Today the plates, tomorrow the world.

(From The Statesman (India))

The porcelain of Revolutionary Russia stirs the blood of Michael Binyon BRIEF, fervent, naive and doomed - the explosion of Utopian enthusiasm that greeted the Russian Revolution swept up Russia's artists, writers and intellectuals in the turmoil that overturned capitalism, convention and class. Some took up arms to defend the new workers' state, some became youthful commissars, some produced fevered works to celebrate the new era. No part of Russia was untouched. Even the Imperial Porcelain Factory, founded on the outskirts of St Petersburg by Empress Elizabeth in 1744 and dedicated solely to the production of exquisite porcelain for the Romanovs, threw open its doors to the Revolution. A group of radical avant-garde artists - Futurists, Cubists and especially the abstract Suprematist painters in the circle of Kazimir Malevich - seized control and attempted to spread the message …