For so many years, we weren't allowed to exhibit what we had in our collections. Renoir, Matisse, Picasso and Cézanne were considered formalistic and bourgeois artists. [describing the Stalin-era emphasis on Socialist Realism in art]
Politicians come and go, but art is eternal.
... I haven't lost faith in socialism to this day. It's obvious that Stalin was a tyrant. We chose the wrong path to socialism in the Soviet Union. But that doesn't mean that the idea is worthless.