Ivan Dubasov

Biography

In the summer of 1922 a school drawing teacher from Odintsovo, outside Moscow, had neither paints nor ink. Ivan Dubasov coloured his designs for a competition for a postage stamp marking the fifth anniversary of the October Revolution with a solution of potassium permanganate instead of watercolour, and persuaded his neighbour, Nikolai Gaarbleikher, to pose for him. In one design a stonemason was carving “RSFSR 1917–1922” on a slab; in the other a nude figure of Humanity greeting the revolution held a postman’s bag. More than a hundred artists took part in the competition, among them Dmitry Mitrokhin and Sergei Chekhonin. After long arguments the jury chose Dubasov’s drawing with the stonemason.

The first prize was a billion roubles. The money was enough to buy his fiancée, Vera, a pair of new felt boots; it was she who had shown him the announcement in Izvestia.

Ivan Ivanovich Dubasov was born on 30 November 1897 in Odintsovo. His father was an assistant auditor at the Moscow Chamber of Control and in his spare time drew cartoons for magazines. In 1908 the son entered the Stroganov School to train as an enameller; his teachers were S. V. Noakovsky and D. A. Shcherbinovsky. In 1913 his illustration to the Gospel in the Old Russian style took first place in a competition among the pupils. By his own account he never finished the school, but in 1915 he received a first-class diploma and the title of certified draughtsman, which gave him the right to teach drawing and technical drawing in gymnasiums. A teaching post in the Urals had almost been arranged when the war began. He was offered the chance to stay in the rear but refused, volunteered in 1916, completed the school for ensigns in Moscow and served as a foot scout on the Western Front. The October Revolution found him in hospital in the Romanian town of Dorohoi. Then came schools in Odintsovo, the Red Army from the spring of 1919, with its club and theatre, and after demobilisation in 1922 a school once more.

Alexander Sukhikh, a member of the jury from Goznak, invited the winner to join him, and on 24 August 1922 Dubasov started work as an artist-engraver at the Second Moscow Factory for the Production of State Papers. A year later he was given the task of refining the state emblem of the USSR from Vladimir Korzun’s design. The globe with the hammer and sickle at the centre was proposed by the head of department, Vladimir Adrianov, while Dubasov had the idea of placing the motto “Workers of the world, unite!” on the turns of a ribbon around the ears of wheat, so that the number of languages could be changed later. This drawing was approved on 22 September 1923. In January 1924, after Lenin’s death, he made a mourning stamp with a silhouette portrait in a red and black frame in barely a day, and on 27 January at four in the afternoon, the hour the farewell ceremony began, it was already in circulation.

From 1923 Dubasov also drew money: the peasant sower for the three-chervonets note, the one-kopeck token note, treasury notes, and the 2 and 3 chervontsy notes of 1928 and 1932 were entirely his own work. In March 1926 he became senior artist, and on 16 February 1932 chief artist of Goznak, in effect directing all the artistic work of the enterprise. His son recalled that his father’s desk always held the tsarist hundred-rouble and five-hundred-rouble notes with Catherine II and Peter I: he wanted to preserve the texture of the old banknotes, their monograms and rosettes, and the familiar colours, yellow-brown roubles, blue fives, red chervontsy. On the design for the 25-chervontsy note with the Dneproges dam there is the number “ID 161040”: Ivan Dubasov, 16 October 1940. It seems to me that this little rebus says more about him than any of his posts.

He also worked on awards. With Pyotr Tayozhny and Ivan Shadr he made the first design for the Order of Lenin; in 1938 he drew the medals “For Labour Valour” and “For Distinguished Labour”, in 1939 the Gold Star medal, and later the Marshal’s Star and the Order of Maternal Glory (1944). In February 1942 he drew a Red Army soldier rising to the attack for the bonds of the State War Loan. During and after the war Goznak also made money for the new socialist countries; notes from Dubasov’s designs were in use for decades in the GDR, Mongolia, Poland, China, Czechoslovakia and Albania. In 1945 he was awarded the Order of Lenin. He made the originals of the rouble notes after the reform of 1947, and for the money of the 1961 issue he drew the 1, 3 and 5 rouble notes together with S. A. Pomansky. The banknotes of 1991, issued after his death, drew on his solutions of 1961. He also designed the pennants that Soviet spacecraft delivered to the Moon and Venus.

Postage stamps ran alongside all this. Up to 1965 he made more than a hundred and fifty originals: the first stamp in the USSR with a portrait of Lenin (1924), a series for the Arctic voyage of the icebreaker Malygin and the airship Graf Zeppelin (1931), anniversary issues for Mayakovsky, Griboyedov, Gorky, Levitan and Perov. He considered his best to be the portraits of Gorky and Mayakovsky and the ethnographic series “Peoples of the USSR” (1933), while the worker at a machine tool of 1929, in his own words, he never got quite right. He called his manner miniature painting and traced it to the enamel and porcelain of the Stroganov School. In the 1920s the magazines Krestyanka and Lapot printed his drawings by the hundred. In 1959 he became an Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR.

On 1 February 1971, at the age of seventy-four, Dubasov retired after forty-nine years at Goznak, but went on helping his younger colleagues; there he was called the patriarch of banknote design. His last work was a set of designs for a new coat of arms for Odintsovo (1980).

He died in Moscow on 15 March 1988, in his ninety-first year, and was buried in his native Odintsovo, at the Akulovo cemetery. The local history museum there has a room devoted to him.