In the summer of 1915, the art critic Iakov Tugendkhold (1882–1928) published a lengthy essay, “In the iron dead-end,” which summarized many of his thoughts on the development of modern art in Europe and Russia, particularly since the beginning of the First Wrold War. Rather unknown today, this text is as important in its stance and position as Alexander Benois’ famous diatribe against the new icon of suprematism published six months later as a review of the 0,10 exhibition held in the late 1915 in Petrograd. The immediate topic of Tugendkhold’s text is a series of improvised and rather radical futurist interventions that disturbed the group show of paintings The Year 1915 curated by K. Kandaurov. Tugendkhold states his disagreement with the post-cubist assemblages and the quasi-in situ works of several artists including Vladimir Mayakovski, David Burliuk, Mikhail Larionov, Aristarkh Lentulov, and particularly Vladimir Tatlin. This essay appeals to both art history scholars working on transfers and exchanges of artistic practices (in this case, the reception and interpretation of Western European art in the Russian empire), and to scholars interested in the history of beliefs in art, particularly of the “over-reading” of art practices as symptoms of larger social and intellectual processes (and of their crisis). Both modern and conservative, Tugendkhold’s text testifies to the overlap of artistic and moral/political issues within the context of early capitalism. Tugendkhold was one of the brilliant connoisseurs and interpreters of European modern art in Russia, and a defender of most of its transformations except for Italian futurism; thus, on a first level of reading, his essay sets forth a cross-cultural comparison between the development of modern art in Europe since the impressionist dissolution of the pictorial unity, via Cézanne, and up to the cubist investigation of shapes and volumes, on the one hand, and the Russian appropriation of these new trends in art, on the other.