by Jan Plamper
Taken on its own, each of these paths only partly explains the genesis of the Stalin cult. Taken together, they give a fresh answer to the question why the alchemy of power, why the Stalin cult, got started.
I
CULT PRODUCTS
2 Stalin’s Image in Time
THE STALIN CULT burst upon the public scene with a big bang late in 1929 and was followed by three and a half years of near silence. On 21 December 1929 Stalin turned fifty years old. The eight pages of Pravda on that date were filled with laudatory articles by fellow Party bosses extolling Stalin’s role in the history of the Party as well as his various functions of general secretary, mastermind of the Soviet industrialization drive, organizer of the USSR, and theoretician of Leninism; congratulatory telegrams by the Communist Party leaderships from Italy to Indonesia and by factory committees and trade unions from all over the Soviet Union; and photographs, with a photo portrait adorning the front page (Fig. 2.1).1 Other newspapers followed suit and featured similar greetings and visual representations, suggesting that the beginning of the Stalin cult was orchestrated and centralized.2 This glorifying salvo in multiple papers must have seemed startling to readers, for throughout the 1920s, Stalin in public representations had paled in comparison to other high-ranking Bolsheviks such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Kalinin. Because Stalin controlled the media since at least 1927, there can be no doubt that he acquiesced to this gambit of minimizing his cult.3
This chapter charts Stalin’s image in Pravda from the beginning of the cult in December 1929 until early 1954, a year after his death. It provides a sense of continuity and change in the depiction of Stalin. Its focus is on visual representations—mostly photographs—but it includes some verbal ones as well. It is based on a reading of every page (amounting to a total of about forty thousand) of the newspaper, which for most of the period was six pages long.4 Visual representations of Stalin are broadly defined as, inter alia, photographs, reproductions of paintings, depictions on book covers, and portrayals in plays or movies. Statistics of these visual representations are in an appendix at the end of the book.5
Figure 2.1. Stalin on his fiftieth birthday. Pravda, 2.1 December 1929, 1.
Why Pravda? Pravda was much more than the first socialist state’s premier newspaper: it was both a mirror of the Soviet political, social, and cultural landscape and an invaluable compass used to navigate through this rugged terrain. The Party official in a Karelian village read Pravda behind his desk at the kolkhoz soviet in order to stay in tune with the contorted Party line. The history teacher in Kazakhstan could not explain current affairs to her steppe nomad students without the most recent issue of the paper. The agitprop activist stationed with a Red Army unit in the Soviet Far East feared for his life if he overlooked Pravda’s exposé on an “enemy of the people”—the same highly decorated general whom he had just praised in front of his soldiers. Stalin’s place in the topography of Pravda was central. The painters discussed in this book all read Pravda to trace the zigzag Party line. “Don’t you read the papers?,” shouted “a voice in the audience” at the speaker during a Moscow Artists’ Union meeting in 1938.6 More importantly, the painters also read Pravda to get inspiration for a portrait from a new, usually photographic, visual representation of their leader (such as was soon to be distributed among them as a template in the upcoming Stalin portrait competition); to get inspiration from a new verbal source, as in an idea propounded in a Stalin quote; to get cues about shifts in art politics, as from a comment by the art critic Osip Beskin; or to survey their own status in the art world, shown by the number of their paintings that were reproduced in the premier newspaper (Figs. 2.2, 2.3, 2.4). Stalin’s portrayal in Pravda, then, was both a microcosm of the total of the Stalin cult and an influential medium of the Stalin cult. Photographs of Stalin—most of them first publicly circulated via Pravda—were, until the appearance of the first Stalin movie in 1937, the master medium of the Stalin cult insofar as they canonized his image. They provided the expressive language of his depiction, which was then followed by other media.
STALIN’S CONTROL OF PRAVDA
Pravda was founded in tsarist Russia in 1912 as a workers’ daily and remained one of the few operating newspapers after the Bolsheviks closed down private and heterodox socialist papers following the October Revolution. In early Soviet Russia, both Pravda, the Party organ, and Izvestia, the newspaper representing the state, were considered elite. Both were read mostly by Party activists of intelligentsia background. In the early 1920s, the Bolsheviks founded mass-circulation newspapers targeted at specific audiences—for example, Krestian-skaia gazeta at the peasants, Rabocbaia gazeta at the workers, Rabocbaia Moskva at Moscow workers, and Bednota at rural activists and officials. Most of these papers were discontinued in the second half of the 1930s, since literacy had increased as a result of the Soviet leap into industrial modernity during the Great Break (1928–1932), and the principle of targeting such specific audiences had been abandoned. Consequently, Pravda increased in stature, circulation, and reach.7
Figure 2.2. Photographs like this one indicated to the Stalin painters who, and which style, was fashionable. The caption says: “At the exhibition ‘Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years’: left: the Lenin room, right: the Stalin room.” Pravda, 2.8 June 1933, 4.
Figure 2.3. “At the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory (Leningrad) the artist A. A. Skvortsov finishes painting a vase with a portrait of Comrade Stalin (from a painting by artist Brodsky).” Pravda, 19 April 1935, 4.
Figure 2.4. “A delegation of artists and sculptors after greeting the Congress of Soviets. The delegation presented the Congress with a portrait of Comrade Stalin by the artist A. Gerasimov and artist Konchalovsky’s painting Flower Bouquet.” Pravda, 6 February 1935, 4.
Pravda and a number of other newspapers were the main medium through which the original Stalin cult was launched on Stalin’s fiftieth birthday in December 1929. At that time the audience of Pravda had expanded to include the engineers and workers on the construction sites of the First Five-Year Plan and the kolkhoz accountants in the villages. The circulation was one million copies in early 1930.8 The Bolshevik leadership used Pravda to push certain themes, and other papers followed suit by producing articles on agenda points first set in the leading news outlet. Stalin effectively coopted Pravda much earlier, in 1924, when he entered into a coalition with the main editor, Nikolai Bukharin, during the struggle over the Party leadership after Lenin’s death.9 In the same year, the photographic depiction of Party leaders was centralized and placed under the control of the secret police.10 Stalin and Bukharin split in 1927, and the latter was ostracized as part of the “Right Opposition.” In consequence, Stalin staffed the editorial board of Pravda with supporters who continued to ensure his control.11 Stalin’s editorial control was largely informal and based on oral communication—the editor of Izvestia, Ivan Gronsky, recalled regular telephone conversations with Stalin in 1928–1929 during the final battle against the Right Opposition.12 Starting in 1930 with Lev Mekhlis, Stalin began appointing his own men as editors in chief of Pravda. At the time, few people were closer to Stalin than Mekhlis: he had been Stalin’s secretary and personal assistant, functions that on paper sounded routine but in fact were equivalent to ministerial posts in a shadow cabinet. Mekhlis was one of the few gateways to the dictator, and thus one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union.13
After the ousting of Bukharin and the appointment of Mekhlis, the smoothly working control mechanism of Pravda (through Stalin and his secretariat) most likely operated as follows. All articles that remotely had to do with Stalin’s person were sent to his secretariat for approval. For instance, on 17 August 1938 Pravda editor Lev Rovinsky sent to Stalin’s head secretary, Poskryobyshev, galleys of an article that contained passages about a meeting with Stalin and accompanied this article with the following note: “For Aviation Day Comrade Kokkinaki wrote an article for Pravda. . . . Since there are references to meetings and co
nversations with Comrade Stalin, I am enclosing two copies of the article and ask you to authorize the publication of these parts of the article. The parts are marked in red pencil on one of the copies.”14 On 13 April 1939 the editor of Komsomol’skaia Pravda, a certain Poletaev, sent an article entitled “I Remember the Young Leader,” by G. Yelisabedashvili, to Poskryobyshev along with the following letter: “The editorial board of the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda asks that you look through the memoir of Comrade Stalin’s youth which we plan to publish in the next issue of our newspaper. The material is verified and authorized (zavizirovan) by the Tbilisi branch of the IMEL [Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute] at the Party Central Committee.” Stalin wrote across the letter: “I am against the publication. Among other things, the author shamelessly told lies. J. Stalin.”15
Photographs were sanctioned in a very similar way. On 24 February 1934 the deputy editor of the Russian version of the journal USSR in Construction (SSSR na stroike) wrote to Stalin’s secretariat: “To Comrade Poskryobyshev. The editorial board sends you an unpublished portrait of Comrade Stalin (the photograph was shot at the seventeenth Party Congress) and asks that you give permission to publish it in the next issue of our journal. The photograph has yet to be retouched.” Poskryobyshev noted: “The photograph ought to be retouched and shown[.] Poskryobyshev. Likely there will be no objections against this photograph.”16 Sometimes Stalin—via his secretariat—was given a choice of which portrait to publish, as on 4 December 1943 when “major general, editor in chief N. Talensky” on behalf of the editorial board of Krasnaia Zvezda wrote to Poskryobyshev, “I ask for permission to publish in Krasnaia Zvezda in an issue devoted to the Day of the Constitution one of the herewith enclosed portraits of Comrade Stalin,” attaching two 1943 Boris Karpov drawings of Stalin, one without a hat, the second with a hat.17 And of course canonizing a photograph by publishing it for the first time was a more sensitive undertaking than republishing a previously approved photo: “Dear Comrade Poskryobyshev! I am attaching an offprint from a plate that we want to publish in the December issue of our journal. This photograph has never been published. I implore you to allow us to publish it.”18
There is evidence that Stalin looked at the photographs himself and actively took part in the decision to publish them or not. On 16 June 1935 Lev Mekhlis wrote in curt terms (implying close familiarity) to the man who presently filled the position in Stalin’s secretariat that he once held: “Comrade Poskryobyshev! The 17th marks the fifth anniversary of the opening of the Stalingrad tractor engine [factory]. I want to publish a photo of Ordzhonikidze and Stalin. Show it, please! (Pokazhi, pozhaluista!).” “Show it, please!” most likely meant: “show it to Stalin, please!” Across the note there is the handwritten phrase: “Not worth publishing (Ne stoit pomeshchat’).”19 An even clearer example is a note that Poskryobyshev received from someone on the editorial board of Izvestia on 17 June 1937: “Dear Comrade Poskryobyshev! I ask that you allow Izvestia to publish the enclosed photo in the 18th June issue, which is dedicated to Gorky.” Written across this note I found, “Comrade Stalin objects (t. Stalin protiv).”20 How regularized and permanent was this kind of direct control by Stalin and his secretariat? We cannot know. But we do know for sure that the dictator’s control over the country’s leading newspaper was one of intervention when he saw fit.
PRAVDA, 1929–1953: REPRESENTING THE LEADER
Only a diachronic analysis can shed light on the changes that took place in Stalin’s representation. At the beginning of the period studied, the first sign that Stalin’s birthday was approaching came on 18 December 1929 when a first batch of congratulatory anniversary telegrams was published on page three. A day later a second batch was published, again on the third page. On 20 December, Stalin’s representation had climbed up to page two, with a poem by Demian Bedny, while the rest of page two and page three again featured congratulatory telegrams. The Stalin presented in the 21 December birthday issue, finally, was an overwhelmingly verbal, not visual construct. There were three kinds of verbal contributions. First, there were multicolumn articles by his fellow Bolshevik luminaries, extolling his specific qualities (Ordzhonikidze’s article “A Staunch Bolshevik”), stressing a particular function of Stalin (Manuilsky’s article “Stalin as the Leader of the Comintern”), or highlighting stations in his revolutionary hagiography (the article “Tsaritsyn”). Second, there appeared short telegrams and congratulatory greetings from Communist organizations or other collectives from the Soviet Union (the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions or the “workers of the Tbilisi shoe factory”) and abroad (from the “Central Committee of the North American United States”). Third, there were article-length or poetic tributes by figures of the literary establishment (Demian Bedny’s poem “I am certain” [“Ia uveren”]). Generally all verbal representations kept distance and refrained from terms of endearment or excessive metaphoric or other figurative descriptions of Stalin. In the 117 greetings Stalin was designated as “leader” most frequently with the terms rukovoditel’, matter-of-factly signifying his function (76 of 201 times), and vozhd’, connoting more heroic, charismatic qualities (49 of 201 times). The most typical designations were “leader of the Party” (both rukovoditel’ and vozhd’).21 Later in the 1930s the charismatic and sacral vozhd’ (with linguistic roots going back to Old Church Slavonic) came first to surpass and then completely eclipse the newer and more sober term rukovoditel’.
If a Pravda reader on that December day had any inkling that the eight pages gave but a foretaste of a full-blown Stalin cult, the reader would have certainly thought that this phenomenon was going to be verbal, not visual. The quality of the pictures that did appear was poor, but this was a general technical problem with Pravda. On the front page there was a photographic portrait of Stalin’s face, occupying about one-sixteenth of the page, a fraction of the size of later front-page Stalin photographs (see Fig. 2.1). Stalin was shown fairly young, with jet black, full and quite unruly hair, not yet combed backward in the style he would later adopt. The photo must have been shot at least one year earlier, because Isaak Brodsky’s 1928 Stalin painting was clearly modeled on the same picture. Stalin gazed directly at the onlooker, not into the distance, as was typical of later images. The second page featured the later canonical January 21 photograph of Stalin and Lenin in Gorki, with Stalin sitting in the foreground in his white uniform. On page three, in connection with articles on Stalin and the Red Army, there was a small and poor-quality photograph of Stalin with Budyonny, walking in his characteristic army boots and riding pants. Pages four and five showcased even lower-quality photographs—of Stalin and Kalinin, with Stalin’s hand in his field jacket in Napoleonic fashion, and Stalin and Molotov respectively. Finally page seven had a tiny frontal photo portrait of Stalin, Lenin, and Kalinin.
After the birthday, throughout 1930, Stalin’s appearances were quite rare and limited to specific dates, such as Party congresses and holidays like the Day of the October Revolution. There was a strong sense of openness and indeterminacy. So much so that the headline of an article in early January 1930 could read “The Stalin faction (Stalinshchina) is fighting for leadership in the Donbass,” using the pejorative suffixshchina.11 At the beginning, the genre of visual representation too was less fixed, ranging from caricature-like drawings by Viktor Deni, to constructivist montaged photographs by Gustav Klutsis, to retouched photographs. And within these genres, there were surprises, as with an image in which Stalin suddenly seemed much older than in the other pictorial representations that had circulated so far. At this time, Stalin still appeared in advertisements, as in an ad for the printed version of his April 1929 speech, “On the Rightist Deviation in the VKP(b) (O Pravom uklone v VKP(b)).”23 Stalin quotes printed across the upper right corner of Pravda, the place reserved for the slogan of the day, or visualized as slogans on banners, became more common and occupied increasing space in the newspaper. So did the greetings, congratulations, and self-commitments to Stalin. To begin with, Stalin
sometimes replied to these utterances, as in his own public congratulatory three-line greeting on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the Comrade Stalin Cavalry Brigade: “A heartfelt greeting to the Special Cavalry Brigade on its tenth anniversary. I hope it remains a model for our heroic cavalry units. J. Stalin.”24
But again, 21 December 1929 was not the beginning of a continuous process of showcasing Stalin. It was followed by silence. Between 1930 and mid-1933, Stalin made only rare appearances on the pages of Pravda. When he did, he was shown together with other Party functionaries and was not marked as outstanding or seen on socialist holiday occasions. This hiatus has been attributed either to a deliberate attempt to avoid linking the person of Stalin with the upheavals of collectivization, or to vestiges of opposition to his single power in the Party. Not surprisingly, there were no greetings from kolkhoz farmers on 21 December 1929.25 Whatever the case, in mid-1933 the public Stalin cult took off in multiple media.
Of course Stalin’s personality cult—even when on hold from 1930 to mid-1933—was accompanied by a new emphasis on “the individual” or “personality” (lichnost’), as evidenced in such phenomena as the beginning star system of movie actors (in contrast to Eisenstein’s and Vertov’s anonymous actors); the cults of other Party magnates, as with the Pravda celebration of Voroshilov’s fiftieth birthday on 5 February 1931; and the cults of the heroes of the First Five-Year Plan, for example in a full-page Pravda article featuring images of some of them (accompanied by short summaries of their achievements) and adding, “The country ought to know its heroes. The outstanding shock worker, the inventor, the rationalizer (ratsionalizator) who has mastered production technology—this is the hero of the land of socialism under construction.”26