The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  With the take-off of the Stalin cult in mid-1933, the genres of representation also became more fixed. Deni caricatures and photomontages gave way to (retouched) photographs, sculptures (in late 1934), and the first reproductions of socialist realist paintings, as with Mikhail Avilov’s picture The Arrival of Comrade Stalin at the First Cavalry in 1919, taken from the exhibition “Twenty-five Years of the Red Army,” or Aleksandr Gerasimov’s 1934 painting Comrade Stalin Gives His Report to the Seventeenth Party Congress on the Work of the Central Committee of the VKP(b), 1934.27 At the same time in verbal representations, words derived from or connected with Stalin’s name became more common, as in Kirov’s dictum, “For the success of the Second Five-Year Plan we must work Stalin-like (po-stalinski),”28 and as in an article on the Day of the Soviet Air Force about “steel birds and people of steel (stal’nye ptitsy i stal’nye liudi)” where “steel” (stal) derived from Joseph Dzhugashvili’s pseudonym “Stalin.”29 The letters “S-T-A-L-I-N” sometimes became an emblem of his cult. Airplanes flew in formation to spell them out (Fig. 2.24, p. 71); or they were embodied by people, as in a 1933 Physical Culture parade at which the athletes formed up to spell the words “Hello Stalin (Privet Stalin)” when viewed from above.30 Verbal representations, however, during the take-off period of the Stalin cult (after mid-1933) were often still quite literal, as, for instance, in Beria’s 1934 article, “We Owe Our Successes to Comrade Stalin.”31

  From the moment of the Stalin cult’s take-off in mid-1933 until the late 1930s Pravda was busy marking Stalin as the supreme leader, ultimately furnishing a canon of stock images or obrazy. First of all and most obvious, marking Stalin involved showing him alone and suppressing representations of other leaders. Just as it became clear in real politics around this time that Stalin could monopolize power if he wished, the newspaper drove home the point that Stalin could monopolize leader representations if he wished. To give an example, different articles in August and November on collectivization were accompanied by the same photograph of the Lenin’s Way collective farm’s “meeting of the individual peasant-farmers (edinolichniki) regarding their entry into the kolkhoz,” as the caption announced. But in August 1930 the wall in the background showed portraits of both Kalinin and Stalin, whereas by November only the Stalin portrait remained.32 The formation of a canon also involved distinguishing Stalin from other Party leaders in pictorial representations of groups, say in a photograph of a presidium on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater. Such strategies of visual distinction revolved around Stalin’s size, his place in the picture, the color of his clothing, his arm movements, and the fact that his hands never touched his face whereas others rested their heads on their arms or held earphones to their ears. For example, in photographs of the presidium of a Party meeting, Stalin was often placed in the center.33 What is more, in photographs of the Seventeenth Party Congress of February 1934, Stalin was the only Party leader with a light-colored uniform, thus standing out from his comrades Molotov, Ordzhonikidze, Kirov, et al.34 A picture of Stalin and his Party cronies with the leader of the epic Arctic expedition of the ship Chelyuskin, Otto Shmidt, likewise illustrates the point (Fig. 2.5). The coloring of his uniform was likely achieved by retouching, or even by gluing an entire picture of him into an existing photograph, because his appearance was very unnatural in these pictures. At other times Stalin’s dark clothing set him apart from the light clothing of others.35 Furthermore Stalin was sometimes the only top Party member with his arm raised higher than that of others, say, in greetings to a Physical Culture parade marching across Red Square.36 Or, in a February 1934 photograph of Kaganovich giving a speech in the presidium of the Seventeenth Party Congress, “The Congress of Victors,” Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, and Molotov rested their heads on their hands, while Stalin was the sole Party boss whose hands did not touch his face.37

  The direction of Stalin’s gaze was another sign of distinction. While others looked at each other, at their leader Stalin, at an object, or at the viewer, Stalin’s own gaze was directed at a point outside the picture. This visual strategy was time-tested.38 In Soviet Russia it acquired a new ideological-temporal dimension and came to signify the leader’s embodiment of the utopian timeline, with the leader gazing into utopia—the future of socialism or communism. In depictions of the young Stalin, the gaze was mostly pointed directly at the camera, not outside the picture: thus in a 1915 picture showing him with fellow revolutionary Suren Spandarian in their Turukhansk exile, Stalin gazes directly into the camera.39 Apparently it was only the crucible of the Revolution and the inheritance of the Party leadership from Lenin in 1924 that turned Stalin into the embodiment of materialist history, of the force that could propel humanity to utopia.

  Stalin’s distinction was further marked by his portrayal as motionless, whereas the bodies of others were shown in a state of movement. Motionlessness in general became one of the key themes in representations of Stalin, and the word “calm” (spokoinyi) proliferated in reference to him. Objects of everyday life in Stalin’s immediate proximity—the pipe in his hand, a map, a newspaper or book—also set him apart from others. His closeness in the picture to the figure of Lenin or an image of Lenin—a poster or painting on the wall—was another distinguishing marker.

  Moving outside the intrinsic features of the picture itself, the text accompanying pictures also marked Stalin as special. In the captions below group pictures Stalin was often mentioned first, no matter where he stood in the picture (Fig. 2.5).40 To further underscore his prominence, his name was often capitalized while the names of others were not. Later in the 1930s, however, Pravda turned to enumerating all those standing in the picture by position and refrained from giving Stalin’s name in capital letters.41 The placement of his picture also played a role. For a long time, it was never placed at the foot of a page. The page itself was divided into different zones with different levels of prominence. The upper-left quarter of the page right beneath the masthead was especially sacred: here decrees and the most important announcements were often printed.

  Figure 2.5. Distinguishing Stalin from others by his place in the picture and color of clothing. In addition, the caption lists Stalin first. Pravda, 6 June 1934, 1.

  Raising Stalin’s profile involved not only images but also words. In late 1932 and early 1933, a new monumentalism of published Stalin articles—now on the front page and sometimes taking up all of it—predated the take-off of the visual Stalin cult in Pravda.42 Yet at this early point Stalin’s legitimacy was still identified as derived from Lenin and his leadership of the Party.43 Later Pravda turned to citing the size of print runs and the number of translations into foreign languages of his writings as an indicator of Stalin’s greatness.44

  These were the main visual and verbal strategies of making Stalin stand out that were used from mid-1933 to the late 1930s. Then how did his depiction change over time? Starting in 1934 Stalin began appearing in connection with the expeditions and flights of Arctic explorers and aviators, all of whom were presented as heroes and embodiments of the Soviet new man.45 Famously, Otto Shmidt and his fellow sailors from the ship Chelyuskin arrived at the Belorussian train station in Moscow and were later greeted by Stalin personally.46 Even more famously, two years later the aviator Valery Chkalov flew to the Soviet Far East in record time. Moscow greeted Chkalov and his crew with a ticker tape parade reminiscent of the welcome for Charles Lindbergh upon his return to New York from the first cross-Atlantic flight in 1927. Stalin personally greeted Chkalov and the second pilot in the crew, Georgy Baidukov, with a fatherly kiss; and a Pravda article read, “It was Stalin who raised these brave men.”47 The same year Stalin appeared with a new hero, Viktor Levchenko, one of the pilots who had flown from Los Angeles to Moscow.48 Perhaps most famously of all, Ivan Papanin and his crew of Arctic explorers purportedly gathered at the North Pole around a radio receiver to listen to their leader’s address. An article, “Warmed by Stalin-like Care,” read: “North Pole, 24 May, 7 P.M. (RADIO). Yesterday
evening there was the extraordinary picture of a meeting of the thirty members of the leading unit of the expedition on the ice at the pole, listening to the reading of a telegram of greetings from the leaders of the Party and government. They gathered under the open sky, in a snowstorm, but felt no cold because the bright words and the anxious care of the great Stalin warmed them and they sensed the glowing breath of their beloved homeland.”49

  These new hero cults were part of the Stalinist Second Five-Year Plan tradition of celebrating socialist heroes like the Stakhanovites, named after Aleksei Stakhanov who during a single six-hour shift in August 1935 allegedly surpassed his norm fourteen times by hewing 102 tons of coal. Invariably these hero cults were in dialogue with the Stalin cult and entailed what one might call sacral double-charge.50 The glorification of other outstanding personalities in conjunction with Stalin’s personality engendered greater sacral charge both for Stalin and the other celebrated person. Thus in 1936 the widow of just-deceased physiologist Ivan Pavlov in a Pravda “letter to Comrade Stalin” thanked the leader for all the attention her husband got during his lifetime.51

  Generally speaking, as soon as it had become clear—by the mid-1930s—that Stalin was the supreme leader, the phenomenon of the personality cult began spreading to others, not only Party bosses in and outside Moscow, but also cultural figures. Alongside the Stalin cult in April 1935, for example, the cult of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko appeared, a cult that was to serve as an example for many other writer cults, especially the vast cult of Pushkin on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of his death in 1937, a cult that was intricately tied with the Stalin cult with a Stalinized Pushkin reinforcing Stalin’s power and a Pushkinized Stalin reinforcing literature’s power.52 In pictorial representations this was true literally with Pushkin appearing in Stalin’s overcoat.53 Likewise on the occasion of the centenary of Gogol’s death in 1952, the sculptor Nikolai Tomsky produced a Stalinized Gogol bust.54

  When Stalin and Lenin were shown together, Lenin was usually to the viewer’s left, Stalin to the right. In much of symbology, the left signifies beginning and the female, the right the end and maleness. It was unthinkable, for instance, that Stalin’s portrait be hung to the left of Lenin’s on the façade of the main department store GUM for a parade on Red Square; Lenin was always to the left of Stalin. In general the iconography of Lenin-Stalin seems to have been projected back onto Marx-Engels. The movement from left to right in depictions of the tetrad of Communist patriarchs, Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, was to be perfected after the war. On the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of the first publication of the Communist Manifesto (27 February 1948), a bas-relief showed all four heads looking to the right, with facial hair getting progressively shorter from Engels to Stalin (Fig. 2.6). Likewise on the occasion of the 125th birthday of Nikolai Ogarev, Pravda refracted the Herzen-Ogarev relationship through a Marx-Engels, Lenin-Stalin lens, pronouncing that “bourgeois historians of literature have depicted Nikolai Platonovich Ogarev, Herzen’s friend and comrade-in-arms, as ‘a pale companion to the bright star.’ In actuality Herzen was right, who said that he and Ogarev were ‘separated volumes of a single poem.’”55 As time went by, to be sure, the artistic genres of joint Lenin-Stalin depictions evolved. The bas-relief, showing white plaster Lenin and Stalin heads on a dark background in a usually round frame, appeared as a new genre of Stalin cult visual art as cult products turned more classicist.56 Interestingly, some of the other Party leaders were always shown with the same pictures. Molotov, for example, throughout the early 1930s was shown in a single image, sometimes rendered as a photograph, sometimes as a drawing.57

  Figure 2.6. Left to right movement from Marx to Stalin. Pravda, 2,8 February 1948, 1.

  The popular Leningrad Party boss Sergei Kirov was murdered on 1 December 1934. A few days later Stalin appeared as a pallbearer at Kirov’s funeral, one of his many appearances as pallbearer, totaling fourteen (Fig. 2.7, 2.8).58 Did images like these establish an uncanny link between Stalin and (violent) death, as in the purges that followed the Kirov murder? Did this link stay in collective memory, ready to be reactivated during mass terror as in 1937? And did it thus counter the strategy of scaling back Stalin’s appearances in Pravda in times of trouble in order to avoid negative associations?

  After the Kirov murder Pravda began a feature on Stalin’s involvement in the struggle for Tsaritsyn early in the Russian Civil War, further establishing this event as a key moment in the founding history of the Soviet Union, signifying the first defensive victory of the new country born in Red October. In early 1935 the first pictures of Stalin without a caption began appearing, testifying to a perception among the makers of Pravda that by now its readers were Stalin-literate enough to recognize their vozhd’ at first sight, without verbal explanations. At the same time reproductions of paintings became more numerous, larger in size, and more monumental in appearance, set in baroque gold frames when shown in the background.59 In the spring of 1935 representations of abundance and fertility burst upon the scene, symbolized by smiling Central Asians carrying exotic fruits or a newborn.60 There was also a sudden explosion of flowers, lakes, and nature, of nature metaphors as in a description of young athletes as a “blossoming generation” and an article by a young Pioneer, “I Gave a Bouquet to Stalin.” Such pastoral idylls pointed to the new sense of arrival, of nearing socialism, to an end of the emphasis on machines and heavy industry of the First Five-Year Plan, to an end of the hardships of building socialism.61 This was in conformity with the shift from machine to garden metaphors in socialist realist novels, as Katerina Clark has shown (Fig. 2.9, 2.10, 2.11).62

  Figure 2.7. Stalin as pallbearer at Kirov’s funeral. Pravda, 7 December 1934, 1.

  Figure 2.8. Stalin as pallbearer at Gorky’s funeral. Pravda, 21 June 1936, 1.

  Smiles proliferated, and on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum even the Party leaders, including Stalin, smiled while applauding the parade on Red Square during the annual Day of the October Revolution.63 All this was encapsulated in the 1935 Stalin dictum, “Life has become more joyous, comrades, life has become easier!” Newspapers creatively adapted this formula, fashioning a binary opposition with life in the dark, capitalist West constituting the negative pole. Consider, for example, London correspondent N. Maiorsky’s headline, “Life Has Become Harder and Sadder.”64 1935, the year that had begun with the first wave of purges following the December 1934 Kirov murder, ended with the first picture of a New Year’s tree in Pravda.

  Figure 2.9. Pravda’s only photo of Stalin with a biological child, Svetlana. Conforming to Stalin’s image of “father of peoples,” hereafter he was only shown with non-biological children. The image was credited to Nikolai Vlasik, Stalin’s bodyguard, tutor of his children, and majordomo after his wife Nadezhda Allilueva’s death in 1932. . Pravda, 3 August 1935, 3.

  Figure 2.10. Stalin with Gelia Markizova, a Buriat Mongol girl. Pravda, 30 January 1936, 1.

  Figure 2.11. Stalin with a blond boy at a Physical Culture parade at Moscow’s Dynamo stadium. Note the shift to ethnic Russian children. Pravda, 22 July 1946, 1.

  Socialism arrived in the mid-1930s, officially first proclaimed with the Stalin Constitution of 1936. On a formal level, this change meant that horizontality triumphed over verticality. Beginning in 1930 Pravda had turned to statistics, graphically represented with steep upward curves, as well as photographs and drawings of the developing socialist cathedrals—blast furnaces, smokestacks, oil rigs, and electricity poles—likewise pointing upward. These were the representations of the building of socialism, of an acceleration on the utopian timeline. The mid-1930s marked the arrival at a plateau, an arrival that was expressed with horizontal representations, such as panoramic views of new socialist towns like Magnitogorsk, of gardens, or bird’s-eye-view maps.

  Similarly, in late 1935 the ethnic minorities of the Soviet Union began crowding the pages of Pravda. During the Moscow-based “week of national art” (dekada natsional�
��nogo iskusstva) of a specific minority, Stalin often made an appearance and was sometimes shown in appropriate national costume.65 How, then, was Stalin’s own ethnicity presented? The answer is surprising, but first warrants a look at the complex Soviet concept of ethnicity. The Soviet Union was not a nation-state but a federation composed of territories delimited according to ethnolinguistic criteria. Apart from citizenship of this federative Soviet Union, every Soviet citizen was ascribed a nationality, which matched (with some exceptions) one of the ethnoterritorial units. This nationality was recorded in such documents as the internal passport. Rogers Brubaker has described this bifurcated Soviet conception of ethnicity, which was to a large extent formulated by and under Stalin, with the terms “ethnoterritorial federalism” and “personal nationality.”66 Stalin was from Georgia, his personal nationality was Georgian, and in real life he bore many markers of Georgianness, starting with his thick Georgian accent and ending with his habit of appointing a toastmaster (in Georgian, tamada) at his late-night drinking banquets with his cronies in the Kremlin. At a dinner in his close circle after the 1937 Day of the October Revolution parade, with tongue in cheek he even told the Bulgarian head of the Comintern, “Comrade Dimitrov, I apologize for interrupting you, but I am no European, I am a Russified Georgian-Asian (obrusevshii gruzinaziat).”67 Yet Stalin was never depicted as a Georgian. As a critique of a draft copy of a heavily illustrated album of Lenin and Stalin put it, “The majority of the pictures . . . belongs to artists from Georgia. This creates the impression of Stalin as the leader only of the Georgian people, not of all peoples of the Soviet Union. This political flaw must be eliminated.”68 As “father of peoples” (otets narodov), one of his central images, Stalin, to use Brubaker’s terms, represented the “ethnoterritorial federation” of the Soviet Union, not his Georgian “personal nationality.” His representations were supranational and consisted of an amalgam of Bolshevik Party culture, Civil War traditions, and other sources. If Georgia (or any other personal nationality) appeared in his official depictions at all, then at most as a kind of wallpaper during the Georgian dekada, which started on 19 March 1936, that is, as folkloric background.69 Personal nationality did appear as a vestige of the representational techniques of a specific artistic culture, meaning that Stalin in a portrait produced by an Uzbek artist often looked slightly Uzbek with “Asiatic,” “slanted” eyes. Likewise, after 1945 and the enlargement of the Soviet space through the annexation of Eastern European countries, Stalin portrayed in a portrait by a Romanian artist appeared slightly “Romanian.”70 Later, during the rise of “Soviet patriotism” (considered by many a barely disguised version of Russian nationalism) at the end of the 1930s, especially during the war, Stalin’s image was Russified. For example, the main film actor starring as Stalin changed. Previously Stalin had been portrayed mostly by Mikhail Gelovani, a fellow Georgian with a heavy Georgian accent and a physical appearance startlingly like Stalin’s. Beginning with the 1948 movie The Third Blow, a new Stalin actor was introduced, Aleksei Diky, an ethnic Russian without an accent. Nonetheless, the Russification of Stalin’s image only went to a certain point. In fact, it mirrored precisely the proportion of Russian space compared to the many other ethnoterritories in the sum of the federative Soviet Union. But an excursus on Stalin and ethnicity would be incomplete without mentioning the potential danger posed by less official representations of his Georgian personal nationality. Suffice it to say that there is a long series of identifications of Stalin as Eastern, Asiatic “Other”—including such high points as Stalin’s “broad Ossetian’s chest” (shirokaia grud’ osetina) in Osip Mandelstam’s 1933 epigram and Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 study Oriental Despotism.71