The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  As far as genres of Stalin representations were concerned, in early 1936 there was a marked move away from photomontages toward reproductions of socialist realist paintings. On 12 June 1936 a draft of the constitution that one month later became known as the Stalin Constitution was published in Pravda. It engendered a new performance of quasi-democracy, with citizens discussing the constitution and sending to Pravda letters addressed to Stalin.72 Soon thereafter Pravda served as a platform for initiatives to open Stalin museums.73 In early August 1936, the theme of Stalin in danger was developed in preparation for the first Moscow show trial of Kamenev and Zinoviev. Articles with titles like “Take Care of and Guard Comrade Stalin” and “Take Care of Your Leaders Like a Military Banner” were launched.74 Generally in Pravda the increase in violence in politics during the show trial was accompanied by an increase in love and tenderness for Stalin.

  Early 1937 indeed showed a precipitous drop in Stalin pictures, likely to avoid linking him with the purges. During 1937 the flowers, gardens, fruits, and smiling Central Asians disappeared, together with the pictorialized Stalin. If smiles made a comeback at all during the year of the Great Terror, it was on the faces of ethnic Russian blonde Komsomol members and schoolchildren, in connection with the beginning of the new school year and Komsomol Day during the fall.75 The year 1937, one of the bloodiest years in Soviet history, drew to a close with an article on 30 December entitled “We Owe Our Happiness to Comrade Stalin.”76

  Between January and May 1938 there again was much less Stalin representation than usual in Pravda, confirming the thesis that Stalin’s cult diminished during cataclysms like the Terror. Again, possibly to avoid negative associations, Stalin was kept out of the pictorial representations of the Soviet-German Nonaggression Pact.77 In the fall of 1938 the Terror was stopped, and the cult picked up again. Letters to Stalin by meetings of scientists, Party units, a congress of Soviet surgeons, the Third Congress of Leading Livestock Breeders of Kazakhstan, trade unions, and kolkhozes also came back with a vengeance. The first still pictures from movies with actors playing the role of Stalin began appearing in Pravda (Fig. 2.12).78 At the dawn of the 1940s the representation of Stalin’s age was conflicting. In some pictures he was shown as old, in others as young. In the course of three weeks in 1941 Stalin appeared first as aged with graying hair, then again as young, with his “Georgian” haircut, “Georgian” moustache (the ends pointed downward), and with hardly a single gray hair.79 This was a period of flux in which Stalin changed to a new paradigm—the image of the postwar generalissimo with deep wrinkles, an aging chin, graying hair, a Russian haircut, and a Wilhelmine moustache (with upward-pointing ends like Kaiser Wilhelm II).

  The year 1939 ended with the greatest manifestation so far of the cult in Pravda, and any other medium for that matter—Stalin’s sixtieth birthday celebration (Fig. 2.13). For all high Soviet Party functionaries only round-number birthdays were celebrated in public;80 in fact, for Stalin there were normative documents expressly restricting birthday celebrations to these. The normative documents were a reaction to attempts to celebrate his fifty-fifth birthday.81 In this respect the Soviet festive cycle differed from that of Hitler’s Germany, where 20 April was always the holiday of Führers Geburtstag.

  Pravda’s 21 December 1939 issue numbered twelve pages (in contrast to the regular six pages and the expanded eight pages of the 21 December 1929 issue), which itself is an indicator of the gigantism of the birthday celebrations. The number of visual representations during the birthday month of December overshadowed any other month (see Graphs 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3). A photograph of Stalin sitting at his desk with a pencil in his hand and several sheets of paper in front of him took up at least one-third of the front-page; let us recall here that in 1929 the photograph in the birthday issue occupied no more than one sixteenth of the front-page. Stalin was shown smiling benevolently, his hair neatly combed back, and his gaze directed to the right at a point outside the picture, not at the onlooker as in 1929. The long and anonymous lead article is entitled “Dear Stalin (Rodnoi Stalin),” carrying the kinship connotation that goes along with rodnoi. The upper right part of the front-page held a decree by the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet that bestowed upon Stalin the order of Hero of Socialist Labor. Below this decree there is an article signed by the Party Central Committee, “To the Great Continuer of Lenin’s Task—Comrade Stalin.”

  Figure 2.12. The first still picture from movies with actors playing the role of Stalin: Mikhail Gelovani as Stalin in Man with a Rifle (1938). Pravda, 3 October 1938, 4.

  Figure 2.13. Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. Note the emphasis on ethnic minorities, women, and children, who reinforce Stalin’s “father of peoples” image. Pravda, 22 December 1939, 1.

  Compared with 1929, Pravda’s 1939 celebration of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday was a more visual event. Again compared with 1929, photographs were not greater in number but larger in size and better in quality. They accompanied texts and showed, for example, in the middle of a full-page article by Molotov on “Stalin as the Continuer of Lenin’s Task,” an image of Stalin with Molotov. Further articles were written by Voroshilov, Kaganovich, Mikoian, Kalinin, Andreev, Khrushchev, Beria, Malenkov, Shvernik, Shkiriatov, Poskryobyshev and Dvinsky, and Dimitrov. Typically the author would treat Stalin’s achievements in the sphere he represented, Voroshilov writing about “Stalin and the Buildup of the Red Army” and Dimitrov about “Stalin and the International Proletariat.” Compared with 1929, new topics included the agrarian sector, the title of Andreev’s article reading “Stalin and the Great Kolkhoz Movement,” and the nationalities issue, the title of Khrushchev’s article reading “Stalin and the Great Friendship of Peoples.” As in 1929, there was a small place reserved for “real news.” In 1929 this space was still half of the penultimate page seven, while in 1939 this area had been reduced to the rightmost, last slim column on page twelve. On 21 December 1949 news was completely effaced from the country’s main newspaper.

  Graph 2.1. Visual Representations of Stalin in Pravda, 1929

  Graph 2.2. Visual Representations of Stalin in Pravda, 1939

  Graph 2.3. Visual Representations of Stalin in Pravda, 1949

  For the entire month of January 1940, every issue of the newspaper carried a rubric on page two, three, or four entitled “Torrent of Greetings to Comrade Stalin in Connection with His Sixtieth Birthday,” with lists of individuals and organizations extending their congratulations to the leader. On 9 March 1940 and the surrounding days the newspaper celebrated Molotov’s fiftieth birthday, also with a rubric of congratulatory greetings, although under a different title (“From All Ends of the Country”), fewer in number, and shorter in duration. Of course in the representations of Molotov’s birthday, Stalin often appeared together with his close “comrade-in-arms.”

  In February 1941 came the celebrations of Voroshilov’s sixtieth birthday, in which Stalin, as usual, played a huge role, amplifying Voroshilov’s status and his own.82 Everything changed on 22 June 1941, the day of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Smiles, which had been reappearing, even on Uzbeks and Tadzhiks at the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow, were suddenly wiped off all faces. One day after the attack, on 23 June, Pravda featured a large photograph of Stalin occupying the entire upper right-hand quarter of the front-page. Stalin looked leftward, his nose very pointed, his moustache already faintly Wilhelmine. There were small crow’s feet in the corners around his eyes, but his hair had not yet turned gray. The slogan at the top of the page presented Stalin as the pivot of the Soviet Union, around whom all were supposed to rally: “Fascist Germany has rapaciously attacked the Soviet Union. Our heroic army and navy and brave falcons of the Soviet aviation will carry out a crushing blow against the aggressor. The government calls upon the citizens of the Soviet Union to close ranks even more tightly around our glorious Bolshevik Party, around the Soviet government, around our great leader—Comrade Stalin. Our cause is just. The enemy will be defeated. Victory
will be ours.”83 The next day this point was driven home pictorially. A photo on the second page showed a large gathering at Moscow’s Stalin car factory with a Stalin bust in the center. Page four pictured a soldier holding the 23 June issue of Pravda with Stalin’s image in the “waiting room of the Oktiabrsky district draft center,” as the caption explained, and a Stalin bust in the background. Evidently to boost morale, in mid-December Pravda featured a still from a film of Stalin’s speech on Red Square on 7 November, the Day of the October Revolution. The caption identified Stalin as “Chairman of the State Defense Committee.” Typically, Stalin’s many Party, state, and military titles were deployed according to the situation. On 15 February 1942 there appeared a Stalin whose forehead now showed a deepening wrinkle.84 There was a new seriousness and decisiveness about him and his gaze into the distance now also signified his visionary premonition of the outcome of the war, of victory. As to clothing, the general’s cap with the Red Star appeared.85 In late March Pravda announced a new movie, The Defense of Tsaritsyn, whose story placed the old founding myth of Stalin’s defense of Tsaritsyn against domestic enemies during the Civil War in the new context of the Soviet Union against the foreign enemy during World War II. Interestingly, even though the film was set in 1919, the actor starring as Stalin—Gelovani—had changed his physical appearance to conform to Stalin’s emerging wartime and postwar image: his hair was graying, the moustache was Wilhelmine.86 Overall, however, there was a decline in visual representations of Stalin during the war. In fact the newspaper became more text based, with the exception of caricatures by the Kukryniksy, the artist trio Mikhail Kupriianov, Porfiry Krylov, and Nikolai Sokolov. Their drawings portrayed recent political events or protested against Hitler and the fascists, depicting them as cannibals, pigs, monkeys, and vultures.87 In Pravda, the visual image-based Stalin cult only really gained in profile near the end of the war, when victory was certain.

  A heavily retouched photo showed a soldier single-handedly producing a self-made front newspaper called Fighting Newsletter (Boevoi listok), with a pencil in his hand filling the page right below the Stalin portrait he himself has supposedly just drawn—but such pictures remained an exception.88 The by now canonical representation of some of the major public holidays was suspended, and there was no picture of a May Day parade on Red Square. Instead on 1 May 1942 the front page featured a Stalin decree and a recent drawing of Stalin by Boris Karpov, executed with bold strokes and showing the leader as army commander with his general’s cap, in profile, looking left, with deep wrinkles on his forehead and around his eyes, and wearing a very Wilhelmine moustache. Instead of parade pictures on the following days, Pravda on 3 May showed a small photograph of a meeting of soldiers in the woods with several officers and a Stalin portrait on a makeshift tribune.89 Everything was now connected with the war. If a Stalin portrait at a worker meeting in a factory was shown, it was a defense industry factory. If a Stalin portrait at a concert was shown, it was a concert of the Red Army choir. If Stalin was shown with foreign dignitaries, they were generals or politicians of the Allied forces.90

  In 1942, the Day of the October Revolution was another milestone on the road toward Stalin’s postwar pictorial representations. From now on he often appeared not in his customary army riding pants with high boots but rather in parade trousers, decorated with stripes on the side, and low parade shoes. The new image soon made its way into secondary representations, as in a painting in the background of a picture of the opening of a new Moscow metro line, where Stalin is shown in his generalissimo’s greatcoat and the new Supreme Commander in Chief’s cap. This image developed further: the gray started at his forehead and temples and later moved to the top of his hair, and spread to his moustache. Epaulettes and elaborate buttons appeared on his uniform. The pockets on the once simple gray military uniform were now stylized and pointed, and the collar became a high one.91 Bodily attributes of Soviet leaders turned into loaded signs and came to stand in for the whole person: think only of Stalin’s moustache, Khrushchev’s bald head, Brezhnev’s eyebrows, and Gorbachev’s birthmark. A turning point in the gradual move toward the postwar style of representations of Stalin as generalissimo came on 7 November 1943, when he was shown on the front page in a drawing by Pavel Vasiliev in his ornate military uniform. Stalin was looking right, his hair graying, his moustache Wilhelmine, much oakleaf decoration on his dark uniform. The caption read: “Decree of the Presidium of the USSR Supreme Soviet on the award to Marshal of the Soviet Union, Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, of the Order of Suvorov.” Two pages further on, Stalin was shown speaking at Mossovet, the Moscow City Soviet, on 6 November, and here too his hair was gray.

  Soviet Russia was not the only country where the bodily features of leaders became iconic signs. Italian writer Italo Calvino remembers from his youth the shift of depictions of Mussolini “from the frontal image to the side image, which was much exploited from that point on, in that it enhanced his perfectly spherical cranium (without which the great transformation of the dictator into a graphic object would not have been possible), the strength of his jaw (which was emphasized also in the three-quarters pose), the continuous line from the back of his head to his neck, and the over-all Romanness of the whole,” all prompted by the appearance in the early 1930s of a new equestrian monument at a stadium in Bologna. Mussolini’s physique infiltrated everyday behavior of the Italian population and inspired concrete practices. “In one of the affectionate games that people used to play at the time with children of one or two years,” Calvino recalls, “the adult would say, ‘Do Mussolini’s face,’ and the child would furrow his brow and stick out angry lips. In a word, Italians of my generation carried the portrait of Mussolini within themselves, even before they were of an age to recognize it on the walls. . . .”92 Mussolini’s protruding chin, his balding head, the often bare-chested torso, the clean-shaven face (vs. the moustached or bearded countenances of his Italian predecessors or his European rival statesmen)—none of these were neutral or insignificant. All of these corporeal features were powerfully signifying loci, and many of them had a latent antipode in Roosevelt, Hitler, or Stalin.

  A new setting for photo opportunities also appeared in late 1942: increasingly Stalin was shown with foreign prime ministers and other high-ranking dignitaries in a dark wood-paneled Kremlin room, standing with his hands behind his back behind a table where either the dignitary or Molotov was signing a treaty, for example, that on “Friendship, Mutual Help, and Postwar Cooperation between the Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Republic.”93 In these ceremonies a benevolent smile sometimes returned to Stalin’s face—after a near-total absence during the first years of the war. Also towards the end of the war, there appeared photos of Stalin at peace conferences meeting the other two members of the “Big Three,” first at Tehran in 1943, then at Yalta and Potsdam in 1945. S. Gurary’s famous Yalta photograph was published on Pravda’s front page on 13 February 1945 and depicted Churchill sitting on the left (seeming physically frail and disgruntled), Roosevelt in the middle, and Stalin on the right. Roosevelt was holding a cigarette (apparently retouched), Churchill was smoking a cigar, only Stalin was not smoking. He was smiling, dressed in his marshal’s greatcoat and general’s cap, and appeared to be the tallest of the three statesmen. In the spring of 1945, Pravda readers could get further visual cues that the end of the war was nearing. Stalin again reappeared in the background of photographs, as in a picture of the “management board of the Stalin artel, Ramensky district, Moscow region” shown “discussing the production plan of the kolkhoz for 1945.” Plans for the future, if only plans of a kolkhoz, were back, as were happy faces of the kolkhoz peasants.94