The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  A majestic Stalin appeared in a 1945 picture by Boris Karpov on the front page of 1 May 1945, just a little over a week before the German capitulation (Fig. 2.14).95 This image shows Stalin in a dark marshal’s uniform with nine medals, his thumb between two buttons of his jacket in a semi-Napoleonic gesture, wearing long trousers and parade shoes, and with graying hair and moustache. In the background (presumably his office) behind him is a chimneylike contraption, and on the upper right-hand side of the wall is a canonical picture of Lenin reading a newspaper. The entire rest of the page was taken up by a Stalin text, a “decree of the Supreme Commander in Chief (Verkhovnyi Glavnokomanduiushchii)” to “give a twenty-gun salute” in the capitals of the union republics to honor the bravery of the Soviet nation on the war and home fronts and on the occasion of the May holiday. All the Stalin decrees appearing in Pravda towards the very end of the war either singled out specific generals, soldiers, or army units for praise or—symbolically—“ordered” them to do something, such as conquer Berlin. During the early phase of the war, there seems to have been a deliberate effort not to enmesh Stalin’s name with failures and defeats. At the victorious end, Pravda deliberately linked his name with the glorious deeds. On 2 May 1945, after a three-year gap (1942–1944) and for the first time since the beginning of the war, Pravda published a picture of a May Day parade with fifteen leaders on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum, with Stalin standing third from the left, between Budyonny and Falaleev. Many were in uniforms with numerous medals; Stalin was dressed more simply, in his marshal’s greatcoat. Several leaders including Stalin were saluting the parade with their right arms. On the same front page was a typical picture of Beria, Stalin, Malenkov, Kaganovich, Kalinin, Mikoian, Shvernik, Voroshilov, and Voznesensky “walking to Red Square” from the Kremlin.

  Figure 2.14. War’s end is imminent and Stalin is back in Pravda. By Boris Karpov. Pravda, 1 May 1945, 1.

  On the day of the German capitulation, 9 May, soon to join the canon of holidays as Victory Day (Den pobedy), Pravda showcased on page three a drawing by V. Andreev that depicted a beaming soldier with an automatic rifle, holding a flag with a Stalin portrait, with the Kremlin tower in the background and fireworks in the sky. The slogan of the day reads: “Long live our victory!” One day later two-thirds of the front page were occupied by an image of Stalin by V. Bulgakov.96 This image shows a graying Stalin in his marshal’s uniform with the single Hero of Socialist Labor medal, holding a pipe in his left hand and papers in his right hand. On the lower left part of the page is a picture of Stalin, Truman, and Churchill. The rest of the right-hand front page is taken up by an “Address of Comrade J. V. Stalin to the People” on the German capitulation (Fig. 2.15).

  On 13 May 1945 Stalin and his magnates were again staged on the mausoleum tribune, this time at A. S. Shcherbakov’s funeral. According to the caption, the photo showed “The funeral of A. S. Shcherbakov, Comrades Aleksandrov, Shvernik, Gorkin, Golikov, Stalin, Voroshilov, Malenkov, Beria, Andreev, Kaganovich, Voznesensky, and Budyonny on the tribune of the mausoleum during the funeral procession (traurnyi miting). Comrade Popov is making a speech.”97 By this time at the latest both domestic and foreign observers (Kremlinologists) were trying to obtain cues about the current hierarchy of the Party leadership below Stalin by studying the grouping of men around him and, discounting the military men Voroshilov and Filipp Golikov, they would have figured that Malenkov and Beria both had good chances, being placed close to Stalin. In these Pravda representations during May, “the high point of the authority of Stalin” (Elena Zubkova), proximity to Stalin can be read as an indication of high status, even as a pole position in the struggle for succession that was bound to erupt some time in the future.98

  The war was over, and so was the heightened seriousness maintained in the country’s leading newspaper. Images of soccer, cows, and the Dnieper hydroelectric power station all returned to Pravda. As if to make up for his low profile during the war years, during the summer of 1945 Stalin was all over the newspaper. The official victory parade on Red Square on 24 June was duly celebrated in Pravda one day later. On 27 June the front page announced that Stalin had received the title Hero of the Soviet Union. On 28 June Pravda’s front page carried a repeat portrait by V. Bulgakov on the occasion of the presentation to Stalin of “the highest military rank—Generalissimo of the Soviet Union (vysshego voinskogo zvaniia—Generalissimus Sovetskogo Soiuza),” and on page two, an image showing a soldier reading aloud this decree to his happy comrades. The postwar generalissimo image of Stalin, which had been gestating since at least early 1941, now reached its fullest expression.99 Stalin’s hair and moustache had definitively turned gray, he looked weathered by the war, his skin appeared older, his entire face somewhat puffy, his chin unmistakably double. He was habitually dressed in his marshal’s uniform and greatcoat, with the single pentagram-shaped Soviet Hero of Socialist Labor medal, often with his hands behind his back. On 1 August Stalin made his first appearance in his white generalissimo uniform with five golden buttons and epaulettes.100 The occasion was the Potsdam Conference. In this picture (and in two more photographs of the conference) the white color of his uniform and his position in the picture set Stalin apart from his Western counterparts, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Clement Attlee.101 In an August 1945 picture of the Soviet leadership with General Eisenhower and Averell Harriman on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum during a Physical Culture parade, for the first time the white uniform spread from Stalin to other Party luminaries.102 In pictures of various Party or Supreme Soviet congresses, Stalin was now often seated all by himself, appearing aloof, sometimes in a corner of the auditorium.103

  Figure 2.15. Front page the day after Germany’s capitulation. Pravda, 10 May 1945, 1.

  It was only a small step from this aloofness to complete absence. Thus in the photograph of the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum during the Day of the October Revolution 1945, Stalin was missing among his cronies for the first time in years.104 Thereafter he made one last appearance, in 1952. There might have been real-life explanations for this change, such as his frail health. However, to Pravda readers this change announced a shift toward absent representations, as in Chiaureli’s movie The Oath (1946), where in a famous scene Lenin’s spirit was transferred to Stalin at a park bench in Gorki;105 or as in Pavel Sokolov-Skalia’s painting, The Voice of the Leader, which showed a group of soldiers and others grouped around a radio listening to a Stalin speech. Another example was Dmitry Mochalsky’s 1949 picture, After the Demonstration (They Saw Stalin), which depicted a group of children and others returning from a parade with shining faces—the presence of Stalin in the picture was manifest on the faces of the children and in the title, yet there was no direct representation of him (Fig. 3.12, p. 114). Around the same time in Poland, Party meetings adopted the ritual of electing Stalin to an imaginary honorary presidium and then leaving a chair empty for his spiritual presence.106 Practices such as this one reconnected with premodern (and Byzantine) tradition, for example of using an effigie in France as an ersatz monarch, or of the Rat who in 1791 genuflected in front of an imperial portrait.107 Stalin’s absence hence was an absence that implied presence—“in the spirit,” as an allusion, as a metaphor. Put differently, by being absent, Stalin became more present than ever (for the first—1937— absent representation of Stalin see Fig. 2.16).

  In Pravda’s representations of Stalin, the concept of presence-in-absence went hand in hand with the rise of the radio. In conjunction with the 1947 elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, not only was Stalin shown at a rostrum with microphones on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater, but an article described enraptured audiences gathered around radio receivers, listening to their leader’s voice emanating from Moscow, the center of the vast Soviet Union.108 Likewise, the representation of the election results was strictly hierarchical: the announcement of winning deputies listed the Russian Republic first, next the city of Moscow, then the election district named “Stalin,�
� and finally the winner— Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.

  Figure 2.16. The first absent representation of Stalin. “. . . together with his family 1.1. Chernyshev is listening to a radio speech of J. V. Stalin from the Bolshoi Theater. . . .” On the same page there was a series of reports from various union republic capitals under the headline “The Whole Country Listened to Stalin.” Pravda, 12 December 1937, 3.

  One year after the end of the war, 9 May had become part of the holiday cycle and Pravda featured on the front page a photograph of Stalin in marshal’s uniform in a wood-paneled room, his left hand behind his back, and his right hand between the buttons of his jacket in the Napoleonic fashion that had become popular in depictions of Party leaders in the early 1930s and had trickled down to smaller authority figures in factories, mines, and kolkhozes (Fig. 2.17, 2.18). In general, after the war the Stalin pictures in Pravda became more repetitive and more closely associated with specific holidays.

  PRAVDA 1947: ONE YEAR IN THE LIFE OF JOSEPH VISSARIONOVICH

  Now has come the moment for a closer look at the more cyclical, ritualized, and synchronic quality of Stalin’s representation: the elements that were repeated year after year. It is best to explore one year to follow Stalin’s appearance in the premier Soviet newspaper—1947. This was one of the gray years in the pages of Pravda. By January 1948 the country would get a foretaste of the 1949 anti-Semitic campaign against “rootless cosmopolitanism,” as it learned of the “accidental” death (in fact, the murder by the secret police) of Solomon Mikhoels, director of Moscow’s State Jewish Theater and president of the Jewish Antifascist Committee. True, in 1947 there was a famine in the Ukraine and in the central and southern parts of the Soviet Union, but needless to say, this calamity never made it onto the pages of the newspapers. And yes, the Cold War and the Zhdanovshchina (the era of Zhdanov, of ideological and cultural persecution) with its tireless campaign against Western cultural influences had all begun a year earlier, but 1947 was a year without noisy scandals like the 1946 attacks against Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and the journals Zvezda and Leningrad. The year 1947, as far as Pravda was concerned, was an atypically typical year, no annus mirabilis or annus horribilis but rather a thoroughly quotidian year.

  Figure 2.17. Stalin sculpture by M. A. Novoselsky. The Napoleonic hand inside the coat goes back at least to photographs of Marx, whose bourgeois period had domesticated the French Emperor’s gesture. Pravda, 10 June 1936, 1.

  Figure 2.18. This is one of several examples of the dissemination of the Napoleonic hand gesture to the new Stalinist heroes, in this case a kolkhoz activist. Pravda, 2.2. October 1933, 3.

  There were 42 visual representations of Stalin in Pravda during 1947, compared with 53 representations in 1945, 39 in 1946, 35 in 1948, and 35 in 1949 (Graphs 2.4). This was a far cry both from the prewar all-time high of 142 Stalin pictures in 1939 or a still-impressive 92 in 1937 at the height of the Great Terror, a time when the public Stalin cult was supposedly scaled back, and from the wartime lows of, say, 21 in 1942. Precisely because of its grayness and typical qualities, 1947 is a good year to peer across a Pravda reader’s shoulder, navigating through the newspaper.

  Graph 2.4. Visual Representations of Stalin in Pravda, 1947

  The lead article on Wednesday, 1 January 1947, was headed simply “1947” and began with the words, “At midnight the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower clock announced the end of one year and the beginning of another. The hearts of the Soviet people were filled with a feeling of calm confidence at the sound of the Kremlin chimes. Time is working for us!”109 In the rest of the article there was a lot of talk about Stalin and how the Soviet Union, under his guidance, was catching up after the wartime devastation. The same was true for the remainder of the paper, but there was no picture of Stalin. The only pictures were photographs of the Dnieper hydroelectric station and the restored S. M. Kirov mill, destroyed during the German occupation, in the town of Makeevka in the Ukraine’s Stalin oblast in the Don Basin, accompanied by an article by Pravda’s Stalino-based correspondent. Consider the use of “Stalin oblast” and “Stalino”—just as movement through Soviet space had become impossible without encountering Stalin coordinates, movement through the leading Soviet newspaper had become impossible without encountering Stalin’s name. But there was no picture of Stalin published on this first day of the year 1947.

  This too was typical. Usually neither the 31 December issue nor the 1 January issue featured an image of Stalin. On December 31 there might be seen a picture of a New Year’s tree and on the first of the year a photograph of Moscow’s illuminated Red Square and the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower headed “Moscow on New Year’s Eve.” In general by 1947, in fact by 1939 at the latest, there was much less of a sense of flux as a canon of Stalin images and a schedule of their appearances had been formed. His representations in Pravda adhered to a certain rhythm, which more or less followed the calendar of Soviet holidays. Year after year Stalin appeared on the same occasions and the same holidays—often with the same pictures. Apart from these representations at the high points of the Soviet festive calendar, Stalin appeared on other occasions such as in a photo with a visiting a foreign dignitary, or at an extraordinary Party congress, or of one of the many Soviet election rituals. But what remained stable, what structured Soviet time, what lifted the kairotic above the chronological, were Stalin’s ritualized holiday appearances.110 It was around these holidays that the year revolved.

  Most often Stalin made his first appearance of the year on 21 January, in the issue devoted to the anniversary of Lenin’s death.111 Here he was shown with Lenin in a classic 1922 photograph at the government country estate in Gorki. Lenin was ailing after his first stroke of late May 1922. In the photo, Stalin is dressed in a white army overcoat and sitting in a vigorous-looking pose with his legs apart, while Lenin is somewhat in the background, dressed in a gray army overcoat, his hands folded and his legs crossed.112 The picture suggests one man, Stalin, about to leap, ready for action, while another is sitting back.113 In 1947, instead of this photograph, Pravda featured a drawing of Lenin by Pavel Vasiliev in the upper left-hand quarter of the first page and a drawing (also by Vasiliev) of Stalin and Lenin in the upper left-hand quarter of page two. The drawing showed Lenin and Stalin seated at a table with a newspaper, Lenin in three-quarter view further back and ambiguously gazing both at a point outside the picture and at Stalin. In the foreground is Stalin in side view, looking down at the newspaper (Fig. 2.19). As so often, the theme was that of Stalin as Lenin’s legitimate heir, of Stalin as the follower of Lenin’s ideas. In 1947, a merely ritualistic invocation of this theme was necessary, since Stalin had long ago become self-referential and no longer needed to refer to Lenin as a source of legitimacy. A long article entitled “The Great Friendship” ends by citing a piece of Soviet folklore: “The banner that Lenin raised above us, / Neither years nor centuries will shake. / Time marches firmly like a trusted horse, / The years go by and we move forward. / Along those paths that Lenin bequeathed to us, / Dear Comrade Stalin leads us.”114 The article ended by proclaiming, “This is what the Soviet people say in their epic. They see the embodiment of the Leninist ideas, of the Leninist beginning in his worthy pupil and comrade-in-arms, in the great continuer of his cause. ‘Stalin is the Lenin of today,’ they say.”115 Other photographs, drawings, or reproductions of paintings might also be shown on this day. Sometimes there were facsimile reproductions of “new” archival documents linking Lenin to Stalin, such as a Lenin telegram or letter addressed to his onetime disciple.116 The resounding message in all representations on this day was encapsulated in the classic slogan, “Stalin is the Lenin of today.” The 22 January picture of the Party leadership at the Lenin commemoration—on the stage of the Bolshoi Theater with a huge Lenin portrait in the background—drove home the same message: despite the entire Party leadership’s presence, Lenin’s gaze again was directed both into the distance and at Stalin, whose gray generalissimo’s uniform distinguish
ed him from his black-clad magnates.

  Figure 2.19. The anniversary of Lenin’s death and Stalin’s first visual appearance in the annual holiday cycle. Drawing by Pavel Vasilev. Pravda, 21 January 1947, 2.

  Stalin’s next holiday appearance was on 23 February, the Holiday of the Red Army (later Day of the Soviet Army), an important occasion celebrating the founding of the Red Army in 1918. It was important, but not as holy a day as the two highest holidays, International Workers’ Day on 1 May and Day of the October Revolution on 7 November.117 On 23 February 1947 a quarter-page photograph showed Stalin in his parade greatcoat with a fur collar and his parade cap with a (probably gold-colored) cord and single Soviet star button. He peered attentively and pensively both at and past our imaginary Pravda reader (Fig. 2.20). His gaze seemed as if he was spotting new military foes of the state he embodied, or pondering the future that he—as the embodiment of history— was able to foresee. To the left of his picture was a long decree that consisted mostly of a summary of the Soviet Army’s achievements but closed with the following words:

  In commemoration of the twenty-ninth anniversary of the Soviet Army I decree: Fire a twenty-gun salute in the capital of our motherland, Moscow, in the capitals of the union republics, in Kaliningrad, Lvov, Khabarovsk, Vladivostok, Port Arthur, and in the hero-cities Leningrad, Stalingrad, Sevastopol, and Odessa. Long live the Soviet Army and Navy! Long live our Soviet government! Long live our Communist Party! Long live our great Soviet people! Long live our powerful motherland!