by Jan Plamper
The 5 March issue signaled the beginning of the end of the vozhd’. It featured a “bulletin on the health condition of J. V. Stalin at 2 o’clock on 5 March 1953” in the upper left hand of the newspaper’s front page. That day, of course, Stalin died, and the next day the entire front page was framed in thick black and featured a canonical photograph of a living Stalin, looking left, his right hand in his marshal’s uniform (Fig. 2.30). On 7 March pages two through six were devoted to Stalin’s death, and on 8 March the topic occupied every single page of the newspaper (on this day the death of the leader eclipsed the traditional International Women’s Day). The issue of 9 March was exactly like that of 8 March. The comparison of the photographs of Stalin on the first days after his death, from 6 March to 9 March, is telling: on 6 March Stalin was alive in a standard photograph every Soviet citizen was likely to have seen in some form, at some point. On 7 March Stalin was shown lying in his coffin; he was in the foreground, in the right corner, while leading Party bosses, among them his potential heirs, stood in the background, appearing relatively small (Fig. 2.31). On 8 March the position was reversed: Stalin’s followers now stood in two columns left and right of the coffin, which was now in the center background. Shown at left, from Stalin’s head toward the viewer, were first Malenkov, then Beria, and next Khrushchev. At right, from Stalin’s feet toward the viewer, were Bulganin, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich. On 9 March Stalin in his coffin faded even further into the background (Fig. 2.32). Again there were two columns to the left and right of the centered coffin. Closest to Stalin’s head and feet stood two soldiers. Right next to them on the left were Malenkov, then Beria, next Voroshilov, and finally Molotov. To his right there were Bulganin, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, and Mikoian. In these photographs of 7–9 March it is as if the visual-spatial succession of images of Stalin’s dead body is meant to re-present the vozhd”s fading from power. At the same time, this succession indicates the dawning of a new era and the coming of a new leader. In the first photograph (7 March), the heirs are shown in one row and thus on a relatively equal plane. The photographs on the following two days, by contrast, create the impression of individual competitors standing opposed to one another, as if about to start a fight. In both photographs Malenkov is closest to Stalin’s head in the left row. In both rows the old guard—Voroshilov, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Mikoian—is reduced to outer ornamentation. Paradoxically, these old comrades-in-arms of Stalin may have lost their power but are seen larger, because they occupy the immediate foreground, closest to the viewer. And paradoxically too, between 7 and 9 March Stalin moves from foreground to background, yet still forms the sacral center of the picture from which power, here the power to succeed him, emanates. In other words, our imaginary Pravda reader witnessed a double movement of Stalin’s dead body in the photographs during these three days in March 1953: by moving into the background it in fact moved into the foreground; or, by moving backward it reversed the spatial valence of background and foreground. It is as if, when new forces were slowly and gradually trying to dim the sacral aura of the dead demiurge, Stalin retaliated by simply moving this aura along with his body, radiating it more glowingly than ever to compensate for the unbefitting position in the picture. The visual representation of Stalin’s dead body on 7, 8, and 9 March, then, served as an emblem of the uncannily difficult tasks of putting a modern, nondynastic dictator, surrounded by a personality cult, to rest and of building up a new leader.
Figure 2.30. Stalin is dead. Pravda, 6 March 1953, 1.
Insofar as these Pravda photographs announced a new leader, it was Malenkov. On 8 and 9 March Malenkov was depicted closest to Stalin’s head, the most sacrally charged part of the dead vozhd”s prostrate body in the coffin; on 8 March the second page showed a jet black-haired Malenkov giving a speech at the rostrum at the Nineteenth Party Congress in 1952 with an almost white-haired Stalin looking on from above; on the front page of 10 March he was shown between other Party luminaries and foreign communists behind microphones, giving a speech on the tribune of the Lenin Mausoleum (“STALIN” in capital letters had been added to “LENIN” on the façade beneath the tribune). Right beneath this picture the text of his speech was printed, taking up almost half the page; finally, on the 10 March third page Malenkov was shown in a 14 February 1950 photograph with Mao and Stalin, the latter two in the background, their hands behind their backs, while Malenkov was in the right foreground, in three-quarter view, his hand in Napoleonic fashion in his jacket. This photograph contributed much to Malenkov’s undoing and his loss of position to Khrushchev: Malenkov was scolded by other Central Committee members for this photograph, and went on the offensive later that day, being the first post-Stalin Party elite member to attack the “cult of personality,” though not yet the person, of Stalin.
Figure 2.31. Dead Stalin in the foreground, his heirs in the background. “In the Hall of Columns of the House of Soviets on 6 March 1953. The leaders of Party and government at Comrade J. V. Stalin’s coffin.” Pravda, 7 March 1953, 2. .
All other pages of the 10 March issue were again devoted to Stalin. On 11 and 12 March, the entire newspaper was about Stalin, much of it reporting on meetings on public squares and other reactions in faraway corners of the Soviet empire. Starting with 11 March non-Stalin news returned to the paper, at first in a single, slim column on the last page. This column became larger every day, and from 15 March onward news not related to Stalin’s death returned to the front page. The coverage of Stalin and his death continually decreased so that by 20 March, Pravda did not feature a single headline devoted to the vozhd’.
Shortly after Stalin’s death began the silent phase of de-Stalinization. This tectonic, if underground, shift was lost on no one. No even partially discerning Pravda reader could have missed it. During the entire remainder of 1953, Stalin appeared in pictures a mere five times: once in a poster on the May Day demonstration, once (on 30 July) in the well-worn photograph with Lenin in Gorki on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Party’s founding, and three times on posters in the background at the Day of the October Revolution celebrations (twice with Lenin, once by himself). There were no Stalin posters or portraits in the photographs of the Physical Culture parade or the Day of the Navy.164 On the Day of the Soviet Air Force at the Tushino airfield, airplanes formed “glory to the USSR (S-L-A-V-A S-S-S-R),” not “glory to Stalin.”165 On the Day of the October Revolution, the crowds on Red Square carried a Stalin portrait that was smaller than that of Lenin.166 And while Stalin had prohibited the celebration of any but the round-number birthdays during his lifetime, nothing spoke against remembering his 21 December birthday in the year he died. But this did not happen: on 21 December 1953 the front-page of Pravda carried articles (with accompanying pictures) on the winners of the Stalin Prizes “For the Strengthening of Peace between the Peoples,” which had been handed out on 12 December, but there was no mention of Stalin’s birthday anywhere in the entire paper. True, a Pravda reader could have had the impression that there was at least a halfhearted effort to continue the spirit of the “Lenin Days” tradition on (and surrounding) the founding father’s death on 21 January and to establish 5 March as a Soviet holiday: on 5 March 1954 there was a full Stalin portrait on the front page. But this portrait was highly ambiguous: on one hand it showed Stalin dressed in an atypically (for his later generalissimo years) dark, simple army uniform, perhaps to signify his passing; and it introduced an unusual source of light in the upper left corner of the photograph, which looked like a transcendent illumination. Some of this light even radiated around Stalin’s neck. On the other hand, all the verbal utterances degraded Stalin to the formula “Stalin is the Lenin of Today”—for example, the lead article read: “J. V. Stalin—the Great Continuer of Lenin’s Cause”—a role, and a source of legitimacy, he had long shaken off when still alive.
Figure 2.32. Dead Stalin in the background, his heirs in the foreground. Pravda, 9 March 1953, 1.
A diachronic look at the represen
tations of Stalin has allowed us to explore the changes in Stalin’s image. But such a diachronic look does not catch the syn- chronic, repetitive quality of the cult. Therefore we scrutinized a typical, most ordinary postwar year of the cult—1947. Taken together, these two approaches provide a working knowledge of the evolution of Stalin’s image from the inception of the cult to its very end.
To reiterate the contours of this evolution, when seen quantitatively, the first surprising fact about visual representations of Stalin in Pravda is that they did not occur on every day on every page. In sum, the statistical story of these representations is one of sudden outbreak, hiatus, expansion, hiatus, high plateau, hiatus, lower plateau. They burst upon the public scene on 21 December 1929, the beginning of the public Stalin cult, and faded away until mid-1933. From then on they expanded enormously, because the stock images were canonized for the first time and because Stalin had to be implanted in the collective imagination as the number one leader via processes of visual distinction vis-à-vis other leaders. The expansion ended in 1937, a Terror-related hiatus of sorts, but then continued and gained momentum until reaching its apex in December 1939 with Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. During the war the representations shrank to a minimum, but picked up in early 1945 as soon as victory was certain. In the postwar period the numbers of representations hovered quite stably around a lower plateau. This contraction was due, among other things, to the suffusion of society with Stalin images.
As for the development of the actual image, the most serious break came during the war: the appearance on 7 November 1943 of Pavel Vasiliev’s drawing of Stalin in an ornate uniform, with graying hair and a Wilhelmine moustache, constituted the single greatest acceleration of a continual move toward the canonical postwar image. Thus the overarching narrative emerging from an analysis of the visual content of Stalin’s image would divide the twenty-four years of the existing public cult into two large blocs: prewar and postwar. Before the war the following changes took place. From the beginning in mid-1933 until about 1935, Stalin was depicted as being more serious. His image was involved in competition with the image of other leaders. In 1935 and 1936, he appeared more joyous, smiling, with children, women, national minorities, and the new Soviet heroes (Stakhanovites, Arctic explorers, aviators). During the war, Stalin’s image acquired a new serious and anxious note. The military leader obraz—later in its generalissimo incarnation—was added and played a major role during the entire postwar period. Toward the very end, a last innovation was introduced: absent representations, as in allusions, metaphors, or as in an appearance in “the spirit” on the shining faces of radio listeners. Such is the picture of the evolution of Stalin’s visual image in Pravda across time during the entire period of the public Stalin cult. Let us keep it in mind as we turn to the paintings and their meanings.
3 Stalin’s Image in Space
IMAGINE, FOR A moment, a citizen living in the mid-twentieth century, under postwar Stalinism. Further imagine that, perhaps as a reward for overfulfilling the production quota at a local coal mine, this citizen gets to take a trip from the Soviet provinces to Moscow. After visiting the major landmarks such as the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin, and after taking a ride on the magnificent metro, our visitor from the Russian provinces might sign up for an excursion to the Tretyakov Gallery. There the visitor will likely be offered a guided tour that focuses on artistic representations of Lenin and Stalin. The museum guide may have graduated from a crash course based on the 1947 essay “Methodical Elaboration of Excursions in the State Tretyakov Gallery on the Subject: ‘The Images of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Fine Arts’” by Vladimir Sadoven. And this being the Soviet Union, the guide will probably follow the Sadoven pamphlet quite closely. It teaches that the subject of Lenin and Stalin in Soviet art “is of great, exciting interest for every Soviet person.” The depiction of Lenin and Stalin embodies “the best features of the Bolshevik-revolutionary and the builder of socialism and [therefore] the tour has a great moral-political, educational goal.” It goes on to explain that “by invoking through the artistic images of Lenin and Stalin . . . different stages in the history of the Party and the Soviet state, the tour also has great political and historical edifying value.” “Because of these goals,” Sadoven warns, “the tour must be conducted in an accessible, politically accurate, and emotional manner.”1
The tour will probably start with a short introductory lecture, followed by a powerful visual salvo of two emblematic paintings, Isaak Brodsky’s Lenin at the Smolny (1930) and Dmitry Nalbandian’s Portrait of J. V. Stalin (1945) (Plates 1, 2). Then visitors will pass through rooms displaying a series of drawings and sculptures of Lenin by Nikolai Andreev. Adulatory quotes about Lenin and Stalin from the poetry of Mayakovsky, Lunacharsky, and the Kazakh folklore performer Dzhambul (Dzhambul Dzhabaev) will be interspersed throughout the entire tour. To “sustain the mounting impressive impact on the viewer from the images of the ‘Leniniana,’” the tour will probably then gloss over a number of paintings and hurry to “subtheme Stalin”—specifically, a room exhibiting Aleksandr Gerasimov’s monumental Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938).2 There, visitors will hear the tour’s lengthiest exegesis:
The picture shows Comrades Stalin and Voroshilov during a walk in the Kremlin against the backdrop of the wide panorama of Moscow. The figures of Stalin and Voroshilov are given in full size in the foreground. On the second plane are the ancient towers of the Kremlin; on the third is Moscow under reconstruction. Stalin and Voroshilov are looking into the distance. They are walking along the pavement, which is still wet from the rain that has just fallen, and their figures are distinctly recognizable against the backdrop of the city and the cloudy sky with blue breaking through here and there. The subject of the picture is very simple and taken, as it were, from everyday life, from a genre painting. But the picture captivates the spectator with a feeling of elation and importance. The artist managed to create this impression both with his composition and with the harmonious uplifting colors; he successfully used the motif of the weather, when everything seems illuminated by the recent rain, and even the color gray looks cheerful. Likewise, the artist has attained a unity of pictorial tone that enables the wholeness and compelling sublimity of the impression. In the appearance of Stalin and Voroshilov one can sense calm strength and vigilance. The result is an unpretentious and majestic image of the leader of the Soviet people and his closest comrade-in-arms, the People’s Commissar of Defense, against the background of the great city, the capital of a new world, Moscow. They are standing in the ancient Kremlin, the heart of the city and the world, are guarding this new world, and are vigilantly looking into the distance.3
Clearly, the guide’s miniature lecture was replete with corporeal-spatial metaphors—the Kremlin as “the heart of the city” and “the heart of the new world,” Stalin and Voroshilov gazing “into the distance.” All of these metaphors are bound up with centrality.
In the Soviet Union there was a connection between centrality and sacrality: no place was more sacrally charged than society’s center. The closer a person was to the center of society, the more sacred was that person. The person placed closest to the center of society embodied the sacred most powerfully.4 As we have seen, it was during the Great Break that Stalin successfully maneuvered himself into the center of Soviet society and firmly established a system of single, dictatorial rule that was to last until his death. This principle of power came to encompass all spheres of society; in the words of Katerina Clark, “the entire country in all its many aspects—political, social, symbolical, and cultural— became unambiguously centripetal and hierarchical in its organization.”5 On the level of symbolic representations too, Stalin was moved into the center. Cult products accorded Stalin center stage and other persons and objects began to be assembled around Stalin, the center, in circles.
If throughout its history the Russian state was usually centered on a single person, then this pattern extended to the micro level as wel
l. The institution of the intelligentsia circle (kruzhok) is a case in point. As we saw in Chapter 1, most Bolsheviks had been members or leaders of Marxist study circles (kruzhki), each grouped around a single leader. During the Stalinist 1930s, textual cultural representations of the Communist Party unabashedly placed the circle at the beginning of the Party’s genealogy. Organized Russian Marxism started as a kruzhok and ended up as the Party, according to the Short Course: “The VKP(b) formed on the basis of the workers’ movement in prerevolutionary Russia out of Marxist circles and groups, which connected with the workers’ movement and brought Socialist consciousness to it.”6 Lenin himself had begun as the leader of a circle: “Lenin entered a Marxist circle, organized by Fedoseev, in Kazan. After Lenin’s move to Samara, the first circle of Samara Marxists soon formed around him.”7 Later, in St. Petersburg, Lenin reshaped many smaller circles into a single larger circle, an embryonic party: “In 1895 Lenin united all Marxist worker circles (already about twenty) in Petersburg into one ‘Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.’ Hereby he prepared the foundation of a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party.”8 But the reconfiguration of circles turned out to be more difficult than expected and demanded superhuman efforts from the shapers, Lenin and Stalin: “The rise of the workers’ movement and the manifest closeness of revolution demanded the foundation of a single, centralized party of the working class, capable of guiding the revolutionary movement. But the state of the local party organs, the local committees, groups, and circles was so poor, and their organizational disunity and ideological differences so great, that the creation of such a party posed incredible difficulties.”9