by Jan Plamper
Bolshevik textual self-presentation, as in the Short Course, is one thing, visual representation another. In searching for a starting point in visual genealogy for the sacralizing of the khruzhok, the court portrait (paradnyi portret) would probably be a good choice. The quintessential court or ruler portrait (German, Herrscherbild) was centered on the courtly person or sovereign.10 Anton von Werner’s painting of the proclamation of the German Empire on 21 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles illustrates this point—with an interesting twist: it famously places Bismarck, in his white uniform, in the center of the picture, despite the presence of King Wilhelm I and other members of the Prussian royal family in the painting (Fig. 3.1). The artist, according to the common interpretation, centered the picture on Bismarck to suggest that the statesman, rather than the monarch, deserved credit for the foundation of a German Empire.
Figure 3.1. Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1877). Bismarck (in white uniform), not Kaiser Wilhelm I (to the left on the dais), is placed in the center. According to the common interpretation, the artist centered Bismarck to express that he, not the Kaiser, deserved the credit for founding the German Empire. Original at Bismarck-Museum, Friedrichsruh.
These principles of spatial arrangement applied to cities as well. Moscow can be seen as always having been governed by a circular spatial order rather than an axial or linear order, because it was organized in ring roads around the Kremlin. This was further reinforced in the “general plan” for the reconstruction of Moscow in 1935. By contrast, St. Petersburg–Petrograd-Leningrad was organized around the axis of Nevsky Prospekt, pointing toward the Neva River, which, as the “window onto Europe,” leads to the Neva delta and out to the Baltic Sea and the world. Similar to its place of origin, the Revolution itself was always represented as linear, forward movement.
Thus the pictorial representations centering on Stalin were but a late addition to a long visual genealogy. Just as the Russian state had always been centered on a single leader, images of the Russian state, its rulers, and its religion had usually been organized in concentric circles. The years of the Revolution and the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–1928) were the exception rather than the rule. This is not to suggest that linear movement was banished altogether from the genre of the Stalin portrait. Stalin quite simply monopolized linear movement: his gaze came to figure as the only axis pointing outside the circular pictorial patterns. Stalin’s gaze at a focal point outside the picture became a distinguishing feature of visual representations of the vozhd’. It is worth recalling that this representational strategy was anything but new. The novelty of socialist realism was to frame the gaze of Stalin—linear, materialist history personified—as the apprehension of the dawning of the future, a future of communism that the Soviet Union would soon enter.
STALIN AND HIS METAPHORS IN FOLKLORE AND ARTIST RHETORIC
The late 1920s saw the eclipse of the Russian avant-garde and the rise of realist art. Within realism changes took place as well. For our purposes it is important to remember that a reordering of the hierarchy of artistic genres was taking place: the portrait was established as the primary genre, and all other genres (landscape, still life) were devalued. This was a necessary condition that led to the development of the Stalin portrait genre. Stalin began to occupy center stage in other fields of cultural production, too. He engendered uncountable metaphors and became a metaphor himself. Indeed, Stalin and the Soviet Union—its nature, its topography—were locked in a loop of mutual signification. If Stalin’s physical body functioned as a signifier for nature (the gaze directed into no-time and no-place—utopia), then nature functioned as a signifier for Stalin. Stalin’s coming to power ushered in a toponymical revolution. Villages and cities, canals and roads, mountains and islands began to bear his name. It became impossible to move through Soviet space without encountering Stalin coordinates.
At the same time, Stalin was consistently likened to nature in the work of writers, poets, and artists. His biographer, Henri Barbusse, wrote: “Here he is, the greatest and most important of our contemporaries. . . . In his full size he towers over Europe and over Asia, over the past and over the present. He is the most famous and yet almost the least known man in the world.”11 In the aftermath of Stalin’s and Voroshilov’s famous meeting with three artists, Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Evgeny Katsman, on 6 July 1933 at Stalin’s dacha, Katsman wrote to Voroshilov:
Stalin has enchanted us all. What a colossal man! To me he seems as huge and beautiful as nature. I was on the top of Mount Tupik (na verkhnem Tupike) in Dagestan at sunset. The mountains radiated like bright gems, I couldn’t take my eyes off this, and wanted to remember everything for the rest of my life. Stalin is just like that: I looked at him, wanted to look at him forever and couldn’t. I wanted to remember Stalin and couldn’t. He very much resembles nature—the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the clouds. You wonder and are amazed and fascinated, but you know that this is nature. But Stalin is the peak of nature—Stalin is the oceans, mountains, forests, clouds, coupled with a powerful mind for the leadership of humanity12
In 1937 Pravda framed the flight to America via the North Pole by a team of explorer-aviators (so popular at the time) as a voyage from the center to the periphery and back to the center, placing Stalin in “the heart of Moscow,” the Kremlin. Such trips to the periphery were indispensable in recharging and reinforcing the notion of the center:
ALL OUR THOUGHTS ARE OF STALIN
Forty-two days ago we left our native Moscow. After taking off from the Shchel-kovsky aerodrome our airplane set course for the North Pole. From that moment on all our thoughts constantly centered on Moscow. When making every effort to overcome the difficulties of our flight, we thought about Stalin who works in the heart of Moscow, in the Kremlin. . . . Now, during the final hours of our way to Moscow, all our thoughts are about Stalin, about the motherland. It is the greatest of all joys to return to one’s native land with the feeling of an accomplished duty, so that we can report to our beloved teacher and leader Comrade Stalin: The mission you entrusted to us is accomplished!13
Pravda also featured articles about a group of mountaineers who climbed the Soviet Union’s second-highest mountain, Mount Lenin in the Pamir Mountains of Tadzhikistan, and then the country’s highest mountain, also in the Pamirs, Mount Stalin:14
CLIMBING MOUNT STALIN
Soviet mountaineers on top of the USSR’s highest mountain. According to information from Moscow, on 13 September at 5:30 P.M. a detachment of the mountaineering expedition of Comrades Aristov, Barkhash, Beletsky, Gusak, Kirkorov, and the physician Fedorkov reached the top of Mount Stalin in the Pamir Mountains. On the northwestern rocky ridge of the USSR’s highest mountain, at a height of 7,495 meters above sea level, they emplaced a bust of Comrade Stalin. Thus the objective of the expedition—to conquer the highest peaks of the USSR: Mount Korzhenevskaia, Mount Lenin, and Mount Stalin—has been attained.15
Figure 3.2. . “Recently, after the harvest fifty-one combine operators and tractor drivers from the Azov–Black Sea Territory climbed to the peak Mount Kazbek. On the hillside leading to the peak the combine operator–mountaineers placed themselves in rows that formed the name ‘Stalin,’ which was shot by our photo reporter.” Pravda, 5 October 1935, 6.
From now on the highest Soviet elevation not only carried Stalin’s name but also featured a Stalin bust. Shortly following these articles Pravda ran a photograph of Mount Kazbek’s snow-covered peak in the Caucasus. “On the hillside of Kazbek’s peak,” elaborated the caption, “fifty-one combine operators and tractor drivers from the Azov–Black Sea Territory” had “placed themselves in rows that formed the name ‘Stalin’” (Fig. 3.2).16 Yet Stalin had to occupy all of the globe’s extremities, not just the highest mountain, but also the northernmost pole. In 1940 Pravda depicted two sailors from the icebreaker ship Sedov, raising two flags on an ice floe, one with hammer and sickle, the other with Stalin painted on
it.17
Another typical nature trope (with roots going as far back as to Russia’s first court poet, Simeon Polotsky [1628–1680]), was that of Stalin as light or the sun.18 From Stalin’s personal library we know that he drew a red circle around the word “sun” and wrote in the margin “Good!” next to this passage in a book about Napoleon I: “Had Napoleon been forced to choose a religion, he would have chosen to worship the sun, which fertilizes everything and is the true god of the earth.”19 As for metaphors of Stalin as sun: if the earth revolves around the sun, then the Soviet Union revolved around Stalin. Looking at Stalin therefore required a celestial, upward gaze. The quintessentially central trope of Stalin as light or sun was especially prominent in Soviet folklore.20 According to a quantitative analysis, an Armenian collection for Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, Stalin in the Works of the Armenian People, contains 151 appellations of “great,” 119 of “father,” and 116 of “sun.”21 And Dzhambul sang:
Stalin, my sun, in Moscow I realized
That the heart of wise Lenin beats in you:
On a day that shone like turquoise,
I was in the Kremlin among a circle of friends.
My eyes saw
The greatest of men.
You, whose name has reached the stars,
With the glory of the first wise man,
Were attentive, affectionate, simple,
And dearer to me than my own father.
For the joyous, fatherly reception in the Kremlin
Stalin, my sun, I thank you.22
Likewise the last stanza of A. Bezymensky’s “March of Parachutists” resounded:
And if in our favorite outpost
Appear hordes of vicious enemies,
We beat with a landing of unheard-of glory
The skulls of the enemy’s fascist regiments.
We will fly where no one has flown before us.
We will finish what we must finish.
Long live the sun! Long live Stalin!
Long live the people of the Soviet land! (repeat)23
And a “fakelore” poem, “Stalin—Our Golden Sun,” “recorded” (supposedly by ethnographers) in Kabardino-Balkaria, as Pravda explicated, read:
Stalin—our golden sun.
The word is deadly for our enemies:
“Stalin.”
Having chased away the thunderclouds,
You opened sunny expanses for us.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Among the soldiers before the battle,
Tall and majestic,
Sparkles in his military outfit
Voroshilov—the famous warrior.
Never vanquished in battle,
He is dressed in armor of strongest
steel,
This brave soldier, enlightened
By the sun . . .
This is the golden sun—Stalin. . . . 24
Yiddish folklore also eulogized Stalin: “He has raised the great shining sun / Over the earth, / Has turned our land / Into a blossoming garden.”25 The topos of Stalin-sun further came up in letters to Stalin, as in that of the Moscow professor who in January 1945 introduced his suggestion that a documentary film be made about the vozhd’ during his lifetime with the words, “You are our SUN, you are our PRIDE.”26 Or in a compilation of popular suggestions for celebrating Stalin’s seventieth birthday: these included the idea to “make from sun-colored metal a sun with an engraved image of Stalin in its middle and the words around the sun—‘Stalin is our sun,’ and to write to the left of the image ‘1879’ and to the right ‘1949.’”27 Artists too echoed the metaphor of Stalin as light or sun. In Katsman’s words after the 1933 meeting of artists with Stalin: “It was as if the life of everyone of us was illuminated with a specially life-giving light (kak by osvetilos’ osobo zhivitel’nym svetom).”28 Light here might have had Christian connotations, but there is also the modern transmutation (of the old Christian luminary motif) of the role of light in enlightened modernity.29 Finally, a Yiddish ditty (cbastushka) posed the question of metaphor itself: “Stalin, what can we compare you with? You cannot be compared with anything.” The conclusion of Stalin’s incomparability is reached, of course, only after attempting to liken him to each of the elements of nature—sun, clouds, winds, ocean, fire, and water, in that order.30 Here we have a trace of the long tradition in Western culture of denigrating attempts to depict the divine with human hands. “The common cry throughout is that gods cannot be represented by dead objects of wood and stone, worked by human hands—let alone be present in them and worshiped,” as David Freedberg has summarized the aniconic tradition.31
STALIN AND VOROSHILOV IN THE KREMLIN (1938)
As banal as it may sound, Stalin was not born into the Kremlin or destined by right of birth to inhabit the center of the Soviet Union’s cultural representations. He had to be actively placed there. In the case of pictorial representations, this involved concrete visual strategies, directed at distinguishing Stalin from other Party leaders. To remind us of a few such strategies from the preceding chapter, they revolved around his place in the picture, his relative size, and the color of his clothing. Stalin’s distinction was further marked by portraying him as motionless whereas others were shown in a state of movement.32 Stability in general became one of the key tropes in representations of Stalin, and the words “calm” (spokoinyi) and “confident” (uverennyi) proliferated. 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. And the proximity of Stalin to the figure of Lenin or an image of Lenin—a poster or painting on a wall—was another distinguishing marker.
The sense of Stalin’s uniqueness was enhanced by setting him off against others, to whom were ascribed the negative sides of culturally latent binary pairs. For example, the male-female gender code, to use Joan Scott’s term, evoked a series of other binaries, such as strong-weak, mind-body, and reason-emotion.33 This principle of binary definition was later extrapolated outside of the Soviet context. The pipe stuffed with cigarette tobacco (Gertsegovina Flor was allegedly his favorite brand) came to signify Stalin, whereas the cigar—together with the top hat—acquired the status of the pipe’s bourgeois Other. No picture illustrates this better than a 1935 Deni caricature of Stalin with his “peace pipe” and a bulldog-faced Western capitalist (perhaps reminiscent of Churchill?) wearing a bowler hat, with a phallic, cannon-shaped cigar pointing from his mouth, spewing bullets (Fig. 3.3).34 In Russia Stalin’s pipe is an abiding cultural myth producing legends, reiterations, and new adaptations.35
Figure 3.3. “Peace pipes.” Caricature by Deni. Pravda, 17 April 1935, 1.
Stalin’s male-coded composure was juxtaposed against Hitler’s female-coded hysterical fits.36 And Stalin’s unpretentiousness as a speaker was contrasted with Hitler’s inflated rhetorical fireworks—“he has never made use of that tumultuous force of eloquence which is the great asset of upstart tyrants,” as Stalin’s hagiographer Henri Barbusse put it in 1935.37 Conversely, for Hitler too cigars and cigarettes were loaded signs, though with a different twist. After the forging of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Hitler prohibited the publication of photographs of Stalin with a cigarette, reasoning, according to his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, that among the German population such images would threaten the respectable status of the statesman with whom the Führer had struck a deal: “‘But a cigarette-smoking Stalin is exactly typical of the man,’ I objected. But Hitler wouldn’t have it. The German people, he asserted, would take offence. ‘The signing of a Pact is a solemn act,’ he said, ‘which one does not approach with a cigarette dangling from one’s lips. Such a photograph smacks of levity! See if you can paint out the cigarettes, before you release the pictures to the press.’” The cigarette in Stalin’s mouth was duly retouched away.38 Hitler further tried keeping Göring from smoking cigars in public, arguing that whoever had been turned into a monument should not be shown “with a cig
ar in one’s mouth.”39
Artists spoke openly about placing Stalin in the center of their paintings. Aleksandr Gerasimov stressed, for example, on one hand the historical accuracy of his Tehran Conference, painted on the premises of the 1943 meeting of the Allied powers. On the other hand, he told his audience unabashedly “it was important that the necessary person be the center of attention. In my case Stalin.”40 And about his monumental 1942 Hymn to October—406 by 710 centimeters in size—Gerasimov told his listeners: “This is a huge picture. Yet I must say with confidence here that, regardless of its size, regardless of the fact that the chandeliers and golden loges shine there—the attention still falls on Comrade Stalin.”41 (Fig. 3.4). Gerasimov achieved this effect by pointing a spotlight at the comparatively small figure of Stalin, who stands at a rostrum at the Bolshoi Theater off to the left of center stage, and by pointing the heads of the entire audience in Stalin’s direction. Moreover, a silhouette of Stalin towers on the Bolshoi’s curtain above a large Lenin sculpture. The silhouette is topped only by the Roman numerals XXV, which signify the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution.