by Jan Plamper
Figure 3.7. Viktor Vasnetsov, Three Warriors (1898). Oil on canvas, 321 × 222 cm. Original at State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
In 1949, Gerasimov added an interesting new detail. He asserted that Viktor Vasnetsov’s Three Warriors (1898) had been his inspiration for the painting (Fig. 3.7). After applauding the anti-Impressionism of Vasnetsov, Gerasimov said: “I admit that this picture was constantly before my eyes; there are three warriors there, and here stand two warriors—our Soviet ones.”69 Vasnetsov (1848–1916), a preeminent Wanderer, repeatedly produced illustrations of the ancient Russian oral epic poems (bylini) about heroic Russian warriors. Three Warriors shows three mythical medieval Russian knights—Dobrynia, Ilya Muromets, and Alyosha Popovich—in full armor on horses in a mountainous countryside. The two at left are looking into the distance, as if to spot the enemy. The third knight is set back somewhat and gazes in a different direction. Unlike in Gerasimov’s painting, all three figures are portrayed flatly rather than in three-quarter view, and the two main knights look toward the viewer’s left, whereas Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov look to the right. Thus the gaze of the three bylina heroes is meant to depict the defense of the Russian land, whereas the gaze of Stalin and Voroshilov holds the dual connotation of vigilance against exterior enemies and the embodiment of history—the gaze into the socialist future.
Let us now return to the circle, which serves as an organizing theme in many other paintings. One example is Vasily Yefanov’s An Unforgettable Meeting (1936–37), which foregrounds a triangle of three figures arranged in circular movement: Stalin, a woman, and Molotov (Fig. 3.8). The three heads indeed create the immediate visual impression of a triangle, but there are in fact more points: the three heads, the arms of Stalin and the woman, joined in a warm handshake (Stalin envelops the woman’s hands). Together these points create a circle in the center of the picture. The remaining Party luminaries, with flowers and microphones, create a second circle around the central one. Other paintings that are arranged in circles around Stalin include Yury Kugach et al.’s “Glory to the Great Stalin!” (1950),70 Boris Ioganson et al.’s J. V. Stalin Among the People in the Kremlin (Our Wise Leader, Dear Teacher.) (1952), and Grigory Shegal’s Leader, Teacher, and Friend (J. V. Stalin in the Presidium of the Second Congress of Kolkhoz Farmer–Shock Workers in February 1935) (1936–1937) (Plates 4, 5, 6),71 as well as David Gabitashvili et al.’s Youth of the World—for Peace (1951), in which Stalin is shown on a poster carried in the center of a crowd of people at a procession.72
Figure 3.8. Vasily Efanov, An Unforgettable Meeting (1936–37). Oil on canvas, 270 × 391 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The circular arrangement held wherever Stalin was, even if the painting concerned a scene from the distant past. For example, Iosif Serebriany’s At the Fifth (London) Congress of the RSDRP (April–May 1907) (1947), which shows the young Stalin and the already older, balding Lenin, is arranged circularly around the young Stalin (Plate 7). Sometimes the circular arrangement was projected back onto other spheres of society, without Stalin’s presence. This practice was particularly true of the artistic intelligentsia. For example, Vasily Yefanov’s picture of the theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky shows him in the center of a circle of people.73
Fedor Shurpin’s 1949 Morning of Our Motherland shows Stalin standing in the Soviet countryside in his white postwar generalissimo’s uniform, carrying his greatcoat (Plate 8). His hands are folded, his hair is gray, the wrinkle on his forehead has deepened. This is the canonical postwar Stalin, seasoned by a world war and the loss of millions of people. The exact geometric center is the place where Stalin’s heart would be beneath his uniform; this is also the lightest spot in the picture. Here Stalin is the immobile center of the picture. The land is already transformed and moving in no larger, metaphysical direction, only in its self-referential circles (consider the smoke of the smokestacks in the far background, the tractors, the little trees planted symmetrically behind Stalin and expected to grow to a certain height but no higher).74 The agents of transformation are collectivization and industrialization, as is visible from the tractors and the smokestacks. There are overtones of Christian transcendence: the green behind Stalin symbolizes fertility; the white of his uniform, godlike creation. The only linear movement—Stalin’s gaze—is directed outward, with a vanishing point outside the picture. While the land is “utopia become real,” Stalin’s gaze is directed toward an even brighter future.
Soviet art criticism itself noted the direction of Stalin’s gaze. The newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, for example, wrote that “the gaze of the great leader and military commander” in an 18.5-meter-high Stalin sculpture to be erected at the White Sea–Baltic (Belomor) Canal “is directed into the distance.”75 At times the gaze into the “bright future” became so overpowering that it overshadowed conventional strategies of pictorial composition. In Peisakh Rozin’s picture V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin at the Bay (1950), Lenin and Stalin are saying farewell and should be looking at each other. Instead, their gazes do not meet and are both directed into the distance.76
This interpretation of Stalin’s gaze also entered public discourse. Witness a 1946 Pravda article by the Tretyakov Gallery’s director, Aleksandr Zamoshkin, about a “New Portrait of J. V. Stalin” by “the master embroideress Comrade Tselman from Sudzha, Kursk oblast.” Zamoshkin began formulaically by summarizing Stalin’s place in the folk arts: “Comrade J. V. Stalin’s image, already engraved in many works of Soviet artists, invariably catches the attention of folk arts masters. Their eyes are fixed on the man who led our motherland to power and prosperity. In artistic embroideries, in bone-carving, in artistic rugs, in lacquer painting the masters of folk arts realize the image of Comrade Stalin, in whom the people sees the embodiment of its achievements and victories.” After this preliminary paragraph Zamoshkin turned to the embroidery by Tselman of “Generalissimo of the Soviet Union J. V. Stalin,” thus indicating the obraz genre—Stalin as military commander (not statesman, not father of peoples, nor Marxist theoretician).77 “This portrait,” he continued, “executed in colored silks, is the most important work of a number of works created earlier by folk masters and is a valuable contribution to our art. This talented artist has managed to express boundless love for the leader of peoples in her great work.” Zamoshkin went on to offer as analytical an interpretation of the artwork as socialist realist art criticism—in a central newspaper—was able to offer. In doing so he expressly described Stalin’s face as the surface onto which utopia was inscribed:
In the austere purity of Comrade Stalin’s face the artist has managed to express the proud creature of victory, an immense inner power. Comrade Stalin’s gaze is directed into the distance. It is as if our bright future is reflected in his face, illuminated by deep thought (V litse, ozarennom glubokoi mysl’iu, kak by otrazheno nashe svetloe budushchee). The artist has convincingly conveyed all this in the expression of the eyes, which are full of life, and in the position of the head, which is lifted and slightly turned back.78
COMPARING GAZES, COMPARING BODIES
For heuristic purposes, it is worth contrasting Shurpin’s painting of Stalin with paintings reflecting the Lenin iconography and, more jarringly and productively, with nineteenth-century American landscape painting. We begin with the second comparison and return to the first.
Albert Boime has identified “the magisterial gaze” in American landscape painting during the period of Manifest Destiny, circa 1830–1865, as an “elevated viewpoint of the onlooker” that “traced a visual trajectory from the uplands to a scenic panorama below.”79 The assumption of this viewpoint, the “Olympian bearing,” is deeply ideological and constitutes the discursive expression of an underlying structural disposition for key tenets of the national American pioneer spirit: the subjugation of the wilderness and the concomitant destruction of the Native Americans who inhabited this wilderness, as well as the expectation of continued westward movement into a utopian paradise on
earth. Boime convincingly juxtaposes the peculiarly American “magisterial gaze” with the nearly contemporaneous Romantic German “reverential gaze” of a Caspar David Friedrich. In Friedrich‘s paintings, “his point of view moves upward from the lower picture plane and culminates on or near a distant mountain peak.” According to Boime, “the reverential gaze signified the striving of vision toward a celestial goal in the heavens, starting from a wide, panoramic base.”80 It is perhaps best to further illustrate the American pioneer stance with one of Boime’s readings of a specific picture. Of Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills (1843; Fig. 3.9) he writes:
Figure 3.9.Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills (1843). Oil on canvas, 69.85 × 102.55 cm. Original at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
A young farmer standing in for the spectator leans on his axe and gazes from a hilltop foreground across the wide vista below. The foreground is strewn with thickets and storm-blasted trees symbolizing the undomesticated landscape that the farmer prepares to clear. We follow his gaze from the boundary of the wilderness across the river to the cultivated middleground zone and the farm dwellings. Moving perpendicularly to the youth’s line of vision is a train in the middle distance crossing a bridge. The line of vision extends into the remotest distance where smoke arises from scarcely seen manufactories on the horizon. Cole’s picture tells us that the future lies over the horizon, with time here given a spatial location. . . . Of course, in actuality, the farmer would be facing in the opposite direction, away from the boundary of civilization toward the forest wilderness to be cleared. I see this reversal, however, as a metaphorical mirror of the pioneer’s vision of the future prospects awaiting him. In looking backward, the farmer declares from the edge between wilderness and savagery on the one hand, civilization and order on the other, that progress moves along a timeline of the landscape.81
Shurpin’s Morning of Our Motherland, by contrast, features a fundamentally different arrangement and perspective. The onlooker does not assume the place of Stalin and follow his gaze, but rather looks at Stalin face-on. Whereas the viewer of Cole’s River in the Catskills is proffered, by following the gaze of the young farmer—whose face remains invisible—a pictorialized idea of the utopian future lying ahead, our only hint at the Soviet future is Stalin himself and his gaze. In the American case landscape itself embodies utopia, whereas in the Soviet case Stalin embodies the bright future.82 As obvious as this may seem, in the American case we are ultimately dealing with a liberal-democratic society, whereas in the Soviet case we have a person-centered dictatorship. The comparative perspective opens up yet another vista on the inner logic of the cult surrounding its dictator.
Moreover, Boime writes of Asher Durand’s Progress (1853) that “the diagonal line of sight is synonymous with the magisterial gaze, taking us rapidly from an elevated geographical zone to another below and from one temporal zone to another, locating progress synchronically in time and space. Within this fantasy of domain and empire gained from looking out and down over broad expanses is the subtext of metaphorical forecast of the future. The future is given a spatial location in which vast territories are brought under visual and symbolic control” (Fig. 3.10).83 One reading of Morning of Our Motherland might likewise posit an encoding of the temporal line—progress—in the painting via the tractors moving in the background, the trees growing, and the rising smoke of the factories. But another reading is possible: the dominant encoding of progress in this painting is via Stalin’s gaze, which is placed in the foreground; the tractors, trees, and smokestacks are marked by cyclical movement in self-referential circles. They are but the background achievements of the foreground Stalin, who can claim these as his very own achievements, as lying “behind” himself. If, in the iconography of industrial construction during the First Five-Year Plan, progress was inscribed in the portrayal of construction itself, then during the postwar era Stalin has consummated a monopolization of progress.
Figure 3.10. Asher Durand, Progress (1853). Oil on canvas, 121.92 × 182.72 cm. Original atThe Warner Collection, Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Figure 3.11. Viktor Tsyplakov, V. I. Lenin (Lenin at the Smolny) (1947). Oil on canvas, 270 × 210 cm. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Turning to a comparison of Shurpin’s image of Stalin with the Lenin iconography, it is noticeable that the latter features a Lenin who is entirely in motion. In Viktor Tsyplakov’s V. I. Lenin (Lenin at the Smolny) (1947), for example, Lenin’s gaze into the future is echoed not only by his body, which is in dynamic motion, but also by the bayonets of the soldiers around him and by the bodies of these soldiers as well (Fig. 3.11). Gerasimov, a painter who created pictorial representations both of Lenin and Stalin, spoke of his differential approach to movement and immobility with regard to the two leaders. “The Gorky Museum commissioned a large watercolor portrait [of Stalin] with outstretched arm,” he recounted:
I wanted to convey the loving face of Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin], this gesture of reaching out to the audience. There is no audience in the picture, because I had been ordered to paint a portrait only. Here all my methods are opposed to the technique I used when I did a portrait of Comrade Lenin. There we have an impetuous pose, the expression of the face matches [the pose], there’s the cry of the Revolution, the cry for the Revolution. Here in all my pictures the image of Joseph Vissarionovich is calm confidence (spokoinaia uverennost’) in the position of the cause that he leads, complete trust in his powers (polnaia uverennost’ v svoi sily), nothing harsh, and calm, convincing speech (nichego rezkogo, spokoinaia, ubeditel’naia rech’).84
At another point Gerasimov asked rhetorically, “Why is V. I. [Lenin] shown talking in this portrait? Because,” he answered, “this was the moment of the Revolution.” By contrast, in his portraits of Stalin he wanted to show “in his poses and gestures a different stage of the Revolution. Then there was struggle, but here we have construction—not without struggle, to be sure, but nonetheless, this is not the kind of struggle when the fate of the Revolution was still up in the air.” Finally, for Gerasimov, Stalin “embodies calm, certain power,” hence “the always calm gesture, the calm and utterly convincing manner of speaking.”85
STALIN: A FACE FULL OF MEANINGS
The topography of Stalin’s face furthermore doubled the topography of the Soviet Union. Consider the poem by Aleksandr Karachunsky, a lyrically inclined sixteen-year-old from Aleksandria, Kirovograd oblast, in Pravda:
PORTRAIT OF THE LEADER
I know the lines of all wrinkles
All sparkles of his attentive gaze;
In him there is so much wonderful, dear
Unpretentiousness!
In him is the will of the people, in him are our dreams,
In him is a boundless ocean of dreams.
And every fine wrinkle on his forehead
Tells tales of difficult years.
About the prisons of Siberia, about fighting the enemy,
About the workers’ platoons marching victoriously
In fire and smoke.
About how factories rose in the desert,
How in the tundra flowers blossomed,
How we survived hunger and frost,
Survived and got powerful.
We all know his dear greatcoat,
The silver smoke from his pipe . . .
And I see the bread of the Ukrainian steppes,
The Caucasian oil, heat from Donbass coals,
The bridges of battleships.
I see how hundreds of heroes of labor,
Are warmed by your care,
They build factories, palaces, towns . . .
Inspired poets compose.
Pilots—the heroes of the air—
Conquer fog and darkness,
And thousands of our Soviet children
Bring glory to the name of the leader.86
The central features of Stalin’s face are usually his eyes (with Lenin, by contrast, the head itself was more signifying than t
he face).87 Artists continually focused on the eyes in their discussions and descriptions of Stalin. At the 1933 “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” exhibition, Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Ordzhonikidze (all in all, about fifteen Politburo members and other luminaries) came to visit. A crowd of artists (Bogorodsky, Brodsky, A. Gerasimov, Lvov, Merkurov, Modorov, Perelman, Shegal, the art historian Mashkovtsev, and others) moved behind the Politburo. “Everyone carefully studies Stalin. Everyone noticed the beauty of Stalin’s face, the harmony of proportions, the beautiful posture, the calmness, the courage, the self-control, the eyes of amber (piva) color with dark outlines, around the eyes his wrinkles of kindness and laughter, which run downward from the eyes and upward on his forehead. That is a very characteristic trait of Stalin’s. A rather small, medium nose, and pleasant, tanned hands.”88 After Stalin’s July 1933 dacha meeting with Gerasimov, Brodsky, and Katsman, the latter wrote about Stalin’s eyes: “During lunch we came to talk about Lenin, and Stalin said with a warm and tender look on his face: ‘He is unique, after all (On ved’ u nas edinstvennyi).’ In my mind I painted Comrade Stalin’s portrait, admiring his eyes, in which his entire genius is expressed, and I felt his expressive and strong look on me.”89