The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  The eyes were also the point of origin for connecting axes between the leader and his people. The sculptor Nikolai Tomsky said of a meeting of Stakhanovites with Stalin that

  when one of Leningrad’s best Stakhanovites spoke—a metalworker of the Kirov Factory—I had the fortune to watch Joseph Vissarionovich very closely, and as an artist I naturally tried to capture every gesture, every expression of his face. And when the metalworker Kardashov, if I remember his name correctly, began to speak about the achievements of the factory, about the new people of the factory, the eyes of Joseph Vissarionovich began to shine with some inexpressible light. It seemed to me, thanks to the fact that his eyes are very close to one another—I am saying this as an artist—that a single radiant star shone through the entire room. At that point I understood what kind of living power, what continuous threads connect our worker, our man, with Comrade Stalin (kakie nepreryvnye niti sviazi mezhdu rabochim, mezhdu nashim chelovekom i tovarishchem Stalinym).90

  In his sculpture Stalin’s Oath, Tomsky “wanted to find in this oath the uninterrupted bond of the Soviet people with its great leader.” The gaze between Stalin and his people is mutual. Tomsky also professed to see his objective in “finding the closest bond of our people, the bond of the peoples, whose looks are fixed on Comrade Stalin.”91 Conversely, whoever had seen Stalin acquired the ability to “see” both literally and figuratively, progressing to a higher level of ideological clairvoyance.92 Consider this final example of a person who took Stalin’s portrait off the wall and turned to his leader’s countenance for advice: “I approached Stalin’s portrait, took it off the wall, placed it on the table and, resting my head on my hands, I gazed and meditated. What should I do? The Leader’s face, as always so serene, his eyes so clear-sighted, they penetrate into the distance. It seems that his penetrating look pierces my little room and goes out to embrace the entire globe. I do not know how I would appear to anyone looking at me at this moment. But with my every fibre, every nerve, every drop of my blood I felt that, at this moment, nothing exists in this entire world but this dear and beloved face. What should I do?”93

  In the early 1930s, visual culture was preoccupied with establishing Stalin as the center of representation. By 1948 his apotheosis had reached such proportions that he was sometimes represented indirectly. Stalin is present, for example, only on the attentive faces of the people clustered around the radio in Pavel Sokolov-Skalia’s The Voice of the Leader,94 and only in the joyful faces of the boys in Dmitry Mochalsky’s After the Demonstration (They Saw Stalin) (1949; Fig. 3.12). Likewise, in Robert Sturua’s She Saw Stalin (1950) a woman has returned from a meeting with Stalin to her native Caucasus village. She is entirely self-engrossed, and wears an entranced, “knowing” look that veers off to the left-hand lower corner. She tries to speak, to describe the meeting, but obviously cannot: Stalin is too great for words. Enraptured, the villagers look at her and seem to be daydreaming about their leader.95

  Like the Stalin cult, socialist realism itself was expansive and sought to break down borders in order to fill space totally and completely. This striving for ubiquity did not stop short of the viewer, not even the viewing critic, who was to lose distance and be drawn into the art. Nor did these totalizing ambitions allow for the existence of art criticism as a separate field; consequently art-critical treatises became indistinguishable from the comments workers entered in an exhibition’s comment books. Seen from this angle, socialist realism implied the end of art criticism and art history as we know it. Considering the absence of conventional art-historical or visual studies exegeses of socialist realist painting today it would seem that socialist realism successfully deployed its empire-building ambitions.96 As Boris Groys put it, socialist realist art “presents a rare example in today’s cultural context—in a world where otherwise ‘anything goes’—of a truly irreducible other.”97

  Figure 3.12. Dmitry Mochalsky, After the Demonstration (They Saw Stalin) (1949). Oil on canvas, 69.5 × 132 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  Within the realm of socialist realist leader portraits, there may be more historical continuity to socialist realism’s usurpation of art criticism than is discernible at first sight. Professional art history has squared poorly with ruler portraits since the Enlightenment. As soon as the metaphysical legitimizing source for the ruler crumbled, his (in a few cases, her) representations too were subjected to the same formal-aesthetic criteria to which a rapidly professionalizing scholarly discipline had begun subjecting all artwork—in the egalitarian, universalist fashion so typical of the bourgeois age. Crudely put, while criticism of a baroque portrait of an absolutist monarch amounted to lese majesty, a critical comment on a nineteenth-century monarchical portrait could claim to be a sign of connoisseurship.98 “How is it,” wondered the French critic Théophile Étienne Joseph Thoré in 1861, “that contemporary art has become incapable . . . of producing depictions of personalities who rule over nations?”99 Contemporary art had not, one could argue then, become incapable of producing such depictions, nor had “the nation” become incapable of deriving sacral aura from these pictorial representations of rulers; instead, contemporary art history had become incapable of interpreting them because its analytical instruments stopped short of nothing, not even a portrait that was to be revered rather than analyzed.

  II

  CULT PRODUCTION

  4 The Political Is Personal, Art Is Political

  Stalin, the Cult, and Patronage

  THE SPECIAL ISSUE of Pravda on 21 December 1929, Stalin’s fiftieth birthday and the beginning of his cult, featured a poem, “I am certain” (“Ya uveren”), by then-undisputed court poet Demian Bedny:

  Suddenly from Pravda a loudly resonant

  Telephone crackling:

  —“Demian!”

  —“I can’t hear you! I turned deaf!”

  —“Stop joking!”

  —“No, I won’t!”

  —“There’s panic in the editorial office:

  Heaps and piles of telegrams! . . .

  On the occasion of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday!

  Never mind that Stalin

  Gets mad and thunders,

  Pravda can no longer

  Remain silent.

  Write about Stalin without delay.

  The Stalin issue will go to press

  On the twentieth of December without fail. . . .1

  Bedny’s poem is a striking cultural artifact. By describing the deadline of December 20 for the “Stalin issue (Stalinskii nomer)” of Pravda, its author gave away more about the production process of the cult’s foundation moment than any other publicly available information. The poem allows a glimpse into the constructed and concerted production of the birthday celebration. What is more, Bedny’s poem more explicitly than any other document to date articulated a key component of the cult, namely Stalin’s alleged opposition to (and grudging acquiescence in) his own cult; for the cult was the expression of democratic, popular will, and the Soviet Union the world’s first true popular-democratic state. “On the occasion of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday!,” Bedny composed, “Never mind that Stalin / Gets mad and thunders.” Bedny then proceeded to reiterate this thesis in a prose article beneath his poem, in case the lyrical did not make the point obvious to everyone: “I know: to write intimately about Stalin means to sacrifice oneself. Stalin will awfully scold you.”

  The sovereign’s rejection of praise had been part and parcel of the glorification of Russian rulers since enlightened absolutism at the latest. Catherine the Great, for example, personally initiated and managed the Legislative Commission, yet in 1767 rejected the bestowal of the title “Catherine the Great, Mother of the Fatherland.” She reasoned that the verdict on her reign belonged to posterity, while she had been merely doing her duty out of love for her people and her country.2 Likewise, wordy professions of the inability to find words sufficient to extol the sovereign had been part of tsar panegyrics during the reign of Nicholas I in particular and
of European sentimentalism in general.3 Bedny’s poem achieved more than that: it voiced an entire structure of Stalin eulogy that was to be used until Stalin’s end, and the very end of his cult. This structure was dialectical in nature and consisted of extolling Stalin, in particular his modesty, while including his resistance to the very act of extolling as a further sign of his modesty. This first chapter on the production of the Stalin cult scrutinizes this dialectics of the cult. It looks at the role of personal actors in the production of the cult, above all Stalin himself, but also the main patron of the visual arts, Kliment Voroshilov. The varieties of patronage, a supreme form of personalized power, will figure prominently here.

  STALIN’S MODESTY

  Official Soviet representations featured a whole array of superlatives for Stalin. Among them was the description of Stalin as the “most modest of men.” Thus Stalin appeared to be in outright opposition to his own cult or at most tolerated it grudgingly; for this cult was the expression of popular love, and Stalin was of the people and ruled for the people. “Comrade Stalin always combines the belief in the masses with great love for the people, for the creators of the new life, and with enormous modesty, which characterizes him as the greatest leader of the popular masses,” pronounced a jubilee album published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1939.4 Official rhetoric further depicted Lenin as having handed over power to Stalin. The leitmotif, “Stalin is the Lenin of today,” expressed the idea of Lenin as another source of Stalin’s legitimacy. By synechdochic extension, Lenin’s character traits—chief among them modesty—were ascribed to Stalin as well.5 The Soviet people, in turn, were to emulate Stalin: “His example teaches us great modesty and moral purity.”6

  Memoirists and observers of the Soviet scene contributed much to this image of Stalin. According to the memoirs of Vladimir Alliluev (whose mother was Stalin’s sister-in-law) Stalin displayed his typical modesty when inspecting a model by sculptor Evgeny Vuchetich for the memorial in Berlin’s Treptow Park in honor of the Soviet victory in World War II. “Listen, Vuchetich, aren’t you tired of the guy with the moustache?” supposedly asked Stalin. He proceeded to replace a statue of himself in the center of the model with a statue of a Soviet soldier, carrying a little girl in his arms.7 Foreign observers perpetuated the official image of Stalin’s modesty and grudging acceptance of his cult. One of the foreigners to equate person with persona was Lion Feuchtwanger, the German communist writer in Californian exile, who wrote of Stalin: “He shrugs his shoulders at the vulgarity of the immoderate worship of his person. He excuses his peasants and workers on the grounds that they have had too much to do to be able to acquire good taste as well, and laughs a little at the hundreds of thousands of portraits of a man with a moustache which dance before his eyes at demonstrations.”8 Another was the Swiss journalist Emil Ludwig, who interviewed Stalin on 13 December 1931 and a decade later characterized him as “Stalin simplex” and “a healthy, moderate man who in twenty years of rule has never shown a sign of megalomania, even if he unfortunately gave in to his glorification.”9 A third was the Hungarian writer Ervin Sinkó, who recounted a story the writer Isaac Babel allegedly told him: “Babel and Gorky were visiting Stalin. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, came in. Stalin said to her: ‘Tell the father of peoples, the leader of the world proletariat, what you learned in school today?’”10

  At first glance, some archival sources confirm the image of modesty as one of Stalin’s character traits.11 In a 1933 reply to the playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov, Stalin wrote: “You talk about the ‘vozhd” in vain. This is not good and, I suppose, not proper. Things do not depend on the ‘vozhd’,’ but the collective leader—the Central Committee.”12 Also in 1933 the publishing house Stary Bolshevik sent a note to Poskryobyshev, asking for Stalin’s permission to publish a dedication to Stalin in a book by a certain Baron Bibineishvili. Reciting the dedication aloud would have required a deep breath:

  To the man who first inspired Kamo to his selfless and heroic revolutionary struggle, who first called him by the name “Kamo,” who with his hand of steel forged the Bolshevik organizations of Georgia and the Transcaucasus, who, together with Lenin, the international proletariat’s leader of genius, led the liberation struggle of the proletariat and the victory of Great October, who after the death of the great Lenin continues and develops the teaching of Marx and Lenin, the theory and practice of the founders of Marxism-Leninism, the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary proletarian struggle, under whose direct guidance the Party is realizing the great task of building a classless socialist society on one-sixth of the globe. To the great leader of the Leninist Communist Party and the Comintern, to the ingenious organizer and strategist of the international proletarian revolution, to Comrade STALIN the author B. Bibineishvili dedicates this book.”13

  Stalin answered: “I am against ‘dedications.’ I am generally against hymns as ‘dedications.’ I am all the more against the suggested text of the ‘dedication,’ since it twists the facts and is full of pseudoclassical eulogistic pathos (lozhnoklassicheskogo pafosa vospevaniia).”14 In 1934 the Politburo accepted Stalin’s proposal to rename “the Stalin Institute under construction in Tbilisi” into a mere branch of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute without carrying his name in its title.15 In 1935 Yemelian Yaroslavsky wrote asking Stalin’s personal intervention to release all required documents at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute through so that he could write Stalin’s biography. Stalin replied in handwriting diagonally across Yaroslavsky’s letter: “I am against the idea of my biography. Maxim Gorky has a plan analogous to yours . . . but he and I have given up this affair. I think the time for ‘Stalin’s biography’ has not come yet!!”16 In 1936 Stalin crossed out his own name in a proposal by Platon Kerzhentsev to organize a competition for the best theater play and movie script on the “role of Lenin and Stalin in the preparation and conduct of the October Revolution.”17 One year later, in 1937, Stalin remarked on a screenplay by Fridrikh Ermler for the movie The Great Citizen, “I agree that it is undoubtedly politically literate. Also, it undoubtedly has literary virtues. However, there are some errors. . . . The reference to Stalin must be excluded. Instead of Stalin the Central Committee of the Party must be mentioned.”18 Also in 1937 at a dinner following the Red Square demonstration on October Revolution Day, the Comintern chief Georgy Dimitrov proposed a toast to Stalin: “When I was imprisoned in Germany I saw the greatness of Lenin, and since Lenin’s death the name of Comrade Stalin is inseparably connected with Lenin; it is the fortune of the history of the human struggle that after the death of the great Lenin Stalin took his place. To the health of Comrade Stalin!” But Stalin would not let this pass: “Comrade Dimitrov is wrong even from the perspective of Marxist methodology. Personalities always appear when the cause that promoted them is good (ne gibloe).” Foreshadowing his famous 23 February 1942 dictum, “The Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state stays,” he went on: “Personalities come and go, the people stay (lichnosti poiavliaiutsia i ukhodiat, narod ostaetsia vsegda), and when the cause is good, a personality will appear.” Recapitulating the intra-Party struggles of the 1920s, he added: “They knew me, Stalin, but not like Trotsky, be brave and don’t invent things that aren’t true. . . . Don’t be afraid to face the facts. Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Tomsky, Bukharin, and Rykov were well-known. Who was on our side? Well, I did organizational work in the Central Committee. But who was I in comparison with Ilyich? A nobody (zamukhryshka). There were Comrades Molotov, Kalinin, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov—but all of them were unknown.”19

  A few months later, on 16 February 1938, Stalin penned a letter to the Komsomol publishing house Detizdat about a children’s book by a certain Smirnova:

  I am firmly against the publication of Stories of Stalin’s Childhood. The book is full of factual inaccuracies, distortions, exaggerations, and undeserved praise. Fairytale hunters, liars (perhaps “conscientious” liars), and sycophants led the author astray. It is a pity for the
author, but the fact remains. But this is not the main thing. The main thing is that this book has a tendency of implanting in the consciousness of Soviet children (and people in general) a cult of personalities (kul’t lichnostei), of leaders, of infallible heroes. This is dangerous and harmful. The theory of “heroes” and “crowd” is not a Bolshevik but an SR [Socialist Revolutionary] theory. Heroes produce the people, they transform it from a crowd into a people—claim the SR’s. The people produces heroes—reply the Bolsheviks to the SR’s. This book plays into the hands of the SR’s. Any such book will play into the hands of the SR’s and will hurt our common Bolshevik cause. I recommend burning the book.20

  The letter was limited to intra-Party circulation where it functioned as a signal: Do not exaggerate the cult!21 Finally, in 1940 Stalin deleted the following words at the very end of a film’s screenplay, The Oath of the Peoples, to be directed by Mikhail Chiaureli, the leading director of Stalin movies: “Against the back-drop of the flying airplanes stands the gigantic Palace of Soviets Like an endless stream, soldiers march past the foot of the Palace of Soviets. On the tribune we see the Politburo and government of the USSR, with Stalin at its head. With his outstretched arm Lenin adorns the top of the Palace of Soviets building.”22

  One could go on and on with examples of Stalin censoring his own cult. They would confirm the thesis that Stalin in both his public and his hidden record was skeptical towards the cult, accepting it only because it sprang from genuine popular will, all the while excising some of the most egregious examples. This was not only the public representation, but it has been confirmed by documents that have surfaced since the opening of the Party archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. Fundamentally, and true to Marxism, Stalin despised his cult. Or did he?