The Stalin Cult
Page 17
STALIN’S IMMODEST MODESTY
Upon closer analysis one thing becomes clear: Stalin wanted his own cult. The modesty was affected in order to overcome the contradiction of a personality cult in a polity that claimed to be implementing a collectivist ideology, Marxism. This affected modesty amounted to a pattern of “flamboyant modesty” or “immodest modesty.” What is more, when one digs deeper, traces appear of Stalin’s jealous control and expansion of his own cult. This also goes to show that the archival documents readily available were part of a deliberate effort by Stalin to place at the easy-to-reach upper layers of his archive—the semipublic “reliquary section,” if you will—documents confirming his image of modesty. This too was a strategy of immodest modesty.
Why did Stalin censor his public presence, and create the semblance of a cult against his own will? First, there was the entire prehistory of disdain for personality cults in Marxism and Russian Marxism in particular. A Bolshevik personality cult was an oxymoron, and therefore its self-presentation somehow had to solve this paradox. The cult achieved this by taking recourse to the immodest modesty pattern. Connected with this was Bolshevik Party culture in which modesty was highly esteemed as a personal virtue, and belonged right at the top of the scale of Bolshevik virtues such as will-power and steadfastness. Any typical Bolshevik hagiography stressed the modesty of its subject. Second, and linked with the Bolshevik virtue of modesty, the cultural pattern of immodest modesty actually reached far back into history. This pattern had been part and parcel of left intelligentsia behavior at least since the late nineteenth century and was continued under Stalin by both the highest Soviet powers and by oppositional intellectuals like Anna Akhmatova. Ultimately it extended back to religion and the portrayal of saints as paragons of humbleness.23
The earliest clear-cut evidence of Stalin’s approval and regular orchestration of his own cult dates from the late 1920s, probably 1927 or 1928. Kaganovich received a letter from Ivan Tovstukha, Stalin’s secretary: “The publisher Proletary has published a Stalin portrait (lithograph) of the worst kind. This is the portrait about whose publication in Ogonek and other journals the boss [khoziain, i.e. Stalin] cursed a lot. Besides, it is awfully painted. Could this thing not be liquidated in some quiet manner? In general, we ought to force Proletary to pull itself together and to always ask for our permission when they want to publish something on Stalin (kogda oni khotiat chto libo Stalinskoe vypustist’). They used to do that, but now they published a volume of 1917 Lenin and Stalin articles with lots of misprints, and two days ago Stalin sent an angry letter on this issue.”24 In this letter to Kaganovich by Stalin’s secretary, we have the first incontrovertible proof of Stalin’s own interest in his representations before he had the absolute power to exert such influence without a paper trail. There is, I believe, even earlier evidence of this kind. In August 1924, exactly seven months after Lenin had died, Stalin received a letter from Kharkov thanking him for sending, as requested, his photograph:
Today we received from Moscow the photographs for which we thank you very much. We had doubts whether you would send them because we had been warned about your persistent unwillingness to be photographed at all. We think it would be possible that your picture become available to all of the country’s Party organizations. Comrade Stalin, we are also looking forward to your letter for the 7,000-strong Stalin [Komsomol] organization of the union. Please do meet our request as soon as you can. We would also like to inform you that the books you gave us have been placed in two clubs of the major mines.25
Lev Mekhlis, Stalin’s secretary, who is presented as having acted as the intermediary, received a similar letter—but with new details: “After all portraits of Comrade Stalin are so rare in our country. By the way, I don’t know how to explain such excessive modesty of the Party leader; in my opinion all Party organizations ought to be supplied with Stalin portraits, but maybe I’m wrong. Everything depends on the characteristics of a person, and Comrade Stalin is by nature unpretentious and modest (prost i skromen), as this is a trait you often notice among great people.”26 There is a slight chance this letter exchange actually took place and possibly Stalin had sent his photograph via Mekhlis. But the language of the letters is extremely formulaic and unusual for 1924, when the Lenin cult alone was in ascendance and Stalin was one of the least-known Party leaders. What is more, there are only typescripts and no originals of the letters in the file. I conjecture that these two letters are post factum fabrications strategically placed in the archive in order to bolster the image of Stalin’s modesty and project it back onto the entire 1920s.
This opens up more generally the question of sources and archives. What kinds of sources create the impression of Stalin’s modesty, of his resistance to the cult? The evidence that seems to confirm this image is from Stalin’s personal depository (fond 558) at the Central Party Archive (today called the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, RGASPI). The holdings in this depository do not consist of documents produced by a regular bureaucracy, but rather they consist essentially of two parts, both assembled by archivists.27 The first part—inventories (opisi) 1–10—was collated at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute from documents from various archives for the preparation of Stalin’s biography during his lifetime (some materials, such as his library with his marginalia, were added after his death). The second part, opis’ 11, was transferred in the late 1990s from the so-called Presidential Archive (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation), an archive created to save documents from destruction by the putschists in August 1991 during the standoff between RSFSR President Yeltsin and the Politburo communist hardliners (the huge Politburo collection to this day is in the closed Presidential Archive). This is the so-called “personal archive” of Stalin. It was collected by the Central Committee’s Special Sector (Osobyi Sektor). Created in 1934 and headed by Aleksandr Poskryobyshev, the Special Sector was both a technical unit serving the Politburo and at the same time Stalin’s most personal chancellery. Stalin controlled his personal archive especially tightly. If opisi 1–10 were meant for Stalin’s biography and hence semipublic, opis’ 11 contains both materials somehow related to Stalin, among them pieces of evidence that showed his actual control of the workings of his cult (we will review them later), and materials that are mainly a showcase personally arranged by Stalin.28 “Stalin assembled his archive from those documents that showed the vozhd’ and his deeds in the best possible light and, conversely, presented his political opponents in the worst way,” as the historian Oleg Khlevniuk has written.29 On top of that, in the Soviet Union archives served different functions from those of archives in many twentieth-century Western countries, and Stalin in particular viewed archives not as sites where historians authenticate the past but rather as repositories of sacrally charged artifacts of leaders like Lenin, and as a storage place, harnessed to the secret service, of surveillance data on the citizenry.30 The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, where opisi 1–10 of his personal archive were stored in his lifetime, was the world’s supreme shrine of sacred documents of communists from the founding fathers to Stalin. Clearly, it made sense to deposit there materials purportedly documenting the inner workings of the cult—such as the sources adduced above—and to bury whatever documentation did survive from the true creation of the cult in the deepest depths of the more highly secret opis’ 11.31 The cult was portrayed as the product of genuine popular veneration, therefore it was only logical that the creation of archival records that would allow posterity to study the cult’s construction was to be avoided, and where it could not be avoided, had to be hidden. Thus it is fair to conclude that those documents in Stalin’s archive that seem to confirm the public image of his modesty were produced and stored with an intent to bolster just that image.
Stalin’s Western biographers have long speculated that, given Stalin’s personality and the Soviet system of power from the late 1920s onward, a phenomenon as widespread and resource-intensive as the Stalin cult could only have b
een initiated and given license to persist by Stalin personally. “The man behind the mask of modesty,” wrote Robert Tucker, was “hungry for the devotion he professed to scorn.”32 Under Khrushchev, the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov confirmed this view, recounting a story Marshal Konev told him. Stalin at first rejected a proposal made by Marshals Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Konev, and Rokossovsky at a Politburo meeting after the war to award him the title of Generalissimo. “In the end,” however, “he agreed. But this whole scene was very characteristic of Stalin’s contradictory nature: disdain for any glory, for any formal respect for rank, and at the same time an extreme arrogance, hiding behind modesty, which is more than pride.”33 Buttressed by newly declassified sources, Dmitry Volkogonov (in the Soviet Union during perestroika) echoed this sentiment: “It became standard practice for Stalin to condemn the leader cult and to strengthen it, . . . to speak of collective leadership and reduce it to [his own] undivided authority.”34 As will be shown, these observers of the Soviet scene—coming from vastly different angles, to be sure—were quite correct in speculating that the Stalin cult could never have started without a green light from the dictator and that he played some sort of role in it once it was in place. From archival sources less “public” than opisi 1–10 in the Stalin fond at the Central Party Archive, it becomes abundantly clear, first, that Stalin was the ultimate arbiter who could, whenever he pleased, remove a cult product from public circulation even after it had passed all filters, and, second, that he either approved or prohibited not every single, but still an impressive number of cult products.35
How, then, did Stalin sanction, control, censor, and correct his cult products? Two letters (one from 1929, the other from 1935) illustrate the shift from a more contested, decentralized cult organization in 1929 to an orchestration in 1935 that was still multiagency and often functioned autonomously, yet was always and deliberately oriented toward the center: Stalin. In the spring of 1929 a larger number of agencies played a role in the Stalin cult, including the Central Committee, Anatoly Lunacharsky and his People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, the censorship board Glavlit, and the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee. Later this power was much more concentrated in Stalin and his secretariat. Take for instance a 1929 conflict about a poor-quality lubok (popular print) “showing a conversation of Comrade Stalin with national minority women (natsmenki).” On 17 May the Central Committee had discussed the publication of the “lubok Stalin Among The Female Delegates in issue no. 1 of the journal Iskusstvo” (with Platon Kerzhentsev acting as speaker) and decided to “(a) remind Glavlit of the inadmissibility of publishing a confiscated lubok in the journal, (b) issue a reprimand to the editorial board of the journal Iskusstvo (Comrades Lunacharsky and Svidersky) for publishing in the journal a confiscated lubok accompanied by a text of libelous character (paskvil’nogo kkaraktera).”36 Lunacharsky rejected the charges, arguing that he had been abroad in Geneva and could not have seen the first issue of Iskusstvo.37 Thus in this story of a broadsheet of Stalin and ethnic minority women we still have a variety of contesting actors including the Central Committee itself, the commissar of enlightenment, Aleksei Svidersky (at that time chairman of Glaviskusstvo), Platon Kerzhentsev (at that time deputy director of Agitprop at the Central Committee), the journal and its editorial board, Glavlit, and perhaps, if invisibly, Stalin himself.
A change can be seen in 1935, when the following incident took place. By this time Maria Osten, a German communist in Moscow exile and commonlaw wife of the celebrated journalist Mikhail Koltsov, knew exactly that when in doubt, there was only one central authority to write to—the vozhd’ in the Kremlin—in this case to ask for permission to republish the famous photograph of Stalin with his daughter Svetlana in her book Hubert in Wonderland (see Fig. 2. 9). Her topic was a working-class boy, Hubert, whom she had brought from the Saarland in Nazi Germany to the USSR, where he was now growing up as a happy Soviet child. “This would be such a pleasure for all little and grown-up readers of my book in the USSR and the entire world!” wrote Osten. A terse remark—“I agree. J. St.”—by the vozhd’ sufficed to permit the publication of a photograph that had been shown in Pravda just once, only to then disappear together with other depictions of Stalin with his biological family.38 The period between these two documents (1929 to 1935) is a mere six years, and yet the situation has changed entirely: the Central Committee and other organizations now have no say in sanctioning Stalin images to be released into public circulation. Stalin functions as the single center of approval or rejection.
Stalin impacted cult production alone and with the help of others. The influence of high Party functionaries like Lazar Kaganovich or Kliment Voroshilov (the most involved Soviet arts patron) on the production process of art (such as at the threshold of a portrait’s mass reproduction) is well documented. In 1930, Voroshilov received a note that suggests his nodal position as mastermind of the Stalin cult: “I am wondering if it is possible to launch a stamp with a Stalin portrait? How could I get an answer to this question? Granovsky.”39 On 14 March 1934 the artist Fedor Modorov wrote to Voroshilov’s secretary : “VseKoKhudozhnik [the All-Russian Cooperative Comradeship ‘Artist,’ founded in September 1929] is getting ready to print my picture Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. . . . Glavlit needs K. E. [Voroshilov’s] reaction (otzyv). Glavlit does not print such things without an approval. I hope that you will do everything.”40 In this context, on 4 May 1934, the publishing house IZOGIZ wrote to Voroshilov: “The State Publishing House of the Fine Arts has the intention of publishing a picture by the artist Modorov, Politburo of the Communist Party. Considering that you have seen this picture, IZOGIZ asks you to inform us if you think its publication in a mass print run is possible.”41 It is all too likely that Stalin influenced the production process in a similar way—perhaps even using Voroshilov as his mouthpiece—long before the first documents surface that show the approval of Stalin pictures by Stalin’s own secretariat.
Whatever the case, in 1937 the publisher Iskusstvo sent Stalin’s secretary, Aleksandr Poskryobyshev, a letter asking that he approve the mass printing of several Stalin portraits. In his letter, Osip Beskin, the art critic and head of Iskusstvo, apparently asked that Poskryobyshev approve Stalin portraits at different stages of the production process. For paintings by I. Malkov and Aleksandr Gerasimov, the prize-winning entries in a 1937 Stalin portrait competition, Beskin asked for a general approval to begin the process of mass reproduction. Two other portraits, it seems, had already passed this hurdle; here, Beskin asked that a trial print run be approved. On 5 September 1937 Poskryobyshev returned Beskin’s letter with the following remark written in pencil diagonally across the upper left top: “No objections. You only need to do additional retouching of Comrade Stalin’s portrait, especially in the left part of the face.”42 In March 1943, the editor of the Army newspaper wrote to Poskryobyshev asking for permission to “publish in Krasnaia Zvezda a new portrait of Comrade Stalin.” Written across the letter we see an underlined “no (nel’zia).”43 On 22 October 1947 the publishing house of the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences wrote directly to “the Kremlin, Secretariat of Comrade Stalin, Comrade Poskryobyshev A. N.” about “original woodcut portraits of Comrades Lenin and Stalin by the artist Neutolimov” to be published in “anniversary issues of the journals Sovetskaia Pedagogika and Nacbal’naia Skkola.”44
This initial letter triggered a chain of responses, involving various members of the Agitprop Department and two of the highest-ranking Soviet artists, who were informally consulted. Stalin’s secretariat—perhaps Poskryobyshev himself—sent the letter written by the publishing house of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to D. M. Shepilov, deputy chairman of the Agitprop Department, for an expert consultation.45 Shepilov in turn apparently delegated this case first to N. N. Yakovlev, another deputy chairman of the Agitprop Department, who wrote: “The portraits of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin are of poor quality. In V. I. Lenin’s portrait the right
eye is depicted inaccurately. One has the impression as though the eyelids are sick. The moustache and beard is painted with too harsh brush strokes. The retouching of the face in the portrait of J. V. Stalin is harsh and dark, especially in the area of the nose, the left cheek, and the neck. The uniform is depicted incorrectly. The left shoulder strap hangs over the uniform collar. The uniform buttons are shown unclearly. I believe that artist Neutolimov’s portraits of Lenin and Stalin must not be published without the necessary corrections.”46 Unsatisfied by or in doubt about this expert opinion, Shepilov seems to have sought out a second opinion. What we know is that P. Lebedev, also a deputy chairman of the Agitprop Department, wrote to Shepilov: “I personally think Comrade Iakovlev’s appraisal of the portraits is wrong. The portrait of V. I. Lenin, which successfully conveys Lenin’s personal features, creates the impression of him as a brave, strong person and statesman. The portrait underscores traits of sternness in V. I. Lenin’s image and is entirely without the kitsch (slashchavost’) that spoils many portraits of Vladimir Ilyich. The portrait of J. V. Stalin is weaker yet overall suited for publication. The artist’s depiction of J. V. Stalin turned out appealing (obaiatel’nym) and at the same time strong and truthful. But the publisher should be urged to soften the shadows which were applied too harshly in different parts of the portrait.”47 Having enlisted the support of Aleksandr Gerasimov and Matvei Manizer (two of the most prominent artists at the time) to bolster his initial positive opinion about the portraits, Lebedev wrote about a month after his initial letter, referring to the artists as “academicians,” invoking their institutional membership to lend status to their given opinions. “The workers of the Agitprop Department have consulted the academicians A. M. Gerasimov and M. G. Manizer, who positively evaluated the artist’s work under discussion. It would be appropriate to allow the publishing house of the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to print in its journals artist Neutolimov’s portraits of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin.” Lebedev’s opinion overrode that of his colleague Yakovlev and he emerged as the winner, for his letter ended: “The publishing house was informed about this verdict.”48