The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  In the aftermath of the meeting, the three realist artists launched a major offensive to get Stalin to sit for them and seem to have almost succeeded. Brodsky wrote to Katsman on 27 April 1934: “What do you think, are we going to paint Stalin in the summer? We should already start talking about this with K. E. [Voroshilov]. Cheer up, you are still young and we will work.”112 Katsman wrote to Brodsky on 8 September 1934: “And finally. Isaak, we must paint Stalin. Gerasimov will return soon, we have to go to Voroshilov and start working. Sittings (seansy) with Stalin will enrich our thoughts and feelings for work at the Artists’ Convention, and will generally help the fate of Soviet art.”113 On 25 September 1934, he wrote again: “Voroshilov is gone, he is in Sochi with J. V. [Stalin]. When they return we will pose the question about sittings. Of course we could go there!? Especially since A. Gerasimov returned from abroad yesterday. So you decide! But I think you are right—if the sessions come true, then in wintertime.”114 In an account of how he painted First Cavalry, Gerasimov at the Central House of Art Workers on 13 November 1938 alluded to the difficulties of getting Stalin to sit: “Besides, First Cavalry is the first painting on our visual arts front that is completely painted from life, with the exception of one portrait, which so far no one has succeeded in painting from life.”115 A 19 August 1939 letter from Katsman to Brodsky reads as follows: “I just cannot understand why our sittings with Stalin are postponed? And we are reacting somehow apathetically to this. I will be in Moscow in two weeks and I will have to take care of this thing again and bring it to a victory. We must paint Stalin or we are scum (svolochi).”116 And in Katsman’s words to Voroshilov in 1939: “Joseph Vissarionovich will turn sixty in December. People from the arts are preparing for this. Let us begin with the main thing. There is no Stalin portrait from life. We need one! This has to be done all the more since Joseph Vissarionovich in life is so expressive and beautiful. We must depict J. V. the way he is. We owe this to history. We owe this to the peoples. We owe this to Soviet art and science. . . . My citizen’s and artist’s conscience are forcing me to write this letter. You decide how to accomplish this and who will work.” He then suggested that Stalin pose for several artists at the same time: “Decide yourself which artists should be given—well, say, 10 sittings for one and a half, two hours. Just imagine—the amazing gift of Comrade Stalin from life will enrich the world in ten days. Different masters will do the portrait of the best man on earth. That is exactly what we need. If we accomplish this I will also paint J. V. from life—that will be the high point of my life and the good fortune of an artist. Even though at the same time there is fear—what if it does not work out? I ask you, Kliment Yefremovich, to acquaint Joseph Vissarionovich with my letter.”117

  Katsman returned to the subject time and again, for example, in a 1940 letter to Voroshilov: “I never forget the dream that we will paint Joseph Vissarionovich from life. I am waiting for those hours when we can do the kind of work that our contemporaries and descendants will be grateful for. We have an obligation to do this work. In me there is some belief that we will paint, and I want only one thing—to be healthy and to finish this work properly.”118 On the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday exhibition in 1949, Katsman wrote: “Today opened an exhibition dedicated to the seventieth birthday of our beloved Stalin. A lot of good paintings are there. . . . But I thought to myself, this is a good exhibition, but the main thing has yet to be done,. . . there is no finished portrait from life. Is it possible that there will never be such a portrait? I doubt we will be forgiven this omission.”119

  From all we know, Katsman’s wish went unfulfilled and there never was another Stalin portrait from life. One reason for this surely was that Stalin had to remain true to the image of the quintessential Bolshevik, who was modest and who acted rather than sitting for painters. Another reason was, as Ryndziunskaia in 1926 explained to Stalin’s wife who asked for mimesis, for “perfect likeness,” that she “was working not for the family, but for the people. If one part or the other will be a little bigger or smaller, by that I emphasize and strengthen the image, not a photograph. . . .” Ryndziunskaia’s declaration not only foreshadowed socialist realism’s call for the realistic portrayal of a person while highlighting that person’s psychological characteristics, it also diminished the need for sitting. Her—and later, socialist realism’s—agenda could be carried out by using the existing depictions of Stalin or photographic and cinematic templates. After all Ryndziunskaia got her unique shot at fashioning a sculpture of Stalin in 1926 when there were hardly any Stalin images in circulation, and when the cult surrounding Stalin had yet to commence.

  “HERE’S YOUR PERICLES”—VOROSHILOV AS PALRON OF PAINLERS

  If any Party elite member besides Stalin has figured prominently so far, it is Kliment Voroshilov, the Old Bolshevik and commissar of war from 1925 to 1940. Whenever he celebrated a birthday or Soviet holiday, he received, just like the rest of the Party elite, large quantities of congratulatory letters. What made Voroshilov’s correspondents different was their profession: most were artists and other members of the artistic intelligentsia. Voroshilov, they all agreed, was their patron among the Bolshevik luminaries, even if others had kinship ties to painters (Ordzhonikidze’s daughter at one point was married to the artist Eduard Barklai and Maksim Litvinov’s daughter was married to the painter Ilia Slonim).120 Thus Evgeny Katsman, the painter, sent a typical letter to his patron on the occasion of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution in the year of Stalin’s death: “In your speech you mentioned us artists—no one has ever done that! But artists need to be pampered, who will decorate communism without artists?! Communism without beauty is poor communism. But artists are like flowers, when you water them, they grow, when you don’t water them, they dry up and die. Pericles nurtured Phidias. The Medici nurtured Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Tretyakov and Stasov [nurtured] Repin. You nurtured and are nurturing Soviet artists. Remember, Stalin once told us about you—’Here’s your Pericles.’”121

  Who was this modern-day Pericles and how did he become patron of the arts? What was the role of patronage in the production of Stalin cult art? Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881–1969) was born in a railroad worker’s family in the village of Verkhnee in Ekaterinoslav oblast in present-day Ukraine (Fig. 4.3).122 Voroshilov joined the Bolshevik Party in 1903 and engaged in underground Party work in the following years, especially in the Ukrainian town of Lugansk.123 He occupied important positions in the Red Army during the Civil War, particularly in the famed First Cavalry, and, in the words of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, was Stalin’s “closest aide” in the defense of Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad.124 In fact, apart from the legitimacy that Stalin derived from the myth of having been handed power by the dying Lenin, the battle of Tsaritsyn matched the October Revolution as a founding narrative of Stalin’s reign. Voroshilov’s proximity to Stalin in this narrative accorded him (and the Red Army, which he embodied) a more prominent place in Soviet cultural representations—in the films, novels, and paintings of the 1930s and 1940s— than the power that he actually wielded in comparison to the likes of Molotov or Beria. Voroshilov was also a member of the Revolutionary War Council and in November 1925 became People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (renamed People’s Commissar for Defense of the USSR in 1934), a position he held until the 1939–1940 fiasco of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War. During World War II he was appointed commander in chief of the Northwestern Armies but was removed from that position when the Germans surrounded and besieged Leningrad. He held numerous other posts during and directly after the war, most importantly as director of the Allied Control Commission in Hungary from 1945 to 1947. From 1946 to 1953 he served as deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. It was only this portfolio that included cultural affairs.125 Katsman congratulated him on the appointment as deputy chairman but pointed out that it was merely the official recognition of Voroshilov’s de facto role over the course of more than a quarter-centur
y.126 Voroshilov lived through Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization unscathed and died a peaceful death in 1969. He was buried with full honors on Red Square.

  Figure 4.3. A postwar photograph of Voroshilov. Source: Bol’sbaia Sovetskaia Entsi-klopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 9 (Moscow: Gosu-darstvennoe nauchnoe izdatel’stvo “Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia,” 1951), pictorial insert between 128 and 129.

  Voroshilov seems to have taken a liking to the arts, especially the visual arts, early on. His first remotely related activity was during his teens, when he worked at showing slides with a “magic lantern” for his admired village teacher Semyon Ryzhkov, as he wrote in his memoirs. The slides were projected onto the white wall of a barn; the local “farmers had never seen anything like it” he recalled.127 Recounting his teens and twenties in his memoirs, Voroshilov dedicated an entire section of a chapter to “Getting Familiar with the Arts” and one of the posthumous biographies, a composite of newspaper clippings, photographs, and reproductions of archival materials, seamlessly wove paintings by Igor Grabar and Mitrofan Grekov as “documentary material” into his life story.128 He was instrumental in the creation of the Museum of the Armed Forces of the USSR and the founding of the M. B. Grekov Studio of Military Artists in 1934.129 He amassed a private collection of realist art, both prerevolutionary and socialist.

  His wife, Yekaterina Davydovna Voroshilova, wrote diaries and letters that give some clues about the scope of the Voroshilov family’s private collection. Voroshilova, herself from February 1947 a deputy director at the Central V. I. Lenin Museum and thus intimately connected to one of the main repositories of Lenin-Stalin artwork,130 wrote in a letter to her thirteen-year-old grandson Klimushka, who together with four ten-year-olds was responsible for a 7 January 1949 fire in the Voroshilov dacha in which much of the picture collection perished: “Pictures which I selected one by one and hung in the rooms for collection purposes and so that they might give us pleasure, burned. Gone are the wonderful paintings of A. M. Gerasimov, Comrade Stalin and Voroshilov on the Volga Steamship, The Apple Trees are Blossoming, Peonies, and the portrait of Timur Frunze. Gone are the paintings of I. I. Brodsky, Lenin at the Smolny, which hung in your grandfather’s study. . . . Klimushka, speaking only of artwork, about forty pieces perished: paintings, drawings, porcelain sculptures, vases with paintings from the biography of your grandfather.” Gone were these many paintings, most of which must have been artist copies, as the originals hung in public museums. Gone too was the Voroshilovs’ impressive collection of works by the prerevolutionary Wanderers, which Voroshilova did not mention. She wrote that she was doubly sad because “almost all letters that Kliment Yefremovich wrote to me burned.”131 Voroshilova’s diaries are full of encounters with artists, testifying to a perplexingly close intermingling of the professional and private lives of Soviet artists and their main patron. Even in Hungary (1945–1947), Voroshilov made friends with numerous artists and managed to sit many a time.132 His friendship with the Hungarian sculptor Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl (1884–1975) was publicly celebrated as an example of the friendship of fraternal socialist peoples.133

  Voroshilov was a typical Bolshevik patronizing a sector of the arts outside his government and Party portfolio. This practice later became widespread.134 Kaganovich patronized architecture, Yenukidze the theater, Molotov—after Yenukidze’s death—the theater and opera. Stalin directly patronized literature and film. However, the artistic medium that a Party leader chose to patronize (or was drawn into patronizing) did depend on his personal inclinations. Voroshilov’s patronage relationship to realist artists goes back to the period of the Civil War, when he was in a position to distribute scarce resources such as painting materials, and also money, food, and living space. In return, artists painted battle scenes and portraits of army officers. The Civil War in general was a crucible for patronage relations that were to continue long afterward.135 The realist battle painter, Mitrofan Borisovich Grekov (1882–1934), seems to have been the first in a long series of Voroshilov’s clients. Starting in the late 1920s, realist artists created a lineage back to the “founders” (osnovopolozhniki) of realism: they enlisted the greatest of prerevolutionary realist artists, Ilya Yefimovich Repin, for the role of ur-realist and continued the line with Mitrofan Grekov. The realists were eager to “invent their tradition” and to present a story of uninterrupted Bolshevik fostering of realist art—a story that glossed over Bolshevik support of avant-garde art during the Revolution and much of the 1920s. In both cases, concrete resources were funneled to artists’ surviving relatives and to publicize their connection to the Soviet regime.

  The next milestone in Voroshilov’s career that prepared him for the role of patron of the arts was his participation in the Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory.136 As a member, Voroshilov engaged in judging depictions of Lenin that prefigured Voroshilov’s later activities on behalf of Stalin art and Soviet art in general.137 In 1928, Voroshilov headed a new, Stalin-sponsored commission with the same name. Taken together, these experiences made it all the more natural for Voroshilov to become the patron of the arts and, it appears, the mastermind of the Stalin cult. In the long run, one could argue, this position saved his life, which was under threat not only during the Great Terror but also especially after the botched Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1940.138 Voroshilov had been immortalized so many times in paintings with Stalin that the iconoclastic effort of purging his image would have been staggering. In this case, symbolic power, as manifested in the combined Stalin-Voroshilov cult, preserved a life.

  Social historians have often explained the vitality of informal patronage networks in the Soviet Union by shortages in the economy or as a function of “neotraditionalism”—the “‘archaizing’ phenomena that were also a part of Stalinism: petitioning, patron-client networks, the ubiquity of other kinds of personalistic ties like blat.”139 This explanation hinges on time lag. The alternative explanation goes like this: the malfunctioning planned economy could not supply the needs of the population; therefore extra-institutional, personalized networks replaced formal, bureaucratic patterns of supply.140 I submit that time lag and shortages both played important but not mutually exclusive roles and that there was, indeed, a fundamental linkage between the kind of personalized authority expressed symbolically in the Stalin cult and patronage in the classical sense, that is an exchange relationship between a superordinate person in command of scarce material resources and a subordinate person in command of something else—art, in our case. The symbolic celebration of personalized relationships, especially between political leaders and writers (Bedny-Stalin, Gorky-Stalin) reinforced material patronage—and vice versa. Patronage was publicly celebrated; it was reconcilable with Bolshevik ideology (despite planning and the attempt to regularize and rationalize all economic relations) because of the embodiment, in the leader, of an institution. Since Voroshilov and the Red Army were linked metonymically, it was the institution, the Red Army, not Voroshilov himself, which disbursed patronage and favors.141

  There was a further linkage between patronage and the Stalin cult: Stalin’s image as “father,” especially as “father of peoples,” entailed an understanding of paternal care for his children. Material and other goods given to a certain ethnic or other group in the Soviet “family of peoples” were often portrayed as warm solicitude by the stern but generous father Stalin for his family. The cultural celebration of the material, caregiving aspects of the father-child relationship in the Stalin cult added legitimacy to real patronage in Soviet society, including the arts. If paternal imagery extended to all levels of the Party hierarchy, and if local leaders in their regional cults were also portrayed as caring fathers, then genuine, material patronage also gained in acceptance.

  In the end, however, the cross-pollination of artist and political leader becomes intelligible only when seen in the larger historical-aesthetic setting that was Soviet socialism. “The highest aspiration” of Soviet artists, Jochen Hellbeck has noted, “was
to occupy a place near Stalin in order to share in his prophetic vision and transformative powers.”142 Socialism under construction was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk-in-progress in which Stalin, the Hegelian-Marxist world spirit personified, was creating a new world and artists, by aligning themselves with this spirit marching inexorably toward the goal of socialist utopia, partook in the creation process. Stalin and artists were thus indispensable to each other and in fact indivisible. This is why it is “irrelevant,” as Boris Groys has written, “that Voroshilov or Kaganovich or Stalin himself were not experts of literature or art, for they were in reality creating the only permitted work of art— socialism—and they were moreover the only critics of their own work. Because they were connoisseurs of the only necessary poetics and genre—the poetics of the demiurgic construction of the new world—they were as entitled to issue orders on the production of novels and sculptures as they were to direct the smelting of steel or the planting of beets.”143 And this is how the Stalin cult and the mundane facts of everyday patronage were linked most fundamentally.

  VOROSHILOV AND THE VARIETIES OF STALINIST PATRONAGE

  Indeed, what were the coveted goods that the patrons were capable of meting out? One of the scarce resources patrons were asked to distribute was, of course, housing—an issue of great contention in the Soviet Union.144 Likewise, if an artist had been arrested, Voroshilov was the natural patron to whom his relatives appealed for intervention on his behalf.145 And of course, the patron could help in procuring the rare commodity of travel abroad.146