The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  More specific to the artists’ profession, the vozhd’ could also distribute the coveted perk of authorization to be present at events of truly historical significance, where the artist could paint from life. Thus a day after the Kirov murder (1 December 1934) a group of Moscow artists sent a letter, on the stationery of the Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists (MOSSKh), to Yenukidze, the “chairman of the governmental commission for the funeral of S. M. Kirov,” with a copy to Voroshilov (probably because he was their acknowledged patron) in which they wrote:

  Shocked by the death of the TsK VKP/b/ Politburo member, the vozhd’ of the Leningrad proletariat and friend of artists Comrade S. M. Kirov, the Moscow Oblast Artists’ Union is asking for the governmental commission’s permission for a MOSSKh brigade selected according to the attached list, which includes major Moscow artists, to make sketches. The immortalization in the fine arts of S. M. Kirov’s memory is indispensable, just as it is absolutely necessary to organize sketches and the drawing of studies from the historical museum as well as from the buildings of former GUM and from other places where the funeral procession will take place and the body of the deceased will be present.147

  Volter, the head of MOSSKh, signed the letter, and the list had a total of forty artists, including Brodsky, both Aleksandr and Sergei Gerasimov, Katsman, Grabar, Ioganson, Perelman, Pimenov, Deineka, and Svarog.148 Similarly, Kirov himself had once arranged for Brodsky to meet two participants in a historical event he was painting who were imprisoned in the basement of the Lubyanka. The painting was Brodsky’s The Shooting of the 26 Baku Commissars, and the incident took place in 1924 when the two organizers of the shooting, Funtikov and Rybalkin, were being held at the secret police headquarters.149

  There were varying degrees of closeness to the patron, and an elite core group of clients often acted as intermediaries to more distant clients.150 Thus the painter Vasily Yakovlev sent an invitation to his exhibition not directly to Voroshilov, but rather through Katsman, a member of the core group. Katsman accompanied Yakovlev’s letter with the ambiguous words: “Brodsky has seen his pictures and praised them a lot. I have also seen his pictures but am so far withholding judgment since they are still in progress and the outcome is difficult to predict. But he is certainly an excellent craftsman.”151 Even Brodsky, who was extremely close to Voroshilov most of the time, at one point appealed to Voroshilov via Katsman, who was closer at that moment.152 Geography always played a big role, and Brodsky’s Leningrad location became a liability, as the patrons all resided in Moscow.

  Voroshilov, to be sure, also acted as an intermediary patron and brokered access to Stalin himself.153 In 1930 Voroshilov wrote to Kalinin at the initiative of Aleksandr Gerasimov about the hard times Gerasimov’s family experienced in their village of Kozlov, because of their prerevolutionary kulak status and because of special taxes that had been exacted from them during collectivization: “In fall of 1929, in connection with our general new course, the artist Gerasimov’s family turn also came. A tax of at first 500 rubles, then another 150 rubles, and finally 720 rubles was imposed on them. According to the artist Gerasimov, he paid all this money, partially out of the family pocket, but mostly from his own income. But he thinks that . . . new taxes will follow. From this whole affair his father has become paralyzed and the artist Gerasimov is upset and has stopped working.” “In all of this,” wrote Voroshilov, “there is nothing unusual. The authorities in Kozlov are obviously acting correctly.” But the artist Gerasimov was too valuable to the Soviet state to be left inactive and deep in his family’s woes. Therefore the taxes should be postponed for two months and no new ones imposed. “I do not know if these requests are realistic, but I think that the artist Gerasimov definitely ought to receive help to preserve his ability to work.”154 The argument that an artist deserved help because he was useful to the state, not because his request was intrinsically justified, was quite typical. Sometimes efforts to enlist a high-placed figure as intermediary for access to Stalin failed. This was generally true for Stalin’s secretaries, who received patronage requests themselves and usually turned them down. The caricaturist Deni, for example, asked that Mekhlis give him personal instruction about political events so that he, Deni, could draw about them more appropriately. Deni wrote, “you would have to give me a chance to meet with you personally once in a while so that I could hear from you the leadership’s position on this or the other question. . . . They call me a leading artist, and I must justify this title. . . . I am asking you to spend very little time on me, since I understand right away (s poluslova).”155

  The system of subpatronage, of patron intermediaries or patron brokers, whatever one wants to call it, also had an eminently practical function. An important element of patronage was a client’s access to the patron for personal communication. Stalin, however, who would have certainly received the bulk of patronage requests given the leader-centered political system, only had limited time. Hence the division of patronage among different patrons was a division of labor of sorts. In May 1946 Vera Mukhina, the sculptor of Worker and Female Kolkhoz Farmer (1937), opened her letter to Stalin by enumerating a number of sculptures that she had produced “since I have become ‘famous’ (since 1937).” But “not one of these” sculptures, she wrote, “has been put up, not because they were bad, but simply because the people who have the right to approve their implementation did not look at them.” By appealing to the vozhd’, she expected that pressure would be put on the right people. “I am already 57 years old,” she closed powerfully, “and I want to succeed in leaving something behind for the country.”156 Was Mukhina aware that her letter was most certainly never read by Stalin, but that it triggered a well-oiled machine of other officials who acted upon it? However that may be, Mukhina’s letter was forwarded to Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee. He sent it to the head of the Committee for Arts Affairs, Mikhail Khrapchenko, and the head of the Agitprop Department at the Central Committee, Georgy Aleksandrov, with the request that they recommend what action he should take. Both Khrapchenko and Aleksandrov gave detailed comments on each of the sculptural projects mentioned by Mukhina, included photographs, and sent their recommendations back to Zhdanov.157 Here the chain ends, but it was likely Zhdanov who made a decision on which project to foster. Thus the scarcest of all goods was Stalin’s personal intervention. It was, of course, also the most valuable and had the greatest impact. Indeed, scarcity and value (in the sense of the ability to achieve intended results) were inextricably linked.

  An artist or a writer could also actively initiate a client-like relationship with a patron-vozhd’ by sending him a cult product and asking him about some detail. In a prime example of how Voroshilov was integrated into the production process of a cult painting of himself, the artist Vasily Dubrovin in 1937 wrote to him:

  This fall the Baku Museum of the Revolution is organizing an exhibition of pictures of the Stalin era. I took on the subject: Voroshilov as Boilerman on the ‘Oleum’ Fields in 1907 in Baku. I have nothing [to go by] except for one 1907 portrait of you. Considering that I have caught fire for this subject and cannot wait to start, but am lacking extensive material, I am earnestly asking you not to refuse answering three questions, which I will be grateful for all my life, Kliment Yefremovich! 1. Did you work as master, apprentice, or laborer at the boilerhouse? 2. What did you wear? What work clothes were there . . . ? 3. Your comrades from underground work, Comrades Shaumian and Alyosha Dzhaparidze, did they directly come by the boilerhouse?158

  Half a year later Voroshilov’s secretary answered all of Dubrovin’s queries: “1. As far as I know from Comrade Voroshilov’s biography, he was in Baku for underground Party work, therefore he was not a master at the boilerhouse. 2. As far as the clothes of that time are concerned, at the Museum of the Revolution you will probably find a contemporary photograph. 3. Did Dzhaparidze and Shaumian stop by at Voroshilov’s and did they meet?—well, where can one find this out more easily than in Baku from th
e comrades of that period.”159

  Time and again cultural producers tried to enlist a high Party patron along ethnic lines, invoking, for instance, Mikoian’s Armenian heritage.160 This was a sensitive issue and Party bosses were careful to stress their supra-ethnic identity as Bolsheviks and to leave behind a paper trail that turned down any such patronage along ethnic lines. This is not to say that such patronage never took place. In oral testimony of the period it certainly played a role. Gerasimov was considered by some an anti-Semitic Russian chauvinist and Gerasimov himself, according to his son-in-law, was convinced that he was surrounded by a Jewish conspiracy of Brodsky-Katsman-Perelman who worked through their ethnic patronage channels.161

  It can be argued that the entire discourse around shefstvo, translated as “patronage” or “sponsorship” in dictionaries, was a formalized and culturally celebrated variant of patronage. Shefstvo was when a factory, for example, sponsored a soccer club in an organized, officially publicized fashion. Often shefstvo was couched in metaphoric kinship terms, of an older brother (rarely a sister) taking a younger sibling (of either gender) under his tutelage. There was collective shefstvo and individual shefstvo. In a reversal of the usual roles, the artistic intelligentsia—musicians, actors, and artists—was engaged in a shefstvo relationship with the Red Army since 1923, with artists taking on the role of older brother. Parts of this relationship seem to have been codified with a contract.162 It is unclear to what extent this was a give-and-take relationship and what artists gained from it. Nonetheless, the cultural newspaper, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, duly celebrated this relationship. An article entitled “The Union of Warriors and Artists” prominently displayed a drawing of Voroshilov in the upper right-hand corner of the front-page and Voroshilov’s address to the artists, “the shefs of the Red Army.” “Dear Comrades! You are asking me, ‘how I assess the results of the shefstvo work of the Union of Art Workers over the Red Army.’ I always knew . . . that the shefstvo of RABIS over the Red Army is deeply meaningful, active, and highly useful. The Political Department of the Red Army gave me a report which shows that over the past year the Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov branches of RABIS through shefstvo sent 82 highly artistic brigades that gave 2,626 concerts in distant garrisons, at which more than four million listeners were present.”163 In a 1933 conflict over who had the right to publish certain portraits by Gerasimov, a representative of VseKoKhudozhnik wrote to Voroshilov as arbiter, apologizing for seeking to make use of his “shefstvo over the artists.”164

  The principle of an institution’s embodiment through a patron, as in the case of Voroshilov and the Red Army, was not the only symbolic aspect of patronage relations that confounded the logic of maximum profit economic rationalism. For example, either patron or client might fall from favor, and yet their personal ties sometimes survived.165 Often patron-client relations extended to the kin of the client after the client’s death. In 1963 Voroshilov wrote, for example, to the head of the Party-state Control Committee, Aleksandr Shelepin, to access bank accounts that Gerasimov had lost track of, but that his wife and daughter needed. “One of the character traits of the deceased was his love for people,” wrote Voroshilov, “the absence of commercialism, and a sometimes excessive forgetfulness towards his debtors, a carelessness in record-keeping. All this is now hurting to some extent his legal heirs—his wife L. N. Gerasimova and his daughter G. A. Gerasimova.”166

  THE RHETORIC OF LETTERS BETWEEN PATRON AND CLIENT

  The rhetoric that artists used in their correspondence with their patrons deserves to be examined in greater detail. In 1926, Brodsky flattered Voroshilov in a letter by telling him that “all artists see their savior in you, and they are not wrong, that is the way it is. You are the only one who takes the interests of artists seriously and sincerely wishes them well.”167 The artist, Fedor Bogorodsky, displayed both greater effusiveness and more self-interest in his letter to the patron of the arts: “I am using the opportunity to greet you sincerely and warmly! Actually allow me—a mere artist—to declare my love for you once more. Of course, like everyone, I am dreaming of a meeting . . . The artist F. Bogorodsky.”168

  Two letters to Voroshilov, one by Brodsky, the other by Katsman, written six years apart, show striking similarities. Both begin by noting a change in Voroshilov’s relationship to the respective painter. “I always felt that you like me and I have appreciated that and have always been proud of it, but for a number of months already, it seems to me, your relationship towards me has noticeably changed,” wrote Brodsky in 1928.169 “In the ten years that we know each other I saw you this unsatisfied and strict for the first time. When we greeted each other, you were on a horse, and I already felt the harshness on your face,” wrote Katsman in 1934.170 Brodsky attributed Voroshilov’s mood change to the slanders of his foes in AKhR (this was at a time when he had been excluded from AKhR), whereas Katsman, following a conversation with Voroshilov, was convinced that serious problems with the state of socialist realist painting were at issue. Both Brodsky and Katsman claimed to suffer from what today might be called psychosomatic symptoms, caused by Voroshilov’s rejection: “This whole story cost me health problems and the loss of 50 percent of my vision because of bad nerves,” in Brodsky’s words, and, in Katsman’s words: “I returned from you completely sick, both physically and morally. I caught a cold with fever . . . I slept poorly during the night and constantly thought about you, about Stalin, and about the fate of Soviet art. I even thought I had fallen seriously ill, but in the morning I had thought everything through and am now in control of myself and healthy.”

  Brodsky asked Voroshilov to grant him a meeting. He claimed to have desired such a meeting throughout the AKhR scandal, but had been afraid of Voroshilov’s wrath; only after a government commission’s inquiry and his acquittal did he feel “rehabilitated and all the rumors and dirt are taken from me and I can look you straight in the eyes.” He pleaded that Voroshilov set up an appointment, “at home or even on a holiday”: “I feel an urge to talk to you, to get your advice, to open my soul, and to return home with my soul assuaged.” He closed by emphasizing that he had stopped working on a large Lenin painting because of the AKhR scandal and desperately needed the meeting with Voroshilov: “I know that you will cheer me up and inspire me for work.” Voroshilov left a typically terse bureaucratic note on the letter: “Summon for Friday morning.”

  Katsman, by contrast, had already had his meeting with Voroshilov, where Voroshilov had seemingly criticized either socialist realism in general or the realists’ failure to produce a Stalin portrait of high quality in particular. Whatever the case, Katsman proposed to make up for his sins by painting such a portrait: “The main thing is to understand one’s mistakes and to be able to correct them! . . . If we paint Joseph Vissarionovich, we will make up for half of our mistakes.”

  Both letters exhibit a fascinating dimension that has not been treated so far: Brodsky and Katsman tie their personal growth as artists (and implicitly, as new men, as communists) to their patron, Voroshilov.171 If art progressed in linear fashion toward new and greater heights, the artists also understood themselves as being involved in a process of movement. “Meetings with you always give me so much, it is as if I grow more and more (svidaniia s Vami vsegda mne mnogo daiut, ia kak by eshche i eshche vyrostaiu),” wrote Katsman. This dimension is generally present in various forms of patronage, including shefstvo: the patron serves a spiritual father, who aids in the growth of his pupil.

  But there is yet another facet. Both Brodsky and Katsman link their inspiration to their patron-vozhd’. It is Voroshilov who inspires them to great art. When Voroshilov is unhappy with his artist clients, they fall ill and lose their capacity for artistic work. Whether the passages in the letters in this regard are read as mere window-dressing for underlying pragmatic interests, or whether these utterances are seen as coextensive with a sphere of “belief” or “thinking,” plays no role for our purposes here. I am interested in the discursive continuities of the
se statements and, from another angle, in their contexts at the time that they were made. In my reading, they exhibit continuities with the ancient notion of inspiration (derived from the Latin, literally being “breathed upon”) through a Muse, and with the Christian notion of inspiration through the Holy Spirit. They mark a rupture with Romanticism which moved the godlike source of inspiration inside the creative person, designating this secular source “genius.” They also differ from many Marxist theories of inspiration, according to which art derives from tensions between base and superstructure or from class consciousness. “Your huge temperament of leader would inspire the collective, it would let it believe in its capacities and would give a feeling of its importance for the Revolution,” wrote the poet Ilya Selvinsky to Kaganovich in 1935, suggesting that the latter patronize a poem, jointly composed by a group of young poets, about a single Moscow house that was to serve as a metaphor for all of Soviet history and society.172 It is striking that this rhetoric of inspiration (voo-dushevlenie) is unthinkable of letters from social milieus other than the artistic intelligentsia. A worker on a site of socialist construction could hardly have written a similar letter, simply because he was so entangled in plans and other new methods of the socialist economy. There was no room for individually inspired work. In the case of the artistic intelligentsia, however, Greco-Roman and Christian notions carried over into the Soviet period. Paradoxically, this was despite the self-professed production of art according to plan and with new socialist methods. It is this fascinating hybrid of planning and ancient artistic rhetoric that we will meet time and again.