by Jan Plamper
Let us examine an entirely different case. In 1934, Voroshilov received a letter from Raisa Azarkh, a writer who he had known since 1918.173 Azarkh, it seems, had been Voroshilov’s lover—whether before or during his marriage to Yekaterina Voroshilova is unclear. In Azarkh’s letter, she linked her writing about the Civil War to Voroshilov and Stalin, and her personal romantic love for Voroshilov to Stalin’s love for Voroshilov. “Dear Kliment Yefremovich,” she began. “By the way,” she continued, “today is the sixteenth anniversary of our acquaintance, if we want to talk about anniversaries. No, my letter will be strictly businesslike and not at all lyrical.” She wrote this simply to keep mingling hints at their former romantic relationship with business matters, in order to keep conflating history with personal romance: “When studying materials about the anti-Soviet Czechoslovak uprising—incidentally, I have wonderfully recuperated, am completely healthy now, have pulled myself together, have lost weight and instead of my 37 years I am now considered 27, and have finished the first part of the novel Fifth Army—so when studying these materials, I found out the following thing, which was entirely new and staggering to me.” She then related as fresh “historical facts” a story of how Trotsky, the traitor, had actually cooperated with the Czechoslovak Legion and how Stalin had saved the Red Army in the Civil War. “It’s time to tell the workers and peasants about this. Who knows that Stalin’s genius anticipated the Czech uprising and if this had been foreseen no rivers of blood would have flowed in the East! I talk about this in my book, but you, dear People’s Commissar of Defense, must know about this more than anyone else. Awfully dear, dearer than ever before in my entire life.” She asked that Voroshilov meet with her, “but then this misfortune happened”—the Kirov murder.
I wanted to fuse Comrade Stalin’s vigilant paternal gaze with my own, which came from the greatest depths of my heart, and went to you, as you stood shocked at the coffin. Dear Klim! One could read Stalin’s way of looking at you: don’t get killed, my young one, my closest and only one, I still need you so much! (Ne ubivaisia, moi mladshii, chto u menia samyi blizkii i edinstvennyi, a eshche tak mnogo nuzhno!) Following Stalin, I am telling you: you are the most wonderful, the most radiant, the most sparkling of everything that life has ever given! And my only one. I have now understood this forever. Take care, my dear beloved. . . . Goodbye, Raia.
On the back of her letter she continued: “See, I am no crybaby but crying nonetheless. . . . My letter ends strangely. From the lines . . . of an epic writer to the passionate outcry to a loved one. Call . . . 1–16–35, tell me your direct telephone. What do you think about the Czechs? And about everything in general. I shake your hand. Raisa Azarkh.” But the letter was still not finished: “I cannot finish this way, you have not seen me in four years, and I do not know when you will see me again. I was very sick after all and lived at the seaside and in the mountains for a long time. I want to send you my photograph. . . . Perhaps it is ridiculous that I am sending it to you. But I have your photographs on the wall . . . and I would be happy if you at least took a glance at mine. All right. Please call and comfort me. That way it will be easy and more joyful to work. Raia.” Voroshilov left a terse comment in blue pencil across the page of his former lover’s letter: “Idiot!”174
There are many possible readings of Azarkh’s letter to Voroshilov. One could emphasize Azarkh’s shrewd manipulation of official discourse—the Civil War novel in need of historical details, the fusing of her loving gaze with Stalin’s paternal gaze—in order to pursue what seems to be her main aim: to get back her old lover. Indeed, Voroshilov’s disparaging comment suggests such a reading. The comment, however, might also be read as his manipulation of his own archival record in line with the “immodest modesty” paradigm. In making sense of Azarkh’s intriguing letter I would like to pursue two other lines. First, the very conflation of a request of information for a historical novel from a participant, a romantic love letter, and a request for patronage, implies how closely related these genres were in epistolary rhetoric. This conflation hints at the difficulty of disentangling these distinct elements from one another; it also shows how difficult it was to measure, bureaucratize, and standardize patronage. Moreover, it shows how patronage was legitimized by the personality cult: if the writing of history had not depended on the leader, if history had not rested on the shouldes of Kirov, Voroshilov, and Stalin, a request for protection would have been out of place.
Second, the difficulty of disentangling genres is matched by the difficulty of keeping separate a Soviet woman’s love for a concrete man, Voroshilov, and for Voroshilov in capital letters, as it were—a model Soviet man, the personification of the Red Army, and the closest comrade-in-arms of Stalin, the embodiment of the Hegelian-Marxist spirit. The model personality of Voroshilov and the physical person of Voroshilov, whom she must have known intimately from their days as lovers, kept getting commingled and confused in the writer Raisa Azarkh’s rich imagination. She was not alone with this problem. It was shared, among others, by the female Russian-language folklore performers from Karelia, a region northwest of Leningrad on the Finnish border. They enthusiastically glorified Stalin as their “father” and thereby cemented the image of Stalin as “father of peoples,” presiding over a Soviet mythic family of nations connected by the “friendship of peoples.” Yet a competing strand of Stalin as man/sexual object always made for incestuous undertones in their folklore, endangering the myth of the harmonious family of Soviet peoples.175
MASLOVKA: EASING PATRONAGE BY CONCENTRATING ARTISTS
If the dissolution of the artists’ and writers’ groups in 1932 and the foundation of monolithic unions simplified the logistics of the state in dealing with the artistic intelligentsia, then the creation of concentrated spaces, where artists would combine work and life, served a similar function. Patrons could inspect more work and visit more artists within their scarce time. Some of the sites of concentrated sociability that were created for visual artists in the 1930s included dacha villages in Ambramtsevo and Peski outside Moscow, the Central House of Art Workers, and rest homes on the outskirts of Moscow, specifically earmarked for visual artists.
Most importantly, however, a model housing complex was built on Upper Maslovka Street, in a district that was then still considered quite far from the center of Moscow. In the complex, sites of labor (studios) and living (apartments) were combined under a single roof. The complex was built at the behest of AKhR and finished in 1930, before the unification of artist groups. Once built, it might well have been a showcase for the feasibility of monolithic unification avant la lettre (Fig. 4.4).176
The newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo and memoirs by a lifelong inhabitant, the artist and restorer Tatiana Khvostenko, a sixth-generation artist whose ancestry went back to icon painters from the Kursk oblast village Borisovka, serve as useful vehicles for studying the House on Maslovka (as the complex was often called). Khvostenko was the daughter of painter Vasily Khvostenko, whose mother had been godmother to Nikita Khrushchev. She moved into the Maslovka complex at age six in 1934.177 According to her, the initiative for a cooperative artists’ house went back to a general meeting of Moscow artists (of both the avant-gardist and the realist directions) in 1925. The case was taken up by the AKhR-ovtsy Katsman and Radimov, who shared a Kremlin studio with Stefania Unshlikht. Unshlikht advanced the cause through her Civil War–experienced Chekist husband Iosif Unshlikht and with the help of resolutions by People’s Commissar for Education Andrei Bubnov and Nikolai Bukharin at the Moscow City Soviet. After the initiative had failed in a first reading, the personal intervention of Lunacharsky and Voroshilov led to its subsequent approval, and one million rubles were designated for the complex. In 1930 the first building, House No. 15, opened, and more followed.178 The Sovetskoe Iskusstvo article summed up: “The house was finished during the winter of 1930. It has 90 studios and 24 separate apartments. The house also features a cafeteria, a kindergarten, a laundry, and a tailor shop.”179 The cafeteria
was run by artists’ wives. In addition the complex had a club in House No. 15 and “At the very top of the house there is a library and reading room. The library . . . holds 25,000 reproductions and 4,000 books on art. . . . The collections of the collector D. I. Shchukin and the lawyer and art lover M. F. Khodasevich served as the basis for the collection of album and book treasures.”180
Figure 4.4. Upper Maslovka: an architectural rendering of the project. © Family Estate Tatiana Khvostenko, Moscow.
The House on Maslovka was home, at one point or another, to such radically different painters as Fedor Bogorodsky, Aleksandr Deineka, Sergei Gerasimov, Boris Ioganson, Evgeny Katsman, Yury Pimenov, Arkady Plastov, Pavel Radimov, Serafima Riangina, Grigory Shegal, David Shterenberg, Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, Vasily Svarog, and Vladimir Tatlin. Some of the most famous Stalin portraitists also lived on Maslovka, including Vasily Yefanov (An Unforgettable Meeting, 1936–1937), Fedor Reshetnikov (Stalin Reading Letters from Children, 1951), and Fedor Shurpin (Morning of Our Motherland, 1949) who stopped painting entirely and lived off the royalties of his masterpiece, according to Khvostenko.181 Isaak Brodsky’s daughter Lidia Brodskaia lived on Maslovka, as did the art critic Igor Grabar and Jim Patterson, the child actor who portrayed the black baby of white American circus acrobat Mary Dixon (played by Liubov Orlova) in Grigory Aleksandrov’s 1936 Soviet blockbuster movie Circus. Some artists’ apartments turned into veritable salons. The Svarog family’s apartment at one point regularly hosted children’s writer Kornei Chukovsky, film director Mikhail Romm, Maxim Gorky, and the Party bosses Voroshilov, Molotov, and Valerian Kuibyshev.182 Because of the concentration of artists in one place, sociability intensified manifold. Artists forged both friendships and enmities; denounced one another during the Great Terror; visited each other’s families, formed string quartets; shared sexual entanglements with female models; associated according to stylistic preference, geographic background, generation, and doorway (podiezd); and exchanged enormous amounts of gossip and rumors. They smoked and drank together outside the “official” space of the cafeteria, club, or library in an old, single-story wooden house located across from House No. 1—a smoke-filled beerhall artists called “Radimovka” after its heavy-drinking most frequent visitor, Pavel Radimov, the oldest AKhR-ovets. This wooden beerhall was a fragment of precisely the kind of city the new Moscow had tried to leave behind forever; here every visitor had a reserved place and the sales staff knew every painter by name and even gave credit when paydays for pictures were far away, running the equivalent of an informal artists’ bank. Radimov once organized a personal exhibition at “Radimovka” and allegedly rejoiced when several paintings were stolen, seeing this as proof of their true popularity.183
By contrast, the Sovetskoe Iskusstvo article portrayed the House on Maslovka as a successful transformation of a “former petty bourgeois, philistine Moscow street” into a modern, socialist, collectivist artist compound. It compared Maslovka to the living and working conditions of artists in the capitalist West:
Artists in Paris live in dark and empty alleys, on the quietest streets and boulevards in the Montparnasse quarter and in Old Montmartre, and in attics, which are romantically called mansardes. When an artist turns famous, he moves to a different quarter or moves down to the lower floors of the house. But the path from the attic to the bel-étage or the entresol is long. A whole life is needed for this. And not everyone succeeds. Jules Romains would probably be prepared to even call artists with warm-hearted irony good-for-nothings (obormoty). Fantasizers, idlers, funnymen, buffoons—artists are running from reality and are saving themselves in an idyllic niche, which has been preserved even in Paris. Going to the outskirts is a dream of every exhausted “bohemian.” . . . The provinces in Paris—such is the dream of the French artist of the 1930s.
The situation of Moscow artists was portrayed as entirely different: “Our artists do not long for the cozy old mansions, for the romanticism of deserted quarters and dilapidated streets. Had Utrillo worked in Moscow, he would not have succeeded in drawing one of the most antediluvian outskirts of the town— Upper Maslovka.”
The Maslovka complex had been such a success that plans for new artists’ housing were already being formulated—and were described by Sovetskoe Iskusstvo in the brightest colors:
The studios on Maslovka are now overcrowded. A project for an entire town of artists has been developed. Alongside the paths of Petrovsky Park spacious, seven-storied houses are spread out. A solemn, almost triumphant arch will lead into the interior courtyard. All 400 studios of the town will be located on the sunny side. In the cellars special carpenter’s shops are being set up for the creation of frames. . . . The roof itself will be turned into a magnificent terrace, into a studio under the sky, where one can paint on clear and sunny days. A majestic exhibition building is being raised in the center between the other buildings. The shows of the Maslovka studios will take place here. The works of artists from the national republics of the Soviet Union as well as of our foreign friends will find a home here. The tiny, old private residences on Upper Maslovka Street are gradually being torn down. There is nothing left to remind one of the old, wooden outskirts of Moscow. Green plantings surround the artists’ town. Petrovsky Path will turn into a gigantic boulevard. Not only the architectural project of the young masters Krinsky and Rukhliadev from Academician Shchusev’s office speaks to this, but also the work that is in full swing on the construction site. Artists are going to work in the 400 studios. Memorials, sculptural reliefs, statues, sketches of frescoes and murals of public buildings will go to the squares of Soviet towns from here. Great Soviet art will be created here.184
Characteristically, the article constantly switched between present and future tenses, as if, as in socialist realism, the future was so close and tangible that it could be described with the (realist) means of the present (Fig. 4.5).185
The patrons had much easier access to the artists once they all began living and working in the same place. Voroshilov could now pay visits to numerous clients, whereas before he had to make trips all around Moscow. Art soviet (khudsovet) commissions, responsible for the judging of art for sale and reproduction, began inspecting paintings on-site at the Maslovka studios.186 Conversely, distance from Moscow now became an increasing problem. The Leningrad artists acutely felt this distance, and any aspiring artist from the provinces had to move to Moscow to enter the loop of patronage and clientage.187 To be sure, the very greatest “court” painters resided not on Maslovka but in their own luxurious living quarters: Gerasimov in his villa and Nalbandian, who is often called the postwar “court” painter, in his apartment on Gorky Street (Fig. 4.6). This is how one observer described the visits of Gerasimov et al. to Maslovka: “Often our luminaries Vasily Yakovlev and Aleksandr Gerasimov entered the courtyard of the first house stylishly in their cars and with their glamorous wives with jewels, in long velvet dresses, and expensive fur coats.”188 Yet after Stalin’s death in the public perception all of these painters, court or run-of-the-mill, were lumped together and Maslovka became a symbol of the Stalin cult and socialist realism tout court. “Down with Maslovka” was the title a group of artists gave an evening at Moscow’s Central House of Art Workers in January 1955, at which satirical verses were read and mockery was heaped on Stalin’s painters.189
Figure 4.5. Photograph of Upper Maslovka. The artists’ complex is in the back. © Family Estate Tatiana Khvostenko, Moscow.
At the birth of the public Stalin cult on 21 December 1929 Demian Bedny thought it necessary to embellish his eulogistic Stalin poem “I am certain” with the stanzas, “Never mind that Stalin / Gets mad and thunders” and to add in prose, “I know: to write intimately about Stalin means to sacrifice oneself. Stalin will awfully scold you.” In the beginning, right after Lenin’s death, everything had been different. When the Stalin cult was nonexistent, when there were almost no Stalin portraits and when Stalin was still scheming for leadership in the Party, he happily agreed to have a y
oung boy named after him. On 29 July 1924 the seventeen-year-old Komsomol member Mikhail Blokhin from a village near the Niandoma station on the Northern Railway wrote to Stalin: “After [Lenin]’s death I wanted to change my last name Blokhin to Lenin, but I thought it over and decided that I don’t deserve such an honor. And so I decided to change my name to yours, that is Stalin, and when they ask me, ‘why did you change your last name to Stalin,’ I will answer ‘in honor of Ilyich’s favorite pupil, Comrade Stalin.’ Now I’m writing to you, Comrade Stalin, because I wonder if you have anything against this.”190 A month later Stalin replied: “I have nothing against you taking on the last name Stalin, on the contrary, I will be very happy since this circumstance will give me a chance to get a smaller brother (I never had nor do I have any brothers).”191 Clearly at this early point in 1924 Stalin readily gave in to the smallest occurrence of cult-building around him. Later when the cult was everywhere, his posture toward this changed dramatically and his opposition to any cult-building efforts whatsoever became a permanent feature. In practice he personally masterminded, limited, and filtered a number of those efforts that were allowed to continue. Yet the volume of cult products exceeded the capacity of a single person to control. Therefore a great variety of other personal and institutional actors exerted the control—and many additional— functions in the production of the Stalin cult, which ended up looking like a multifocal matrix that worked autonomously. Autonomously is correct indeed, with one caveat: the autonomous everyday functioning of the cult was always directed toward the pinnacle of power, Stalin, who could interfere in customary decision-making processes and unhinge established mechanisms of cult production as he pleased. His fiat was decisive.