by Jan Plamper
Figure 4.6. Caption: Aleksandr Gerasimov villa in Sokol. From Fototeka Gosudarstvennyi Nauchno-issledovatel’skii Muzei im. A. V. Shchuseva, Moscow, negative no. XI 472.9. N.d., no photographer (thanks to Monica Rüthers for supplying me with this picture).
There were many similarities in the way the Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin cults functioned. The great difference lay in the modesty question: the Mussolini and Hitler cults did not need to solve the paradox of their existence, they were cults “without discontents,” while the Stalin cult—bound to the procrustean bed of Marxist collectivism—always remained a cult malgré soi. One of the strategies of overcoming this paradox was to enter the unabashed cults of Mussolini and Hitler into the public script of the Stalin cult and by contrast, to present Stalin’s cult as superior, because unwanted by him.
Patronage also characterized Stalin cult production. There was a mutually reinforcing nexus between the personality cult and patronage that ultimately rested on the entanglement of politician and artist in the demiurgic realization of the world-historical-cum-aesthetic project called socialism. In the early 1930s, patron-client relations coalesced into a semiformalized system, in which each artistic field had its own—more or less tacitly—acknowledged patron; even if this patron had no formal relation whatsoever to the art he mentored, and even if cultural producers never ceased trying to enlarge their base by enlisting other patrons across artistic fields.192 In this system Stalin was, of course, the overtowering patron. All other patrons were “subpatrons” who brokered the scarce resource of access to Stalin. If Stalin intervened in any artistic field, he did so most often in questions of literature and, increasingly, cinema. For both of these areas no Party luminary besides Stalin would have fit the description of patron. Music (excepting opera, which came under the rubric of theater) also seems to have been without an unofficially acknowledged patron. The visual arts were patronized by Voroshilov, architecture by Kaganovich, and the theater and opera at first by Yenukidze and later by Molotov.193 The question, however, of just how a Party boss became a patron is a difficult one. Factors such as personal taste, historical contingency, and the compatibility of the professional portfolio with the patronized artistic medium all seem to have played a role. Such is the tentative picture of semiformalized art patronage that emerged in Stalinist Russia.
5 How to Paint the Leader?
Institutions of Cult Production
SO FAR PERSONAL actors from the world of politics have held center stage. And rightly so, considering the prominence of personalized social relations in the Soviet polity, with its dictator Stalin towering above all. Now the moment has come to examine the institutional actors (defined broadly as ranging from artist organizations to the art press) and institutional practices (from Stalin portrait competitions to art criticism of the leader portrait in socialist realism) that were involved in the making of the Stalin cult.
During 1933–1935, when the Stalin cult in painting started in earnest, all painters of note were organized in branches of the Union of Soviet Artists. The Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists (MOSSKh, Moskovskoe Otdelenie Soiuza Sovetskikh Khudozhnikov, renamed in 1938 Moscow Union of Soviet Artists, MSSKh [Moskovskii Soiuz Sovetskikh Khudozhnikov]) and its Leningrad mirror organization LOSSKh were the most important. MOSSKh was founded on 25 June 1932 and marked a high point in a process of institutional—as well as material, stylistic, and ideological—centralization.1 Yet it was only a stepping stone toward a countrywide, translocal artists’ union, a development that reached a further stage with the 1939 formation of an organizing committee (orgkomitet), headed by Aleksandr Gerasimov, and culiminated in 1957 with the organization of the USSR Union of Artists (SKh SSSR, Soiuz khudozhnikov SSSR). This final stage was reached much later than in other spheres of the arts—the Soviet Writers’ Union, for example, was formed in August 1934. Under Stalin centralization, unification, and planning were the order of the day in all spheres of social life, from the economy to the arts. But centralization, unification, and planning did not usher in conflictless harmony among the twenty-four thousand persons who defined themselves as artists in the 1939 census.2 The fault lines that traversed monolithic artist unions, the debates about socialist realism and the leader portrait, and the institutional mechanisms of Stalin cult production can only be understood against the background of the history of the art world between the October Revolution and Stalin’s rise to power.3
Painting portraits of political leaders was by and large the domain of artists with realist stylistic preferences. This is not to say that avant-garde artists never produced a leader portrait (Plate 11); in fact, some of the very first portraits of Lenin (painted during his lifetime from 1918 onwards) were by avant-garde artists.4 Artists allied with the realists were by far more numerous after 1917, even if the modernists of various ilk have received more attention and are perceived as emblematic of the experimentalism of the first decade following the Revolution. This is because Russian modernist art was institutionally and personally intertwined with Western modernist movements and because Russian modernism generated artists who have become familiar names—Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodchenko, and Tatlin—in the Western avant-garde canon. Another reason is that both modernists and realists cast their conflicts over art and over limited resources during the 1920s as an epic battle between two diametrically opposed poles, even if in truth there were more commonalities and more movement between the groups than they cared to admit. A final explanation is that modernism ultimately lost out to realism—and there is such a thing as the charm of the loser.
Before turning to the institutional practices it is essential to cut through the maze of the institutional actors. What follows, then, is a list of the artist associations, Party-state organizations, educational institutions, publishers and visual art factories, newspapers and journals, censorship bodies, and the secret police that together constituted the institutional matrix of socialist realist Stalin portraiture.
Artist associations. The Russian realists built on the tradition of the Wanderers. The Wanderers had coalesced in the 1870s around itinerant exhibitions, they painted in realist styles on subjects going beyond the “academism” (institutionally based in the Academy of Arts of St. Petersburg) and ranging from popular peasant scenes to lifelike depictions of Christ. Their source of patronage was partly the court, partly—and increasingly during the twilight of the old regime—the new merchant class represented by such entrepreneurs as Pavel Tretyakov. After the Bolsheviks came to power this group of patrons vanished through expropriation, emigration, and physical annihilation. A new group of private collectors emerged—drawn partly from the Nepmen of the 1920s, partly from the Stalinist elite of Party bosses, Red Army generals, and factory directors, who might privately order portraits of their wives or children—but its share of art commissions or purchases remained insignificant and it operated in the dark because of the prohibition on private trade.5 The Wanderers as an organization continued to exist until 1923, when they joined the 1922-founded Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), which was renamed Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR) in 1928. The painter Evgeny Katsman, who in a 1925 diary entry called the Wanderers “sentimental Populists” who “did not understand the ‘brave ideals’ of the revolution and the beautiful harshness of Bolshevism,” was among the founding members of AKhR on 1 May 1922 together with Pavel Radimov and Aleksandr Grigoriev.6 Between 1923 and 1938 Radimov, we recall, shared a studio with Katsman in the Kremlin and in 1926 Grigoriev had accompanied Katsman and Brodsky on their visit to Repin in Finland.7 AKhR went back not only to the Wanderers, but also to the common experience of the Civil War, when an institutional vacuum forced many painters—lacking not only canvases and commissions but also the barest means of survival—to fight for their existence. The most important new source of patronage during these harrowing years was the Red Army, which commissioned battle scenes and officer portraits, thus feeding a growing group of painters of almost entir
ely realist orientation. The best known was Mitrofan Grekov, in whose honor in 1934 a famous studio for amateur soldier-painters was named. During the Civil War the bond between realist painters and their later “Pericles,” Voroshilov, was forged. The new Bolshevik festivals became another source of commissions during the chaos of the Civil War.8
AKhR’s immediate function was to organize exhibitions of its members’ artwork, and its overarching aim was to advance their interests. This meant easing access to the new primary source of patronage, the Party-state, and fending off others, among them modernist artists, who were also seeking much-coveted material means for art—such as money, brushes, paints, and easels; exhibition space, studios, and living-space; and trips to Venice and Paris. Opposed to AKhR stood the modernist artists organized in visual arts studios and around exhibitions of the Proletarian Culture movement, Proletkult (founded on 20 January 1918 and subsumed in the Party in November 1922); around the journals LEF (Levyi Front or Left Front, 1923–1925) and New LEF (Novyi LEF, 1927–1928); and around the association of nonfigurative easel painters, OSt (Obshchestvo Stankistov, Society of Easel Painters, 1925–1931). Again, in truth there was more conflict within and interchange between the two factions than they were willing to admit. Artists oscillated in their allegiance to “left” and “right” artist organizations, and changed their styles. Deineka was increasingly painting in realist fashion by 1934 and even the founder of suprematism, Malevich, reverted to impressionist and realist styles between 1927 and his death in 1935.9 There were also kinship ties that linked the two factions: for instance, Katsman’s and Malevich’s wives were sisters, and the women forced their quarreling husbands to socialize in their private lives.10
Party-state organizations. The new Red patrons related to these modernists and realists in varying ways. An initial predilection for the modernists (from 1917 until roughly 1922) by the main organization of the cultural bureaucracy, the arts section of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, Narkompros (Narodnyi komissariat prosveshcheniia), and an initial penchant towards the realists among other sources of Bolshevik patronage, especially the Red Army during the Civil War (1918–1921), gave way to a general favoring of realism by the mid-1920s. There was a certain renaissance of modernism during the early stages of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932), which ended in an all-out victory of realism in 1932.11 Let us simply note here that both factions received some support throughout the entire 1920s. Contrary to the claims of both, the game was relatively open until 1932.
Nominally the visual arts were kept within the purview of the state, not the Party. Not to say that the Party in its various incarnations—from the Party organization in AKhR up to the Central Committee, and later, as we have witnessed, increasingly Stalin himself—ever ceased calling the shots. Narkompros (founded on 9 November 1917 and headed by Anatoly Lunacharsky until 4 July 1929), and especially its Izo (Visual Arts) Department (Otdel izobrazitel’nykh izkusstv, set up between January and May 1918), were the primary institutional patrons of the visual arts.12 At different times throughout the 1920s, Narkompros purchased recent paintings for state museums and institutions, organized exhibitions, and provided studio space for artists. But it did not put the relationship with artists on a regularized footing until the 1928 foundation of the Main Administration of Belletristic Literature and the Arts, GlavIskusstvo, a new, better-staffed, and more powerful organization.13 In 1929, GlavIskusstvo was responsible for the widespread introduction of a system known as kontrak-tatsiia, which put the financing of artists’ work on a contractual basis and provided regular, centralized support that greatly helped to draw artists further and further into the first socialist state. From now on, the state financed not only the purchase of finished artwork, but its very production. Two organizations subordinate to GlavIskusstvo administered the new contract system. First, the All-Russian Cooperative Comradeship “Artist,” VseKoKhudozhnik (founded in September 1929), commissioned paintings, assembled exhibitions of the resulting artwork, and distributed trips to vacation resorts.14 It also organized trips to the kolkhozes and factories mushrooming all over the country, in order to acquaint painters with the “new life” developing all around them. Regional branches of VseKoKhudozhnik were set up and by mid-1931 more than fifteen hundred artists had joined the “Comradeship” and paid the small membership dues. Second, the state art publishing house IZOGIZ took over publishing operations from AKhR and began to administer art publishing centrally. Through IZOGIZ artists could make money from reproductions of their artwork.
Figure 5.1. Isaak Brodsky and one of his Stalin portraits, 1934. Photograph by Iakov Khalip. © Muzei-kvartira I.I. Brodskogo, St. Petersburg.
This restructuring of the world of the visual arts during the Great Break fundamentally changed the mechanisms of art production, including the creation of leader portraits. From 1929 onward, most Stalin portraits were produced under the kontraktatsiia system, including the many copies of the celebrated Stalin canvases of Gerasimov, Brodsky, and their peers that started appearing in the mid-1930s. In January 1936, kontraktatsiia was transferred from Narkompros in the newly created All-Union Committee for Arts Affairs (Komitet po delam iskusstv), which remained under the larger umbrella of Sovnarkom and was first chaired by Platon Kerzhentsev. From the late 1930s, inside this new agency the Art Fund (Khudozhestvennyi Fond, abbreviated Khudfond) took over the kontraktatsiia functions of VseKoKhudozhnik. The Stalin Prize right from its establishment in 1939 acted as another powerful institutional force. The last major institutional player appeared toward the end of Stalin’s reign when in August 1947 the USSR Academy of Arts was created. Aleksandr Gerasimov became its first president. The Academy of Arts effectively represented the Party’s arm in the art world, for its full members were appointed directly by the Party rather than elected by the membership (as was the case in MOSSKh) or appointed within the bureaucratic organization (as was the case in VseKoKhudozhnik).
Educational institutions. The institutions of art education went through changes similar to those undergone by the other institutional actors. The hotbed of modernist art education, the Higher Art and Technical Studios, VKhuTeMas (Vysshie Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskie Masterskie, founded in 1920, first directed by none other than Kandinsky and renamed High Art and Technical Institute, VKhuTeIn [Vysshii Khudozhestvenno-Tekhnicheskii Institut] in 1927) shunned traditional teaching in painting technique, but the Leningrad Institute of Proletarian Visual Art was more hesitant to break with tradition. This traditionalist orientation and the full-scale victory of realism during the Great Break was reflected in its October 1932 reorganization into the All-Russian Leningrad Academy of Arts, which now included an art university (Art VUZ), an art history institute, a museum, a library, and laboratories. Isaak Brodsky became its rector in 1934 (Fig. 5.1). Let us remember: a decade earlier the very word “academy” had triggered a series of negative associations. “Academy” stood for precisely the tradition that influential members of the Soviet art world were trying to overcome. Leningrad’s VUZ, called Repin Institute since 1944, was subsumed under the USSR Academy of Arts right after that body was founded in 1947. A year later the Moscow Art Institute was renamed Surikov Institute (it had opened in 1936 as the Moscow Institute of Visual Art and had been called the Moscow State Art Institute from 1940 onward). With the triumph of academism and the symbolic invocation of prerevolutionary realist artist luminaries, in 1949 the main institutions of undergraduate art education changed their names back to their pre-1917 designations: Stroganov Art College (Moscow) and Shtiglits Art College (Leningrad). Thus by the 1940s there was was in place a smoothly running, hierarchical system of art education. It ensured that future Stalin painters would receive a sound training in the painting techniques required to produce portraits of their leader.
Publishers and visual art factories. The publishing house IZOGIZ has already been mentioned as a significant contractor. In fact, there were other publishing houses—most important, Iskusstvo—and other influential actors r
esponsible for the technical and mechanical reproduction of artwork. Publishing houses commissioned artwork for posters, lithographs, prints, postcards, and much more. They wrote to the secretaries of Party leaders to ask, in the absence of sittings, for photographs and screenings of documentary film material on Stalin (kinokhronika);15 and they paid honoraria and royalties. Artists might publish a portrait with one publishing house and later transfer the rights to another.16 There were also such institutions as the “visual art factory” (izokombinat), responsible for the mass reproduction not only of oil paintings (especially canonical Stalin portraits) and prints and posters, but also busts and statues.
Newspapers and journals. Especially in the 1930s, when cult production was more open-ended and less regularized, the press was a tremendously influential institutional actor. Pravda (and to a lesser extent Izvestia) provided guidance, as the “Don’t you read the papers?” incident shows.17 Pravda was required reading for painters who wanted to remain in tune with the vagaries of Kremlin politics, if only to find out if the subject of the portrait they were painting had been exposed as an “enemy of the people.” Some leading Pravda pronouncements on the arts were republished in the culture newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, which from 1931 onward appeared twice a week for most of its existence.18 In the early stages of Stalin painting Sovetskoe Iskusstvo also served as a nodal point where different channels of the Stalin cult—announcements of open Stalin portrait competitions, criticism of exemplary Stalin portraits, art-theoretical articles on the portrait in general and the leader portrait in particular—came together. Later these functions were assumed by the art bureaucracy and other institutional actors. The monthly “thick journals” Iskusstvo and Tvorchestvo, both established in 1933 and both edited (at first) by the famous critic Osip Beskin, were also important reading for the Stalin portraitists.19 Iskusstvo was more intellectual and featured long articles on subjects ranging from Rembrandt’s treatment of shading to Nikolai Andreev’s drawings of Lenin, while Tvorcbestvo was more heavily illustrated, featured shorter articles, and generally reached out to a wider audience, including amateur painters.20