The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  Censorship. These newspapers, journals, publishing houses, and visual art factories—in fact all media of reproduction—were heavily controlled by the censorship board Glavlit (founded in 1922) or by Glavlit censors at the publishing outlets themselves. As a rule, when particularly sensitive cult products were under scrutiny—for instance, a coffee table book–like album of Stalin paintings compiled for his sixtieth birthday—regular censorship channels were bypassed and the Glavlit chief had to give the green light personally. This rule can be generalized for all Stalin cult products: the more sensitive the product, the less institutional the actor consulted for judging the product, with Stalin’s secretariat at the top of the pyramid, and the less bureaucratized, the more informal and verbal, the mechanism of judging.

  The secret police. Last but not least, the secret police force quietly exerted its chilling influence. During the 1920s its role was not as ominous as it was to become. Together with other Soviet institutions like the Red Army it was in fact a commissioner of paintings, including one of its founder “Iron” Felix Dzerzhinsky. Later it made its influence felt via informers inside the art world, who were widely known and feared among artists;21 via officers at organizations within the art bureaucracy who looked into personnel questions; and as an executive arm of the Party-state once an artist had been found guilty of an offense, for example creating a “counterrevolutionary” representation of Stalin.22

  These artists’ organizations, art bureaucracy agencies, art education institutions, outlets of technical reproduction, Party organizations, and repressive Party-state organs were the most important institutional actors involved in the making of the Stalin cult. Together they formed a maddeningly complex field of institutional and personal operators. They interacted multidirectionally, though never on an equal footing as there surely was a hierarchical power gradient involved. This field was so complex that most painters had difficulty navigating within it, and cartographic knowledge became a highly valued skill. Such knowledge was held mostly among the elite group of the Aleksandr Gerasimovs of the art world, and it was of course transmitted orally, if at all. Many of the regular painters made mistakes while operating within this field, for some of which they had to pay dearly.

  This relational field deserves a closer look as it changed over time. We first turn to early institutional practices such as the portrait competitions and related exhibitions, then once the canon was established (by 1939 at the latest) to regularized Stalin cult production in painting, and finally to art criticism and the leader portrait.

  STALIN PORTRAIT COMPETITIONS AND

  EXHIBITIONS OF STALIN CULT ART

  Competitions on a specific theme, usually leading to large-scale exhibitions, became a regular practice in the making of socialist realist art during the 1930s. In the first half of the decade, the organization of these competitions and exhibitions was quite open-ended and chaotic, and individual artists had greater possibilities for personal input than in later years. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo was a point where the different organizing forces converged in a public arena. A competition for the first major exhibition since the proclamation of the doctrine of socialist realism in 1932, an exhibition entitled “Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years,” was announced in an article on 8 May 1933. This retrospective exhibition of realist art in the Soviet Union was to be monumental and involved three museums. The Tretyakov Gallery was to show caricature, the Historical Museum on Red Square was to show painting, and the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum was to exhibit posters and etchings. The newspaper was clear on the organizing principle of the exhibition: each section was to feature “an introductory subsection” in which “the main lines of development of a given art over fifteen years ought to be illustrated with representative examples.” Above all, the exhibition was to show linear, “natural (zakonomernyi) movement of each art form toward socialist realism” and “the growth of each separate artist.” The “‘Lenin’ and ‘Stalin’ rooms, in which the best artifacts depict with artistic means the image of the leaders,” were to be the telos of this movement and the pinnacle of the exhibition. In closing, the article even pondered opening the exhibition later than planned, since the selection of artwork commissions was yet to be finished—an example of the open-endedness that was characteristic of the early 1930s and so atypical of subsequent years.23 Three weeks later another article published the statistics for the selection of artwork: “Until 23 May in the painting section 1,178 works have been examined, of which about 800 pictures by 175 painters have been preliminarily accepted.”24 Clearly, in 1933 the newspaper fulfilled functions that just a few years later were taken on by artists’ union meetings, cultural functionaries from the Committee for Arts Affairs, publishing houses, and other institutional actors.

  Another competition was organized by the publishing house Iskusstvo in 1937, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. By then the situation was quite different from that of 1932. This competition was closed: the jury only commissioned contributions from a select number of invited artists. In the 1937 competition, Iskusstvo sent out letters to fifteen artists, in which it explained the conditions of the competition: each artist was to receive photographs of Stalin (ordered by Iskusstvo from the newspaper Izvestia); and a screening of movies with Stalin themes as well as the more documentary kinokhronika was to be organized. This time the financial rewards were remarkable; the first prize was fifteen thousand rubles. Additional fees certainly followed, earned from reproductions: the two prizewinning portraits had print runs of over one million and the two winners received 5 percent of the earnings).25

  Twelve artists then signed contracts with Iskusstvo. Three (Igor Grabar, Boris Ioganson, and Georgy Riazhsky) declined, citing their involvement in other projects (the language of their rejections was full of anxiety that this might be interpreted as an affront to Stalin). The contracts were signed in early April and the deadline was set for 1 July. On May 1, June 1, and July 1 each artist received a thousand-ruble advance. At first the artists themselves seem not to have known the names of the other participants, for Isaak Brodsky asked the organizers: “If possible, let me know who signed the contracts, who are my competitors?”26 The portraits had to be painted in oil, watercolor, or pastel, and were to be at least one meter in height.27 Despite the short time allowed for production of the paintings, most of the twelve artists managed to submit them on or around July 1. Star painter Aleksandr Gerasimov was five days late, but compensated for his lateness with a surprise submission of two portraits.

  The portraits were then exhibited in a specially prepared, closed room of the Tretyakov Gallery for the members of the jury, which included well-known artists like the Kukryniksy, as well as Aleksandr Poskryobyshev (the head of Stalin’s secretariat), Platon Kerzhentsev (chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs), and Glavlit chief Sergei Ingulov.28 The participating artists were the cream of the official Soviet art world and included Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Evgeny Katsman. The jury decided not to bestow a first prize but rather to divide the fifteen thousand rubles into a second prize of ten thousand rubles, awarded to Aleksandr Gerasimov, and a third prize of 5,000 rubles, awarded to P. V. Malkov. The jury commented on Gerasimov’s portrait: “The simple working atmosphere of an office, a table with books, journals, and letters. Comrade Stalin in an armchair at the table. The portrait is painted in an expressive, lively fashion. The artist succeeded in avoiding the dryness and boredom of an official portrait.”29 By contrast, Brodsky’s standing and style were already rapidly eroding, and his “large, official portrait” was charged with being painted “in Brodsky’s usual manner—painstaking and cold mimesis (protokol’nost’) in general and in the details” (Plate 12). Another painter, Mashkov, was criticized even more harshly: “The artist, who deservedly has the reputation of a great painter, presented for the competition the helpless work of an autodidact, a dead and tasteless lubok, without any signs of painterly craftsmanship or quality.” Nonetheless,
Iskusstvo concluded, “competitions for portraits and thematic pictures are one of the most effective methods of increasing the quality of our art publishing.”30

  Also in 1937, there was a parallel competition for Stalin portraits by Iskusstvo’s rival IZOGIZ, located on Moscow’s Tsvetnoy Bulvar, a mere fifteen-minute walk from Iskusstvo’s Kuznetsky Most location. Indeed, it is quite possible that the two portrait drives were in “socialist competition” (sotssorevno-vanie) with one another, as these were the prime years of socialist competition and Stakhanovism. With a first prize of twenty thousand rubles, a second of ten thousand, and a third of five thousand, this competition was even more lucrative. Like its Iskusstvo twin, this competition was closed, but no list of invited artists has yet surfaced. Some of the painters must have been identical, for Brodsky pressured IZOGIZ to return his contribution in timely fashion so that he would be able to submit it to the second, slightly later, competition— after it had failed to receive a prize at the first one. Four people served on both competition juries. The artists in the IZOGIZ competition also received a list of the themes they should focus on. The list began with “the portrait or bust,” continued with “on the tribune of the mausoleum” and “among children, aviators, heroes of the Soviet Union,” and finished with “J. V. Stalin and Yezhov.” Portraits were supposed to be fifty by sixty centimeters in size and “had to satisfy the demands of mass reproduction”—rougher brushwork, we know, was more suitable than fine brush strokes.31 And of course “the publishing house supplies all photographic materials on the planned themes for every participant in the competition and also organizes a showing of relevant movies.”32

  The late 1930s were the years of monumental art exhibitions. Apart from those that we have already examined, other large-scale exhibitions in the sec- ond half of the 1930s included a thematic Komsomol one and Lavrenty Beria’s exhibition, “Art of the Georgian SSR,” which opened in November 1937. The same year, the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair (followed in 1939 by the pavilion at the New York World’s Fair) opened with numerous commissions from socialist realist artists. An exhibition in honor of the twentieth anniversary of the Red Army commenced in 1938. The exhibition “Industry of Socialism,” originally organized by Sergo Ordzhonikidze’s Commissariat for Heavy Industry, was also supposed to open in 1937, but its beginning was delayed until spring 1939 because of infighting among various artist factions and by the Great Terror, which affected Ordzhonikidze’s organization particularly deeply.33 Also two years behind schedule, the permanent All-Union Agricultural Exhibition opened in 1939.

  Indeed, various bureaucratic organizations initiated and financed these exhibitions in order to solidify their share of power through symbolic means. At the head of each organization stood a vozhd’—Ordzhonikidze in the case of “Industry of Socialism,” Beria in the case of the Georgian exhibition, and Voroshilov in the case of the Red Army exhibition—who personified his institution and was celebrated in the exhibition concerned with a display of cult products. At the same time, the vozhd’ was involved in everyday organization through very real patronage, as the preceding chapter has shown.

  After 1937, competitions with subsequent exhibitions served much less often as vehicles for producing new Stalin cult art.34 Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in 1939 prompted several exhibitions that simply displayed extant art devoted to the Stalin theme. Only the less spectacular 1939 sculpture exhibition “V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin in Sculpture” began with a competition. Despite the overwhelming role of the state in the organization of all these exhibitions, they were represented as spontaneous products of popular initiative. Thus “the initiative to organize the ail-Union exhibition, ‘Lenin and Stalin in the Visual Folk Arts,’ belongs to the people,” according to an article in Iskusstvo.35

  The stellar exhibition in 1939, “J. V. Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land in the Fine Arts,” opened on Stalin’s birthday, 21 December. It offers a good perspective on both the large exhibitions of the 1930s and the Stalin cult itself. The exhibition began not with a competition—a call for creative production— but in a retrospective key. The visual section of the Committee for Arts Affairs sent out a barrage of letters to individual artists, to local artist unions in places as far away as Leningrad, Turkmenistan, and Kiev, to museums and publishing houses, and to the directors of the “Industry of Socialism” exhibition and the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, asking about any artistic representations of Stalin that the artist or institution might have on hand.36 The original letter by the Committee for Arts Affairs went out in April 1939, eight months before the exhibition,37 but the actual organization of the exhibition began only in Septem- ber and turned into a race against time.38 It is unclear why the exhibition was organized so late. Did the Terror play a role, since many depicted heroes were relegated to the dustbin of history as “enemies of the people?” Or was an unambiguous signal by Stalin necessary in order to go ahead with the exhibition?

  At any rate, after the initial inquiry by the Committee for Arts Affairs various individuals and institutions submitted lists of finished and unfinished Stalin art. The sculptor Marina Ryndziunskaia, whom we encountered in Chapter 4 as the designer of a 1926 Stalin sculpture, wrote from Moscow of “a 1933 sculpture in wood,” and the chairman of the Urals Artists’ Union sent “a list of Sverdlovsk artists who are working on the subject of Comrade Stalin’s life and activity: 1. Zaitsev Ya. P. (sculptor) Comrade Stalin with Pioneers. 1 meter 30 centimeters tall, plaster . . . 2. Melentiev G. A. (painter) Comrade Stalin at the Meeting of the Constitutional Commission. Oil, size 4 × 2 meters. Property of the Sverdlovsk Museum of the Revolution.”39 During the late spring and summer the Committee for Arts Affairs then sent cultural functionaries to the studios of individual Moscow artists and to the Soviet periphery to check what kind of Stalin art was in progress. But the overall organization of the exhibition remained chaotic. As late as September, it was not yet decided whether the exhibition would take place at the Tretyakov Gallery, the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, or in several rooms of the “Industry of Socialism” exhibition. At the same time, Moscow’s Museum of the Revolution and the Lenin Museum were planning their own more historically oriented Stalin exhibitions, and were vying for some of the same pieces of artwork. The socialist competition between the different museums was described as something positive.40

  As far as substance is concerned, the exhibition roster was also far from settled in the early fall. At an organizational meeting, one participant demanded that “all the artwork at this exhibition ought to be directly connected with Stalin.”41 Another wanted to add to artwork “about the life and activity of Comrade Stalin,” artwork showing “themes of somewhat allegorical character, such as the Stalin Constitution, where the image of Comrade Stalin will not be shown directly, but where the entire picture will give an idea of the era of the Stalin Constitution.”42 Moreover, there were different opinions as to whether the exhibition should show as many objects involving Stalin from as many parts of the Soviet Union in as many techniques as possible (from traditional easel painting to ceramics and walrus ivory carvings), or whether quality ought to overrule quantity. The latter principle seems to have won, as many art functionaries emphasized how “responsible” this exhibition was—with Stalin’s power at its height and the Terror fresh in everyone’s mind.

  In the end, the Tretyakov Gallery was chosen as the single location for the exhibition. To pool resources, another initially separate exhibition on “Famous People of the Country,” devoted to images of Stakhanovites and other “heroes” of the 1930s, was fused with the Stalin exhibition. The artwork was to be assembled from existing Stalin iconography “plus a small number of works (about 30) that the Committee for Arts Affairs commissioned from leading masters.” “Apart from these commissioned works,” the functionary of the Committee for Arts Affairs continued, “we have collected information in the Union republics—Central Asia, Georgia, Armenia, Ukraine.”43

  Indeed, the involvement of pla
ces far from Moscow in this exhibition was significant.44 The exhibition was instrumental in promoting Stalin’s image as “father of the peoples.” The mechanics of involving the periphery were as follows: in the spring central art functionaries visited artists in the Caucasus republics, in Leningrad, in Siberia, in Central Asia, and in Ukraine. Everywhere the central functionaries communicated with local artists through the regional artists’ unions, all of which were subordinate to the Moscow Union MOSSKh anyway. On return to Moscow from these trips, the functionaries reported, for example:

  I recently was in Armenia and had a chance to look at the materials there. I must say that we have never seen Armenian visual arts, despite the fact that a large exhibition devoted to the Stalin Constitution took place in the Armenian Republic two years ago. . . . After looking at the paintings, which are partly finished, partly still in an unfinished state, after looking at the artwork of the sculptors, and after looking at what they (the jewelers, carpet-makers, and embroideresses) have in the sphere of folk arts, I came up with about 45 pieces of artwork.45

  In October Moscow again wrote to local artists’ unions, inquiring, for instance, if paintings by a number of Kiev artists (inspected during the spring) were nearing completion; Moscow “asked to send photographs of these works as soon as possible.”46 Or an individual Leningrad artist received the following advance notice: “The State Tretyakov Gallery informs you that after 9 November the commission for the selection of artwork for the Stalin exhibition will be in Leningrad. This commission will visit your studio and inspect your paintings.”47 This was in line with the organizers’ goal of “convincing the [artists] that this [exhibition] is a very important political enterprise”; it was also consonant with the intention to “implement stricter control.”48 “On the one hand it is indispensable to prod the artists,” echoed Aleksandr Gerasimov, “on the other hand we need to offer them help when they encounter difficulties. What, for example, if we have commissioned a portrait but the painter has no model?”49