The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  Artists responded to the committee’s October inquiries with letters and photographs, showing the state of completion of their work. After the news of the exhibition had spread widely among artistic circles, some artists who were not invited proposed to submit Stalin busts and paintings at their own initiative.50 In late November and early December a jury, composed of famous artists and cultural bureaucrats, met in Moscow and judged the art that had been gathered. Certain works were accepted unconditionally, others were designated for alterations, and yet others were rejected outright.51 As was to be expected, given the short notice, many works were submitted late.52

  Patronage in the highest reaches of power resolved conflicts over the exhibition or availability of specific paintings. If a famous work was on display at a different exhibition, powerful forces made it available to the Stalin birthday exhibition. Thus the director of the Tretyakov Gallery wrote to Voroshilov in early November, asking that the commissar of defense allow the transfer of Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin to the Stalin birthday exhibition directly after its return from the New York World’s Fair.53

  One of the complaints of participating artists was the difficulty of getting the “notable people” (znatnye liudi)—the Stakhanovites, Arctic explorers, biologists, and kolkhoz milkmaids—to pose. “I was ordered to do a portrait of Os-tuzhev,” ventured one artist. “He came to my studio, I tried to win him over. . . . He looked at everything and left—I do not know why, but perhaps my art did not convince him. . . . Then I was supposed to do Shchukin, but he unfortunately died.”54 Another artist was just as pessimistic: “I had a commission for a portrait of Lysenko.” After several attempts to paint the quack biologist, Lysenko disappeared—“no answer, and when I visited him twice he was not there.”55 A certain Isaev of the Committee for Arts Affairs agreed that getting znatnye liudi to pose often was problematic: famous scientists or Bolsheviks “believe that if they sit, they will be accused of laziness, of wasting time on modeling, therefore they escape sitting or do so at their desks.” Sitting for one’s portrait was considered frivolous, as we saw in Chapter 3. It was hard to reconcile with Bolshevik notions of modesty and relentless, around-the-clock work for the Party cause. The Stakhanovites and decorated kolkhoz farmers were “easier to get to sit, but they want to keep the painting as a memento. That is why the Committee . . . must give a public explanation.”56 Often the artists were unhappy with the micromanagement by the Committee for Arts Affairs. Katsman complained:

  I was supposed to do a portrait of Gudov. I know Gudov, he is a very interesting person. I wrote a note to Bykov [the responsible functionary at the Committee for Arts Affairs, with whom the artists corresponded] that it would be a pleasure to do a portrait of Gudov, but an even greater pleasure to do a portrait of my favorite Dzhambul [Dzhabaev, the celebrated Kazakh folklore performer]. After this I received a reply that this is impossible since Dzhambul is being portrayed in sculpture. I think this is not right, and if I get Dzhambul, I am prepared to fly to him by airplane or by whatever means, because as an artist I want to portray him. And this is important, because we are talking about art here.57

  Meanwhile artists accused artists—and art functionaries accused artists—of not trying hard enough to get their intended models to sit. “As far as Fadeev [the writer] is concerned,” sniped one artist, “I suspect that Yakovlev did not look for him seriously. He is such a man of culture, understands so much, that he is always helpful.”58

  Right before the opening of the exhibition, powerful cultural functionaries and Party members probably walked the rooms to see if anything needed to be changed at the last minute. This is conjecture based on our knowledge that the chairman of the Committee for Arts Affairs, Platon Kerzhentsev, made last-minute changes in the way pictures were hung at the 1937 “Art of the Georgian SSR” exhibition. He removed several pictures from the exhibition, and had details changed in others.59 As the director of the Tretyakov Gallery reported to Kerzhentsev, “On the basis of the remarks that you made when inspecting the exhibition of art of the Georgian SSR, we have removed the painting of M. I. Toidze, Stalin with Lenin in Gorki. . . . The artist U. M. Dzhaparidze has been ordered to correct the position of the hand of Comrade Stalin in his picture Comrade Stalin and V. Ketskhoveli, and I. A. Vepkhvadze has been told to change the chin in his Portrait of S. M. Kirov. From the pictures that we had rejected we have returned Bagrationi’s painting Abundant Harvest.”60

  At the Stalin exhibition several artists asked the organizing commission why their pictures had been rejected. Exhibiting artists were interested in the success of their paintings in the show: “Is the exhibition well attended? Do you have a visitor comment book and do they criticize me a lot there? Were there any remarks from the government commission? These questions interest every painter, not just me, so please do not think that I am an exceptionally ambitious painter.”61

  Once the Stalin exhibition was scheduled, the Tretyakov Gallery was actively involved in propagandizing it. In general, many efforts were made to reach as many people as possible, from all stretches of the vast Soviet state. Not only were people brought in organized groups from the periphery to the exhibitions in the center, but also the main provincial towns organized their own exhibitions or hosted mobile exhibitions that had traveled from the center.62 The Tretyakov’s public relations even included sending its own press release to Pravda: “THE SUCCESS OF THE EXHIBITION STALIN AND THE PEOPLE OF THE SOVIET LAND IN THE FINE ARTS. The exhibition devoted to the life and activity of Stalin, and to the people of the Soviet land, was opened at the State Tretyakov Gallery in connection with Stalin’s sixtieth birthday and is very successful. The exhibition has already been visited by more than 150,000 people.”63 One sure way to boost an exhibition’s visitor statistics, according to the artists, was to get Stalin himself to visit it.64 But Stalin did not make an appearance at his birthday exhibition.

  In May 1940 the Tretyakov Gallery began to prepare a public discussion of the exhibition with some of the most famous representatives of the Soviet artistic intelligentsia. It invited such artists as Gerasimov, Grabar, and Mukhina; the writers Pogodin, Tolstoy, and Fadeev; the composers Khachaturian and Khrennikov; the movie directors Kapler, Romm, and Ermler; as well as actors and Heroes of the Soviet Union, among them, the Arctic explorer Papanin. The evening was to take place on 28 May and the Committee for Arts Affairs insisted that each invited participant receive a list of questions that should preferably be touched upon:

  1. Collection of materials. Selection of the most typical, studying the atmosphere, surroundings, and facts characteristic of the life and activity of Lenin and Stalin. 2. Which ideas, facts, and details impress through their artistic concreteness and how did you use them? 3. Questions about the physical likeness and its expression in artistic images. 4. The creation of an artistic image: the poetic, heroic, and lyrical in the image. 5. Which image do you consider the most successful? In literature, theater, painting, sculpture, and cinema. . . . 6. Recount your personal creative work on the image. 7. How do you think the unity of the vozhd’ or hero with the people can be expressed more deeply and truthfully in works of art?65

  There was a postscript to the 1939 Stalin exhibition. Ten years later Stalin celebrated his seventieth birthday. By that time, exhibitions were mounted not only in Moscow and the Soviet provinces but also in the Eastern European satellite states, each of which had acquired its own Stalin cult. The iconography was imported from Moscow, to be sure, but the Hungarians, Poles, East Germans, Romanians, and others all executed the Soviet templates in the vernacular, so that distinctly “Polish,” “German,” or “Romanian” Stalins emerged. Here they were similar to the Central Asian Soviet republics, which earlier had created their Stalins with slight, yet noticeable Kazakh, Tadzhik, Uzhek, or Kirgiz features. In 1949 Moscow too put on another large Stalin exhibition, “Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin in the Visual Arts.” The preparations for this exhibition were less haphazard than those for its 19
39 predecessor. The organizers were able to draw on the 1939 experience and on the even larger body of existing Stalin pictures created in the preceding decade.

  The cult, then, was in a state of flux during the early 1930s, when its mechanisms were still being consolidated and its canon was still evolving. Hence the greater importance of portrait competitions in the first half of the decade; these allowed for more creativity than in later years. But they were also typical of production-raising practices of the Second Five-Year Plan, such as socialist competition and Stakhanovism. This also explains the role of the press as an organizing tool for the earliest competitions. In the absence of strong institutions and a developed interplay between them, the press functioned as the central public vehicle through which Stalin portrait competitions were organized. The competitions had another function: in the early 1930s different publishing houses were still competing against each other and each was trying to win its own original depictions of Stalin. Later, for example in the exhibitions connected with Stalin’s sixtieth and seventieth birthdays in 1939 and 1949, there was a much greater sense of images and procedures being settled and unified. What is more, there were enormous financial stimuli for artists who participated in portrait competitions. Both prize money and royalties from reproductions allowed artists to increase their income and in fact enabled a standard of living that was comparable with that enjoyed by the highest Party nomenklatura. Unlike the Party members, the painters had the license to flaunt their wealth. This was because of residual preevolutionary cultural expectations for artists to act Bohemian. Dmitry Nalbandian had the celebrated Georgian restaurant, Aragvi, deliver meals to his Gorky Street apartment. Aleksandr Gerasimov built a Spanish Colonial–style mansion according to his own design and owned several cars (including a Buick), complete with chauffeurs. To be sure, and true to Bolshevik values of modesty, Gerasimov occasionally affected the “simple country bumpkin” and dressed up in sheepskins when the Party bosses arrived.

  EVERYDAY STALIN PORTRAIT PRODUCTION

  While the Stalin portrait was the most lucrative kind of painting an artist could create, not all artists produced Stalin portraits. And of those who did, not all were paid as well as Gerasimov and Nalbandian. As members of the artists’ union, the mass of artists received salaries comparable to those of an engineer with average qualifications. Average writers are believed to have lived better than average artists.66 On top of their regular salaries, artists earned money through the kontraktatsiia system. The majority of Stalin painters got their commissions from the Art Fund (from VseKoKhudozhnik until the mid-1930s). Most commissions were issued on the basis of a sketch (eskiz—famous artists were exempt from having to submit one) in the context of the many thematic semiannual exhibitions organized by artists’ unions, all of which were modeled on the monumental exhibitions of the 1930s (the 1933 exhibition “Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years” serving as the ur-model).67 It was also possible to offer to the Art Fund a finished Stalin portrait, but this was less common.

  And, as we have seen, some of these exhibitions originated in either open or closed competitions. The thematic organization of the exhibition—in such rooms as “Stalin as Military Commander,” “Stalin as Marxist Theoretician,” and “Stalin Among Kolkhoz Farmers”—structured Stalin portrait production in advance. This thematic taxonomy, closely tied to the obrazy, the stock images of Stalin (which we examine below), had solidified by the late 1930s. Once a contract for a commission had been concluded between a painter and the institution organizing the exhibition, the painter received a portion of the honorarium as an advance payment, and once the painting was more than half finished, another advance was paid. Letters asking for the postponement of deadlines for paintings were often met with positive replies, unless the deadline was truly pressing (such as that of an important exhibition). After submitting the completed painting, the artist received the remainder of the honorarium.68 The amount of the honorarium varied greatly. As the Georgian artist V. V. Dugladze recounted, “I worked exclusively on the image of ‘the young Stalin’ and got paid a lot. For example, for the picture The Young Stalin in the Gori Citadel I received forty-five thousand rubles. This was at a time when a bottle of vodka cost twenty rubles!”69

  The economics of Stalin portrait production pivoted around planning. There were supply-demand aspects to planning, but these were structured very specifically. On one hand there was of course “true” demand for Stalin portraits, as when a Red Director of a factory desired (or deemed it appropriate) to hang one behind his desk, as was customary for Soviet officials. On the other hand, a theoretical physics institute in Ukraine, a reindeer kolkhoz in northeastern Siberia, and a rubber boot factory in Leningrad all had a small allowance in their budgets for “cultural-everyday expenses” (kulturno-bytovye raskhody, abbreviated kultbytraskhody).70 Toward the end of the financial year, they were especially interested in spending this part of the budget because unspent money would be omitted from the next plan. They spent some of the money on new furniture or Red corners, and some on Stalin portraits purchased from the Art Fund. Demand also affected the Art Fund. It too worked according to plan and had to overfulfill its sales quota of Stalin portraits during a given year. To sell its production it made use of informal “plenipotentiaries” (upolnomochennye) around the Soviet Union. These “plenipotentiaries” collected commissions from institutions for specific artwork. Since the artists were dependent on sales of their artwork, they clandestinely paid the “plenipotentiaries” io to 25 percent of the honorarium they received from the commissioning institution via the Art Fund. In artists’ lore, tales about men like Ostap Bender abounded. They worked “according to the saying, ‘they kick him out the door but he comes back through the window.’”71 In general, since no one ever counted true demand, there was a constant surplus of artwork, Stalin portraits included. These “nonliquidated assets” (nelikvidy) tended to pile up in the storage rooms of the Art Fund.72

  Once a Stalin portrait was finished, it entered a whole new phase, often of technical reproduction. Original, oil-painted Stalin portraits were reproduced— independently or in books and other print media—as lithographs, posters, photographs, and postcards. A number of organizations were responsible for disbursing the resulting royalty payments to artists—among them, for primary reproduction, the publisher itself, and for further reproduction, the Bureau for the Protection of Authors’ Rights (Biuro po okhrane avtorskikh prav).73 And of course, organizations were often late in paying honoraria.74

  During the process of reproduction, the Stalin portraits were retouched. The publishing houses specializing in art reproduction had an “art workshop” (khudozhestvennaia masterskaia) responsible for retouching. “We are enclosing thirty-two portraits of J. V. Stalin by the artist A. Gerasimov for corrections,” wrote the senior editor for technical reproduction to the art workshop at Iskusstvo publishers in 1938.75 The amount and detail of documentation on retouching (and the entire reproduction process, for that matter) is astounding. At every step the names of everyone involved were painstakingly recorded.76 This reflects a heightened concern to fix on paper clear responsibilities—and tremendous anxiety, lest something go awry.77 Apparently artists had to consent to the retouched versions of their Stalin depictions. In a letter to the “editorial team of the photo album ‘Comrade Stalin in Photography’” one “artist I. Rerberg” wrote of a series of retouched photographs that “such excessive retouching completely destroys the vitality of the photographs and everything most important in photographs, namely the rendering of the body, mannerisms, etc.” He concluded with typical candor, “One gets the impression that the entire face is made of a single material—rubber or wax.”78

  The actual printing process of Stalin portraits was also highly sensitive and pressroom jobs must have been among the most stressful. As in retouching, here too the responsibility for each step in the typographical process was meticulously recorded. Often the proofs of a printed product were harshly criti
cized. “The proofs of the J. V. Stalin portrait,” wrote the Iskusstvo department of reproductions to VseKoKhudozhnik’s printing shop, “cannot be accepted; they require serious corrections: 1. soften the large-grained dots in the painted area. 2. Accentuate more strongly the lines of the nose and cheeks. 3. Redo hair and eyes.”79 Money was also an issue. A press that had printed a Lenin portrait with “red dots on the face” and a Kirov portrait with “a glaring spot in the background” was ordered to “redo the entire order at the press’s expense.”80

  At different stages in the production process the censorship board Glavlit interfered routinely. It seems that the Glavlit representative at a publishing house had to approve the plate (klishe) for typographic reproduction, the proof, and the finished product. Sometimes the director of the publishing house wrote to the chief of Glavlit personally in order to override the on-site Glavlit representative’s decision.81 Besides this prepublication censorship, there were various forms of postpublication censorship. First, a Stalin portrait could be withheld from circulation (for example, it went to press but was destroyed rather than delivered to stores). Second, portraits already in circulation might be recalled. Third, restrictions might be placed on access to products already in circulation (a portrait went into “special storage” [spetskbran] at libraries).82