by Jan Plamper
A 1940 assessment of the leader portrait sounded as though progress had been made since the early 1930s:
When working on a portrait, the artist increasingly and with growing confidence takes the path of a synthetic-generalized image, tries to combine personal and “social” elements, and strives to fill the generalized image of the leader with living and expressive concrete features of his character. . . . In each of these pictures the action unfolds while being in deep and intrinsic connection with the telos of the most significant political events. Stalin as the leader who realized his idea of building socialism through his guidance, Stalin as the teacher and friend, the embodiment of constant love and care for the masses—this, in essence, is the basic theme to which these pictures are devoted.139
Similarly, a 1941 article positively noted that “The image of the leader in the imagination of the people lives and becomes richer depending on the spiritual growth of that very people. Straightforwardness and hyperbolization for a long time seemed the only way of realizing the image of the leader. But now the image of the leader is unthinkable outside of his portrait, outside of the uncovering of the whole richness of the individuality of the person portrayed.”140
Throughout the 1930s, then, art criticism regarding the leader portrait retained its basic dialectical structure. Over the course of the decade the antagonism of the two poles realism vs. abstraction (or their many subsequent incarnations) lessened and the “versus” that separated them changed into an “and” that bridged them. In 1933 Ivan Gronsky counterposed “realism” to “naturalism” and “photography” to “art,” yet in the same year Sergei Romov had already claimed that a combination of “authenticity” (“likeness”) and “reflection of inner life” constituted the radiant path to a higher “synthesis of socialist realism.” In 1934 S. Razumovskaia spoke of portretnost’ vs. “generalization,” whereas a year later Osip Beskin pleaded, “the portrait must resemble the original” and have “some level of generalization.” Why? “Because art is the fusion of the subjective with the objective, as Hegel put it.” In 1935, L. Gutman identified a whole battery of binary oppositions, beginning with “the photographic record of the appearance of a leader” vs. “the solution of formalistic problems of the portrait genre” and ending with “from outside” vs. “from inside.” By 1937 the synthetic “and” clearly outweighed the oppositional “versus.” Mark Neiman spoke of how the “personal” and “the social” must “flow together.” By 1939 Osip Beskin’s ideal portrait had to “reflect reality” and “reveal the inner truth of a phenomenon,” it had to feature both “nature” and “illusiveness,” and in 1940 F. S. Maltsev clamored for a fusion of “the personal” and “the social.”141 By the mid-1940s, art criticism of the leader portrait practically disappeared from the pages of cultural journals and newspapers. Was there nothing left to say, since the portrait had become truly “synthetic” and entered the realm of socialist realist harmony?
“MILLIONS ARE USED TO SEEING LENIN DIFFERENTLY”: THE CANON AS A PROBLEM
The sum of canonical representations of Stalin was called “iconography” (ikonografiia). This term was part of Soviet art criticism of the 1930s and 1940s and was stripped of previous religious connotations.142 The existing iconography of leaders caused serious tensions in art crticism about leader portraits: how could portraiture further change and develop, if it was supposed to conform to existing portraits? In other words, how could the Marxist demand for historical progress, for linear, forward development, be reconciled with an immutable canon? And what if, after all, portraits needed to be changed according to the political vagaries of the time?143
A concrete case makes plain the dilemma that Soviet art criticism faced. The case concerns a Lenin portrait, but the pattern applies to the Stalin iconography as well. In November 1955 an artist by the name of Denisov, who did not belong to the top tier of Soviet artists but had previously copied Stalin portraits by stars like Gerasimov and Nalbandian, wrote to the chairman of the Central Committee Cultural Department, A. M. Rumiantsev, about a Lenin portrait he had been painting for the Lenin Museum since 1947. This portrait had been rejected at various levels and by various institutions of the cultural bureaucracy. The main reason was that it did not conform to the canonical image of Lenin. “My attempts to get my painting through the so-called ‘Great Art Soviet’ of the visual art factory,” wrote an offended Denisov, “came up against statements of artists, such as that of Comrade Nalbandian—’millions are used to seeing Lenin differently.’”144
Denisov then tried to make his case. His greatest weapons were patronage and the visual memories of people who had seen Lenin. Thus he added three written comments by well-known Soviet celebrities. Olga Lepeshinskaia, an Old Bolshevik and deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the RFSFR, wrote: “I was delighted by the artist K. A. Denisov’s portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Before me was the living Vladimir Ilyich, just the way he stayed in my memory. I believe that we must distribute this portrait among the masses, so that they get a vivid impression of the living Lenin.”145 Another Old Bolshevik, Tsetsilia Bobrovskaia, concurred: “A living V. I. Lenin—the Sovnarkom president is looking from this portrait, painted by the artist Comrade Denisov, and the eyes are particularly good. These are the eyes of V. I. Lenin. A great success for the artist.”146 Apart from the “affidavits” of these witnesses and guardians of Lenin’s memory, Denisov had also secured Voroshilov’s support:
He acknowledged the portrait’s quality and was irritated when he heard that artists are forced to paint Lenin portraits from only one or two widely distributed photographs. “How can one,” said Kliment Yefremovich, “reduce to clichés a man as alive (zhivoi) as Lenin, a man who was someone else every minute, while always remaining himself!” That was said on 31 December 1953 to a whole group of old Communists, whom Comrade Voroshilov hosted. He immediately ordered that A. M. Gerasimov be called so that the portrait could be shown to the people, that is, to accept the portrait. After looking at the portrait, Comrade Gerasimov told me that he would call the visual art factory for approval. But I did not hurry to sell the portrait and later improved it further and further, testing my visual memory (I worked and often met with Lenin myself)—with Comrades G. I. Petrovsky, O. B. Lepeshinskaia, and finally with Comrade Krzhizhanovsky.147
After trying since 1947 to bring “Vladimir Ilyich closer to the viewer and the viewer closer to him,” Denisov’s final plea was to “protect my aspirations against the hollow, cold wall of the stencilers (trafaretchikov), that is those people who fear taking the slightest responsibility for something that is unusual or new to them.”148
A deputy at the Central Committee Culture Department then produced a note that was discussed and accepted at a session of the Central Committee. In this note, he argued that Denisov’s Lenin portrait had been evaluated by the Moscow visual art factory’s art soviet and “was rejected because of its poor professional realization. The painter of the portrait received comments and advice from the artist-members of the art soviet, but Comrade Denisov did not agree with their opinion and is asking to organize a viewing of the portrait with comrades who knew V. I. Lenin closely.” Most importantly, “the portrait at hand differs significantly from the well-known photographs and the established popular image of V. I. Lenin.” Like other institutions before it, the Central Committee hammered home the point that Denisov had violated the Lenin iconography. “We think it makes sense to recommend that the painter take these comments into account and continue work on the portrait,” it concluded.149
The memory wars over the iconography of Lenin went on. In October 1957 Denisov complained in a letter to the Old Bolshevik Otto Kuusinen about the “callous attitude of some Central Committee workers towards the sincere work of a person for the good of the Party.” “Judge for yourself,” Denisov wrote. “A man strove to create, and did create, a portrait of V. I. Lenin for more than ten years with his left hand alone (the right one is missing), about which O. B. Lepeshinskaia writes: ‘I wa
s delighted.’”
In the meantime Denisov must have also organized a public protest against the rejection of his Lenin portrait: “Sixteen old communists, who knew and saw Lenin alive, wrote in a letter to the newspaper Sovetskaia kul’tura that ‘the image of Lenin must not be reduced to clichés (nel’zia zatrafarechivaf obraz Lenina)’ and that they ‘consider the keeping of the artist Denisov’s portrait of V. I. Lenin from public showing incorrect.’” Similarly, Literaturnaia gazeta carried an appeal by Old Bolsheviks in favor of Denisov’s Lenin portrait.
Finally, Denisov reported receiving a note from the Central Committee, which read as follows: “Many have looked at your portrait, even secretaries have looked at it. Some like it, others do not. Therefore pick up your portrait and take it to the exhibition [at the Lenin Museum] through the usual channels.” “If they had at least said,” Denisov concluded, “who does not like his painting and what is bad in it. After all, we are not talking about canons that have been established by painting for the sake of painting, but about a different image of Vladimir Ilyich—about the question of the life of an artist, a comrade-in-arms of Ilyich.”150
The archival record next has a letter by Denisov to “Comrade [Petr] Pospelov” of the Central Committee, who had once “cut this Gordian knot and ordered the Lenin Museum to acquire my portrait for their exhibition and to publish it through the Ministry of Culture.” Yet the knot must have miraculously refastened, for the director of the Lenin Museum enlisted various representatives of the artistic intelligentsia to give Denisov further advice on how to change his painting. After that the director of the Lenin Museum sent Denisov on a Kafkaesque journey from one bureaucratic institution to another. The one-armed artist ended up feeling as though he had “turned into a soccer ball.”
The story ends with the following communication, an appeal to Denisov’s patron at the Central Committee to renew his pressure on the Lenin Museum to buy his portrait: “Comrade Krzhizhanovsky wrote in his comment on my portrait: ‘I think that the reactions of our society will undoubtedly be positive.’ Just like the deep conviction expressed in the letters of Lenin’s comrades-inarms, this opinion could, it seems to me, be enough grounds for the director of any museum to take the small risk connected with exhibiting a portrait of V. I. Lenin—a new interpretation that everyone who knew him alive likes so much.”151
We do not know what subsequently happened to Denisov’s Lenin portrait, nor has a copy of the controversial picture come to the surface. But the case highlights some of the inherent tensions of art criticism of the leader portrait genre. On the one hand, depictions of a leader were supposed to be “truthful,” and those people who had personally seen a leader were one of the sources of “truth,” especially after his death. On the other hand, a canon of leader portraits developed over the years, and this canon was firmly implanted in the collective imagination. Violating this canon came close to iconoclasm. Denisov had been a lowly kopiist, who had done little but keep up the canon by painting oil copies of masterpieces like Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin for the spot on the wall behind the desks of regional Party bosses. It was ironic that he at last broke out of the canon with his Lenin portrait. The Khrushchev years must have played a role—the Stalin cult had been discredited and the Party claimed to be returning to its Leninist origins. De-Stalinization demanded a de-Stalinized Lenin and made the Party insecure about the established Lenin iconography. It is a combination of this sense of insecurity, of patronage (Voroshilov), and of the renewed power of Old Bolsheviks during the Khrushchev era that allowed Denisov’s case—a case that began (unrelated to the times) in 1947 under Stalin and that was motivated by a desire to restore the “real Lenin”—to enter the archival record of the highest reaches of Soviet power.
Had Denisov’s painting materialized and been released into mass production, the art criticism surrounding it would have been fraught with further serious and generic tensions. The Romantic doctrine of original, autonomous authorship and a process of spontaneous, inspirational creation clashed with the reality of a multiplicity of “authors” in a system of mass production organized around socialist planning. “Masterpieces” had an aura—they were presented as unique and their exhibition in the main museums of the country was treated as a singular experience, a pilgrimage site to be visited by as many Soviet citizens as possible. Yet in truth these very paintings were copied for local Party offices, houses of culture, and factory cafeterias by the artists themselves and an army of impecunious colleagues, copyists like Denisov. This tension in art criticism was almost as prominent as the tension between the existing canon and new paintings (as in the case of Denisov’s Lenin portrait) or between the ideal of painting a leader from life and the reality of painting from photographic and cinematic templates.
The Denisov case was not isolated. Between 1953 and 1961, Stalin’s body lay next to Lenin’s in the mausoleum on Red Square. According to one member of the embalming team, Yury Romakov, the guiding principle of the embalming process was to achieve the greatest possible likeness between the corpse and the established image of Stalin in art, photographs, and film—to avoid shocking the people.152 Here too, the march of time, which left its traces even on Soviet leaders, was the canon’s great source of contamination. How to reconcile current images of Stalin with pictures whose subject was in the distant past? To be sure, the Soviet painters worked out a Stalin iconography showing the leader at different ages. Sometimes, however, the current image was superimposed onto paintings with historical subjects, as in a painting reproduced in Pravda depicting the Wrangel front during the Civil War, when Stalin should have actually looked much younger.153 Time and again, questions of temporality and mimesis moved to the center of the search for the perfect image of the leader.
If photography failed to deliver the utterly mimetic representation, were there other media that could do so? There was an earnest suggestion to use a plaster molder to create an archive of life masks of the leaders. A death mask already was a distorted representation of the leader, whereas a life mask would furnish the “real,” perfectly mimetic template for an endless stream of works of art. Thus Voroshilov received a letter from Anna Ellinskaia: “I live at the dermatology hospital, where the well-known molder Sergei Pavlovich Fiveisky has created a huge museum of casts of very high quality. S. P. Fiveisky has grown old and almost blind, but his son Sergei Sergeevich Fiveisky works just as well, if not better than him. Now, this molder could assemble a gallery not of portraits, but of precise depictions of our dear leaders in their lifetime. Not only we, but also posterity would appreciate this gallery.” “I have not,” she finished, “told anyone of my thought and am first turning to you as a countryman, since I am also from Lugansk and approximately your age. My name will tell you nothing, I am merely a housewife, but I love my country and my leaders no less than any worker.”154 Anna Ellinskaia’s letter seems to have been taken quite seriously, for Voroshilov’s archive contains a note with her main proposition and pencil remarks (“we ought to take a look at the work of these molders and then decide”—Voroshilov). Did this note circulate at a Politburo meeting?155
Life masks of the Bolshevik pantheon, Stalin’s embalmed body, and Denisov’s Lenin portrait—they all point to deep and large problems of socialist realism. Artists may have been able to synthetically bridge the seemingly irreconcilable prescriptions of representing the world as it was and as it ought to be, of fusing realism and socialism. Here socialism—the “ought-to-be,” future, or utopia— was in fact less challenging, precisely because it was nonexistent and therefore allowed for a wider range of approximations. Realism—the “as is” or the present—proved to be the real challenge. For as time moved on, the perception of what was, of reality, changed. The Lenin of Khrushchev’s time was no longer identical with the Lenin of Stalin’s time. Yet when Khrushchev came to power a collective visual memory had formed—“millions are used to seeing Lenin differently.” It was this chronological vector that posed one o
f the greatest threats to representations of the leader, to socialist realism, and indeed to socialism.
6 The Audience as Cult Producer
Exhibition Comment Books and Notes at Celebrity Evenings
AN ASTONISHING VARIETY of persons and institutions interacted multi-directionally to produce the Stalin cult in painting. Together they constituted a field with multiple foci. This field was always oriented toward the Archimedean point of Stalin. One collective personal actor in this field has been missing so far: the audience. Who were the Stalin portraits intended for? Who actually “consumed” the cult products? And how? Was the audience an active participant in the production process of the portraits, or were they merely passive onlookers? These issues of reception are knotty ones. For one, reception is a problematic concept embedded in an outdated communication schema that presumes a sender of a message through a medium to a recipient. The ways, however, in which Stalin “messages” or images were made, the mechanisms of cult production, were vital in processes of meaning-making, as this book has tried to show. The classical communication schema is further confounded by Stalinist cosmology, which saw artists inspired by Stalin, the incarnation of Marxist historical development, producing an art that showed the Soviet world including its people as a work-in-progress moving toward a final historical stage, in which chronological time would be suspended just as differences between artists, the people, Stalin, and anyone else would cease to play a role.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives source genres have surfaced that, at first glance, seem to lend themselves to a straightforward study of reception in the classical sense. The comment book (kniga otzyvov) that was laid out at exhibitions and the anonymous notes passed forward to the stage at a celebrity evening (tvorcheskii vecher) with an actor who played Stalin are two such source genres. They are the centerpieces of this chapter. Yet these sources, we shall see, are best interpreted not as windows into “popular reception” of the Stalin cult, but as elaborate cultural artifacts in their own right that served numerous and varied functions. In this they resemble other sources that have become prominent since the opening of the Soviet archives, such as the “reports on popular moods” or svodki, which many historians at first were inclined to read as Gallup poll–like reflections of Soviet public opinion.1 Historians further saw this public opinion coalescing around binary poles of “affirmation” vs. “resistance.” In general it is helpful to approach the issue of reception not through the affirmation / resistance lens but instead by allowing for vastly different reactions—even in a single person, and even over very short periods of time. Rather than viewing these reactions as “conflicting” or “paradoxical,” we might best understand them as responses of a flexible, fractured, yet historically specific subject that can accommodate multiple utterances, actions, and thoughts over the course of hours or even minutes.2 More specifically, it is useful to watch out for the actual templates which informers followed in recording what they allegedly heard. Which categories, which rubrics were available in a given document? It helps, in other words, to look beyond the ocean of svodki we drown in at the archives and to search for the rare documents that allow us to reconstruct how they were produced, much as Jean-Jacques Becker uncovered the categories given to French school teachers, who were then expected to push “public opinion” during World War I into these state-supplied rubrics.3 Exactly the same applies to comment books at exhibitions and notes at celebrity evenings: the interesting and methodologically sound question is not how they reflect what the Soviet people thought about Stalin, but what purposes they were supposed to serve, what logic they followed, how this logic changed over time, and what this tells us about historically variable, “local” concepts of “reception” in Stalin’s time.