by Jan Plamper
THE COMMENT BOOK
Comrades, I believe that our greatest kind of criticism is mass criticism, not the criticism of art historians.
—Culture functionary Zhukov at selection meeting for 1937 MOSSKh Sculpture Exhibition
As we saw in Chapter 1, World War I greatly accelerated the continual movement toward mass society, mass politics, and mass culture. The Great War forced states across Europe and North America to draw upon and engage their populations in new and expanding ways—aided by the technological advances of the mass media. When the war was over, the population as a collective actor—“the masses”—had to be reckoned with in one way or another most everywhere. Bolshevik Russia was part of these developments, and it is here that the beginnings of the Russian comment book lie.
In the sphere of culture the audience became both a target of cultural products and an active participant in the processes of cultural production. One study has shown how Soviet literature studied readers’ reactions and these reactions then began to partially prestructure the kinds of literature that emerged.4 Works on Soviet cinema document how the reactions of moviegoers were investigated in the mid-1920s by “scientific brigades” that had developed quite sophisticated sociological methods of studying viewer reactions.5 Due to its interactive potential, the new Soviet theater of the 1920s was a front-runner in terms of studying audience reactions to plays.
There were numerous attempts, especially during the heady days of scientific utopianism during NEP, to quantify spectator comments and turn their analysis into a “science.” For example, in 1927 a Commission for the Study of the Spectator (Komissia po izucheniiu zritelia) was formed to study from psychological and sociological perspectives the “reflexology” of Moscow theatergoers. “We consider it necessary to introduce at large theaters a kind of psychological service, i.e. a permanent psychologist, who conducts the work of studying the audience, the actor, and the forms of interaction between these sides.” After one theater had been chosen as the “central laboratory for methods of studying the spectator,” the commission really set to work.6 Besides the questionnaire method and the statistical analysis of questionnaires, the commission observed the audience during the play. The play was divided up into time segments,7 and a graph showed “laughter” in red, “fright” in brown, “intense silence” in continuous blue, just “silence” in dotted blue, and “inattention” in yellow (Plate 13).8 Such social science techniques derived from a number of national and international sources, including Soviet sociology and Soviet advertising (which during NEP conducted studies with focus groups and was influenced by German and U.S. “advertisement science”).9 In turn, these techniques shaped Western practices, as cross-fertilization still reigned supreme between the October and the Stalin revolutions.
Art, too, began to collect audience opinions through the institution of the comment book.10 It is unclear exactly when this institution was imported from the West, but it seems that no comment books existed before the Revolution, not even at the exhibitions of the Wanderers.11 The comment book became one of the most entrenched institutions of museum-going and lasted well past the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a genuine tool for measuring audience reactions during the 1920s, and became mere window-dressing, a kind of pseudo-participatory institution, in the early 1930s. The comment book, together with spectator sociology, was later reactivated as a sign of the democratic-consultative changes taking place under Khrushchev.
Comment books were usually notebooks that were laid out in particular exhibition rooms or were available for an entire exhibition (Plates 14, 15, 16). According to a curator at the Tretyakov Gallery who participated in the 1949 exhibition in honor of Stalin’s birthday, the general purpose of comment books was to study the viewer, to find out “what he likes, why he likes it, does he like it the right way and for the right reasons?”12 In the early days pages in a comment book were sometimes subdivided, with comments in the center and reactions to the comment by other visitors in the margins.13 Asked about this practice of commenting on comments, the Tretyakov curator said that this was rare and existed only at the beginning, when the viewer was “less educated, less enlightened.”14 Thus as a forum of interpersonal written communication, the comment book also served didactic purposes, with viewers educating each other. From the perspective of the museum, the comment book also furnished information on how to rearrange the exhibition. On every wall, the center was to be occupied by a single important painting (derzhashchaia veshch, in the curator’s words) and if too many comments referred to other paintings, the placement of these could be changed to redirect attention to the main painting. Visitor comments further prompted curators to change the guided tours that invariably accompanied exhibitions.
With the monumental exhibitions of the 1930s comment books became more formal and decorative. They were now often leather-bound and sported the gold-emblazoned name of the exhibition on the front cover (Plate 17). This change in outward appearance attests to the shifting functions of comment books. If they originally were intended as pragmatic, “scientific” statistical instruments to collect data on viewer reactions, or as forum-like educational tools, they later turned into a standardized, codified, eulogistic representation of power. The handling of comment books at exhibitions also changed. At the Georgian exhibition, for example, the guard of a specific room countersigned all visitor comments, supposedly to assure that no undesirable comments were recorded. Or, as Voroshilov’s wife, Yekaterina Voroshilova, the deputy director of the Lenin Museum, noted in her diary in 1949, “I checked the comment books on 30 April. Comrade Borynin’s attitude toward this new job was formalistic. He didn’t look at the comment books for an entire month and he poorly instructed the guard in the room, who was supposed to look after the comment book.”15 According to the Tretyakov curator, at many of the Stalin exhibitions there were no comment books but rather boxes into which visitors put pieces of paper with their comments. Thus negative comments—khuliganskie otzyvy, in her words—could be filtered out.16
The comment book differed from the questionnaire method (anketirovanie) in that the latter was an all-out effort to gather each and every visitor’s reaction, whereas the comment was a largely voluntary action on the part of the viewer. True, given the large number of visitors who came in a collective, from their factory committee, their union, their Komsomol cell or Red Army unit, the social pressure to leave comments was intense. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo was unabashed about what could be called the “organized voluntarism” of visitors at the 1933 “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” exhibition: “in conjunction with the exhibition, political propaganda as well as agitational and mass work will be widely organized. According to preliminary targets about 300,000 organized visitors are supposed to go through the exhibition—first and foremost shock workers, osoviakhimovtsy [members of The Society of Friends of Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction, one of the largest Soviet voluntary organizations], Red Army soldiers, and Komsomol members.”17 And while the exhibition was in full swing, the newspaper noted, “for the popularization of the exhibition a cycle of current radio programs, ‘With the Microphone Through the Exhibition,’ was organized.” The medium of film was also mobilized: “Soiuzkinokhronika [the Soviet newsreel agency] filmed the exhibition and released a short sound film. Besides this film, all Moscow movie theaters are showing agitational movie advertisements for the exhibition.” Finally, “at the main factories informational talks are being organized.”18
The open reporting on the constructed nature of visitor habits did not hinder Sovetskoe Iskusstvo from celebrating the daily number of actual visitors. These numbers were meticulously displayed, as a sign of an exhibition’s popularity, in the newspaper’s most prominent place, the masthead next to the title.19 In 1933, the media made transparent the manipulation of visitors at exhibitions and at the same time celebrated these visitors as a statistical victory of the popularity of socialist realist art, as though the visitors at Soviet exhibitions were exclusi
vely “voting with their feet.”
In spite of the uncertainty as to when and how comment books were first introduced in Soviet Russia, it is clear that as early as 1923 at the second Red Army exhibition a comment book was available.20 In 1925 a professional propaganda worker from the Urals mentioned comment books with entries about a painting by Isaak Brodsky:
Your painting attracted the general attention of all visitors in Sverdlovsk, the capital of the Urals. 325 comments are distributed as follows: very good—305; satisfactory—15, and unsatisfactory—5. The latter are primarily from our “artists,” who did not criticize but engaged in demagoguery, for which they were blamed by the workers, peasants, and proletarian intelligentsia. . . . A worker from the diamond-cutting factory was correct when he wrote the following: “Having seen several comments about Brodsky’s picture, I see that our local artists for some reason do not give Brodsky’s picture enough credit, or rather, that they are jealous of his talent. But I will tell you why: our artists cannot do a picture that is better done than this painting.” These simple and clear expressions of the proletariat of the Urals say almost everything regarding the undeserved criticisms of your painting. . . . It was particularly gratifying for me, a political education worker, to see your painting—full of life, truth, and genuine beauty. It depicts the leaders of the revolutionary proletariat and their characteristic features in such a way that one could not wish for anything better. I saw and listened to Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kalinin, Lunacharsky, Stalin, Tomsky, and others. Your painting renders them wonderfully and makes me recall the leaders precisely the way I saw them two or three years ago.21
During his 1928 exclusion proceedings from AKhR, Brodsky pointed out that his painting Meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council “at the last Red Army exhibition received the greatest number of positive comments from the visitors.” And yet, he complained, “this painting was passed over for the prize, and prizes were awarded to paintings that received a smaller number of good comments.”22 The union representative, I. E. Khvoinik, then inquired “why Brodsky was not awarded a prize at the tenth AKhR exhibition for his painting Meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council if it had received the greatest number of votes from 2,000 questionnaires.” According to the protocol, “the representatives of AKhR explain that RVSR [Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic] awarded the prizes and the jury was not made up of artists. In the ensuing dispute AKhR hastened to defend Brodsky.”23 In other words, during the mid-1920S, comments from questionnaires and possibly also comment books played a significant role in discussions within the artist community.
In 1929 GlavIskusstvo’s State Commission for the Purchase of Visual Art experimented with a new form of acquiring Soviet art for the Soviet state. At a special exhibition by several artist organizations (including AKhR and OSt) groups of viewers, selected from different social backgrounds that were meticulously listed in percentages and tabular form, received questionnaires for judging the paintings on the walls. Among other things, the commission concluded that “the distribution of positive and negative comments is about the same for the different social categories”; that “almost all grades given are not explained, but where they are, one can observe the following: in the category ‘white-collar workers,’ the criteria ‘reality,’ ‘naturalness’ are most frequent, in the category ‘workers’ the criteria ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness of colors’ prevail.”24 The commission decided not to recommend this method of selecting paintings, because, if organized on a large scale, it would create enormous logistical problems. Masses of viewers, who were representative of the different social groups, would have to be channeled past a large number of paintings, all of which would have to be exhibited in one place at the same time.
The experiment with the new method of the acquisition of artwork was apparently a sign of the renewed radicalism of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) and was forced upon the artist unions by GlavIskusstvo.25 At least, representatives of the artist organizations wrote a collective letter in which they defended themselves against an article attacking them in the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda, and in so doing revealed further details of how they had surveyed viewer opinions. Among other things, they emphasized that the exhibition had been sufficiently publicized and that the opinions had been collected anonymously.26
The 1934 exhibition “Young Artists” featured a questionnaire sheet (oprosnyi listok). It read as follows: “Questionnaire. Write down your opinion about the exhibition and its artwork. Underline: worker, white-collar worker, student, peasant, officer, Red Army soldier. Put the completed questionnaire into the box.”27 V. G. Tsybulin, who classified himself as a “student” and “peasant,” commented on a picture entitled After Work by a certain Nevezhin: “This work is but a shadow of the French school in our socialist reality. This piece is artificial. Where is the horse’s behind? This work is bad in that it does not show the real life, and the technique is weak.”28
Later during the 1930s, artists used the comments to further their own standing or lessen that of their colleagues. During a 1937 discussion in the Committee for Arts Affairs regarding the selection of sculptures for the annual MOSSKh sculpture exhibition, one functionary argued that the negative comments at last year’s sculpture exhibition had not been taken seriously enough. “90–95 percent of the comments in the three visitor comment books,” he claimed, “were negative, clearly negative. . . . But at the discussion . . . they tried to downplay this by saying that the visitors to the exhibition were just a ‘strolling public’ (flaniruiushchaia publika). It seems to me that one must not say this kind of thing about Soviet citizens who come to an exhibition. This was possible before the Revolution, then there was a flaniruiushchaia publika.”29 The functionary, Zhukov, continued: “To demonstrate more clearly . . . how the spectator judges this exhibition, I translated all comments into the numerical idiom. . . . When the viewer says that ‘this is the best of all, I like this piece the most’ or if he says that this is the best work of the exhibition, or if he says that it is very good, I . . . gave a 5. When viewers said that something is simply good, I put down the number 4, and when it is satisfactory—3, and when they curse, I gave a 2 or 1. And so, 25 comments on Merkurov are almost all 4s or 5s.” “Comrades,” he concluded, “I believe that our greatest kind of criticism is mass criticism, not the criticism of art historians.”30 Thus at the very moment they were largely being turned into a Potemkin village, the comment books began to be represented as signs of truly democratic art production—as opposed to prerevolutionary art for the few, for the flaniruiushchaia publika?31
There were more, and there was more to, representations of Soviet democratic art production. Aleksandr Gerasimov, in a discussion of Katsman’s one-man exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts on 26 June 1950, offered an excursus on Katsman’s Visitors with Kalinin (1927) (Plate 18). The picture itself depicts a pseudo-participatory practice—petitioners to the Soviet Union’s elderly grandfather, Old Bolshevik and President of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin. Gerasimov in his discussion mentions that the peasant petitioners so much identified with the painting that they traveled from far away and made actual gestures of reverence. Thus Katsman achieved a remarkable doubling of representation: the narod votes with its feet and overcomes obstacles on its way to a painting that depicts the narod voting with its feet and coming to the incarnation of Soviet power:
M. I. Kalinin, depicted by Katsman, is standing and reading a petition, which the farmers who have come to him have given him. Next to him stands a farm woman, with yet another paper that she wants to hand Kalinin. Then there stands a secretary and a group of farmers. No doubt this is no longer only a collective portrait but already a thematic composition with a certain theme, the theme of showing the relationship of the Soviet people with its new popular power—the All-Russian elder (starosta) . . ., to show a new type of statesman, who is unusually close to the people, whom these farmers consider entirely one of their own, who came to him with t
heir needs. . . . I cannot forget the impression that this painting made on the farmers who came to look at it. They came into the room and looked at the painting for 3–5 minutes, then bowed deeply to E. A. [Katsman], said “thank you,” and left. At first the people came from 10 kilometers away to look at this picture, then from zo kilometers. So this picture received widespread popularity without any advertisements or posters.32