The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  It is unclear whether this advice was heeded or whether, in general, the audience’s input had any consequences whatsoever in the artistic production of movies. The integrative effect, however, of creating a bond between artist and audience and the impression among the people that their opinion mattered, that they were truly involved in the creative process, should not be underestimated. In one of the last Stalin movies, The Fall of Berlin (1949), Mikhail Gelovani returned to his habitual role will of the people or the whim as the vozhd’ (Plate 19)—at the of Stalin?

  This brings us back to the vexed question of reception. Let us begin by asking about the intended audience of the Stalin cult products, especially the Stalin portraits and Stalin films treated in this chapter. Clearly, the products were meant for the “masses”—for the entire population. There was no differentiation into elite and popular products, into products for women or men, into products for children or adults, into products for Caucasus mountaineers or Ivanovo textile workers, into products for Soviet citizens of Muslim background or those of Russian Orthodox heritage, and if some products—such as oil-painted copies of celebrated, publicly exhibited Stalin oil portraits—were restricted to the privileged few of the Stalinist elite, this did not change their expressive registry, which continued to be tailored to the totality of the population. True, this totality was still restricted to the Soviet populace, as the cult products were not targeted at a global audience. Even during the post-1945 expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, first in Eastern Europe, then during the Cold War in the developing world, it is questionable if this ever became the case. In this respect Stalin cult production differed fundamentally from capitalist cultural production. The Hollywood film industry, from the 1920s onward, was directed at an international audience.61

  The perceived taste of the Soviet totality was an important factor in dictating the ways in which the leader was portrayed. Cult producers deemed legibility to be of prime importance and strove to create uniform and uniformly legible cult products—which they then expected to be read uniformly by the audience. Because audience tastes seemed nebulous after the Revolution, during NEP questionnaires and comment books (as well as other forms of audience research in different sectors of the arts) played a significant role in trying to ascertain the Soviet population’s repertoires of reception. At the same time, during the first postrevolutionary decade, the comment book already served educational purposes—with the page as late as 1933 divided into two columns, one for comments, the other reserved for reactions to these comments. It is possible that the results of the NEP and First Five-Year Plan–era sociological audience research bolstered the general turn from abstractionism to realism. This turn was also a result of the dictator’s and his henchmen’s taste, and other factors.

  Coeval with the onset of the full-blown Stalin cult in the early 1930s, the comment book mutated into a largely performative instrument. Its overriding purpose became to demonstrate to the Soviet populace (and perhaps to the West) that Soviet art—including that of the Stalin cult—was for the people and from the people.62 Was it successful in this representational effort? We cannot know, but we can know some of the ways in which the comment book was supposed to, and indeed did, “work” during the existence of the Stalin cult. One function of the comment book was to suggest to the population that it participated in a feedback cycle, in the making of art that was made for it. The population was presented to itself as both the object and the author of art. True, this function played hardly any role with Stalin portraits, where irreverent comments were considered out of place and were indeed physically censored. But through the publication of visitor comments in the newspapers and through the public shaming of some artists via these comments, the act of commenting in a comment book was generally endowed with the meaning of participation or even empowerment. It is likely that some of this aura was transferred to the act of leaving a comment on a Stalin portrait. At the celebrity evening, a similar act was writing comments on scrap paper, which were passed forward to the stage and received a reaction by the celebrity, say, a response spoken in the microphone. Such “participatory practices” proffered by the regime were likely perceived by many not as “pseudo,” but as genuinely effective participation in the arts. Pierre Bourdieu’s insights about opinion polls in democratic societies are pertinent here: “The opinion poll is, at the present time, an instrument of political action; its most important function is perhaps to impose the illusion that a public opinion exists.”63 What amplified the illusionary effect of participation in Stalin’s Russia was that the contemporaneous alternatives of participation were portrayed as utterly unattractive: on the one hand there was total dictatorship in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and other authoritarian states, on the other hand there was conflict-ridden, ineffective participation—“democracy” in quotation marks—in the United States, Britain, and France.

  Further functions of comment books were to teach museum-goers to acquire “culture” (kulturnost’), and to let museum-goers help each other acquire “culture”—by creating a shared communicative space, in which one viewer read the comments of another. In this way comment books also created community and served integrative purposes, bringing together people from all walks of life in a single, and from the 1930s onward increasingly sacrally charged, space (signified by the shift toward expensive, colored leather-bound comment books). The final goal of comment books was the total mobilization of the population. As for the actual comments, they surely taught museum-goers to “speak Bolshevik” in the sphere of the visual arts, that is, to acquire the official discourse about the paintings they were seeing.64 For example, Pravda published similar reactions by moviegoers after the premiere of a new film, thus prestructuring its further reception.65 In fact, many of these comments were beamed to the larger population via the mass media, so that they had influence on people beyond the community of writers of entries in exhibition or museum comment books. Through reading in the press that certain comments had, in an extreme case, cut off an artist from the community of artists, writers of comments were given a sense of empowerment. Indeed, and unbeknownst to the writers, in nonpublic communication within the artists’ community comments were mobilized to raise or lower the standing of artists. Artists were very anxious about the comments they received.

  After Stalin’s death the comment book resumed some of the genuinely consultative NEP-era functions it had lost during the 1930s. Thus in July 1954 Aleksandr Gerasimov wrote to Petr Pospelov at the Central Committee and complained that the recently closed exhibition of his artwork from trips to India and Egypt had garnered negative comments. Enthusiastic comments made by Indians or Egyptians might have been due to “diplomatic politeness,” as Gerasimov explained with ostentatious modesty—but there were also “evil ad hominem attacks and even terrorist threats, examples of which I am enclosing.” The cultural newspaper Sovetskaia Kul’tura, the successor to Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, had failed to follow Gerasimov’s demand to write critically about the attacks and threats.66 Clearly, a year and a half after Stalin’s death and in the midst of creeping, silent de-Stalinization, Gerasimov’s star was sinking. At the same time a new atmosphere of openness was gradually settling in, as can be seen from some of the negative comments Gerasimov attached. “We still know how to make bombs from tin cans,” one anonymous writer threatened.67 Another directly fought back: “Muscovites are embarrassed by the dirt and settling of personal scores, which these pages are full of. And we think it is a shame that those who write such things hide their last names,” wrote three women (with legible last names).68 A fellow artist likewise bemoaned the cowardice of the writers of “hooligan attacks” and surmised that the few legible last names were in fact pseudonyms.69

  Under Khrushchev the comment book became but one of several consultative institutions, the new “complaint book” (kniga zhalob) in stores and government offices constituting another.70 The comment book indeed became considerably more democratic and the artist acquired more a
gency in deploying it. Thus the sculptor Stepan Erzia set out a comment book in his studio in order to collect comments testifying to the bad conditions there.71 By 1980, when a book on the artist Ilia Glazunov appeared, five-sixths of it were comments—positive and negative—from a 1979 exhibition in Leningrad’s Manezh. They ranged from “Thank you for your pure art. Encountering it, one gets spiritually cleaner and brighter” to “A triumph of tastelessness!” and “Comrade Glazunov! Not only are you a plagiarizer, you lack basic taste and humanity.”72

  Conclusion

  STALIN DIED ONE real and several symbolic deaths. Many people experienced his physical death on 5 March 1953 as a loss of truly existential proportions. With the passing of the leader, the force that held their lives together suddenly was no more. There was a logic to the fact that his demise brought about their own deaths—from heart attacks or as a result of being trampled in the crowds moving forward to see his lifeless body. For those who managed to catch a glimpse of his corpse as it lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions there would be no closure. His cult and its alchemy of power had made him seem larger than life, so that now embalming his dead remains, dressing them in the white generalissimo’s uniform, and placing them next to Lenin could not suffice. Not even removal from the Mausoleum and burial at the Kremlin wall brought an end to this story. Stalin’s corpse kept rising from the grave, like that of the fictitious dictator Varlam Aravidze in Tengiz Abuladze’s 1986 movie Repentance.1

  Khrushchev’s secret speech of February 1956 was followed by a massive iconoclastic campaign that sought to remove every trace of Stalin’s image and name from Soviet public space. The state-sponsored iconoclasm of 1956 and 1961 (the year of the Twenty-Second Party Congress which made de-Stalinization official policy) was preceded by iconoclastic initiatives from below, for there had always been cases of people defiling the leader’s public image, writing anti-Stalin ditties, telling anti-Stalin jokes, and celebrating the day of Stalin’s death.2 These initiatives from below made sense, since Stalin had become a symbol—a concentrated site of meaning—and as a symbol he stood for more than Stalin the person: for Soviet-style communism, for Soviet nationality policy, for Soviet religious policy, and much more. Yet neither these popular responses nor the state’s iconoclastic efforts could bring a sense of closure.

  Stalin had to die again and again—most recently in 1989/1991. Indeed, he is still alive, as a spate of post-Soviet Staliniana (books, movies) and public approval ratings of 50-plus percent at the beginning of the third millennium go to show. It seems that the Stalin-era slogan “Stalin will live eternally!” (Stalin— vechno zhiv!) has as much relevance today as it did in the past. Why this is the case will occupy scholars for a long time. Perhaps, as some have suggested, it has to do with the absence of regime change at the time of his death, a circumstance that contrasts markedly with “initial scenes of death and their sequencing with respect to regime end” in such cases as those of Italy’s Mussolini (“hanging and humiliation”), Germany’s Hitler (“suicide and silence”), Japan’s Hirohito (“desacralization and confident state funeral”), and Romania’s Nicolae and Elena Ceau§escu (“execution and ‘secretive’ public burial”).3

  The sources of the Stalin cult was the first issue this book has tried to resolve. Rather than viewing the cult as the outgrowth of eternal Russian Byzantine authoritarianism, a simple product of Stalin’s psychopathology, an inescapable feature of totalitarian regimes, or a concession to the premodern mentality of the peasants who entered the Party during the Great Break, I have viewed the Stalin cult as an example of the modern personality cult more generally. Modern personality cults in the sphere of politics share five features that set them apart from their predecessors. They are secular, that is, they reject a metaphysical source of legitimacy (as with divine right) and instead are anchored in popular sovereignty; their cult objects are all male; they address the entire population, not merely an elite; they use mass media and uniform, mass-produced cult products; and they are limited to closed societies, in which the mass media are sufficiently controlled to prohibit the introduction of rival cults. The move to modern personality cults was of course nonlinear, yet the trend can easily be traced. Napoleon III was the first politician with a modern personality cult. Later stages included World War I, during which the mass base of personality cults expanded further and the cults themselves became entangled. If, for example, during Louis XIV’s reign monarchy was the undisputed form of political rule, the post-1918 leaders embodied radically different worldviews that vied for global hegemony—Mussolini stood for fascism, Stalin for communism, Churchill and Roosevelt for capitalism. The cult representations of these leaders also became entangled. Stalin’s calm oratorical style and body language, for example, were juxtaposed to Hitler’s wild gesturing and rhetoric. Despite many discomforting commonalities, a comparison of the symbolic politics of Stalin, Hitler, and the like with Roosevelt (or Charles de Gaulle or Ronald Reagan) shows that the differences are more important.

  We have noted there were at least three more influences on the complex path to the Stalin cult. There was the “tsarist carryover,” the tradition of the cult of the tsar which weighed heavily upon the Bolsheviks, no matter how much they tried to distance themselves from it after the October Revolution. There was the tradition of personality cults on the Left, no matter how impossible to reconcile with the collectivist ideology of Marxism. And there was the tradition of the radical intelligentsia circles, whose members glorified circle leaders with cult products. All the leading Bolsheviks were socialized in these circles, and once they usurped power in 1917 the formative experience of the circle began to shine through, no matter the disdain they heaped on personality cults.

  Just how the symbolic dimension of Stalin became all-important—how his cult was made—and how the resulting cult products circulated and how people made sense of them, has been the main subject of this book. The newspaper Pravda was an important instrument that Stalin portraitists used to navigate through the rugged terrain of Party politics. It was the country’s premier news medium, and also a microcosm of the Stalin cult. It is an ideal case with which to study the way the cult’s visual registry developed over time. After the cult’s take-off in mid-1933, Pravda was preoccupied with establishing Stalin as number one in the collective imaginary—distinguishing him visually from his comrades-in-arms. After this task had been achieved (by 1939, Stalin’s sixtieth birthday), Stalin’s appearances were restricted to Soviet holidays. The war brought a hiatus in depictions, and then a major shift in the way Stalin was portrayed: as of late 1943 he was shown as a military commander and elder statesman. Toward the end of his life, Stalin began to appear in “absent” representations—for example, the faces of listeners gathered around a radio receiver. These absent representations were a kind of preparation for his death, a foreshadowing of his absence. When he finally did die, his piecemeal disappearance from Pravda propelled and at the same time indexed the slow (and initially silent) process of de-Stalinization.

  If Pravda is a window on the pictorial evolution of the cult, Aleksandr Cerasi -mov’s 1938 painting, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, arguably the most famous Stalin portrait, lends itself to a hermeneutics of a (indeed, the) socialist realist leader portrait. A mirror of Soviet power, this painting is organized around Stalin in concentric circles. These concentric circles became the dominant form of spatial organization in portraits of Stalin. Depictions of Lenin differed markedly: they were organized in linear fashion, with Lenin’s body or arm directed toward a focal point in the picture. They expressed the dynamic forward movement of the Revolution, whereas depictions of Stalin were meant to convey a sense of arrival after the building of socialism during the First Five-Year Plan.

  In the fabrication of his visual image Stalin’s role was crucial. He masterminded his own cult, often acting as the ultimate filter of its products before they were released for social circulation. Because Marxism was fundamentally incompatib
le with the very idea of a personality cult, his role was kept secret. Stalin bridged the gap between what was (his cult) and what ought to have been (collective leadership) by resuscitating a culturally virulent pattern that I have called “immodest modesty”—feigning public disapproval and grudging tolerance of the cult out of democratic conviction while all along clandestinely controlling it. Other Party bosses were instrumental in managing the cult in the different spheres of artistic production. Kliment Voroshilov was responsible for the case most prominently discussed in this book—oil portraiture. He became a patron of socialist painters; in fact, an entire system of informal patronage developed in which high-ranking Party figures oversaw one or other sector of the arts. For example, Yenukidze and, after his death, Molotov were patrons of the theater, Kaganovich of architecture. Within the Soviets’ highly planned system of art production, it may at first seem paradoxical that personal patronage became so influential. When one considers that the ultimate aim was to manufacture a patricentric cult of the leader—a supremely personalized form of power—this seems less perplexing. Specifically, Voroshilov visited painters in their studios and corrected their portraits of Stalin, but also engendered a sizable cult of his own by sitting for his own portrait. Voroshilov’s cult standing probably saved his life during the Great Terror and after he bungled the Winter War in 1940. The effort to disentangle him from Stalin in public symbolic politics would have been mind-boggling indeed. Symbolic power in Stalinist Russia became a question of life and death.