by Jan Plamper
Every Stalin portrait has a biography enmeshed in a complex set of events. Its life began with a competition, followed by an exhibit. Announced in the cultural newspaper, or in letters to selected artists, the competition set the parameters of the portrait: its subject matter, its painterly technique and size, and the technical strictures that attendant mechanical reproduction imposed on the original. The organizing institution of the Stalin portrait competition then provided (original or retouched) photographic or cinematic templates. It was an open secret that many painters then engaged a model to sit as Stalin—after all, Stalin himself was not available! As the artists began painting, colleagues or art patrons from the upper ranks of the Party who made the rounds of the studios gave informal critiques. Official, but not public criticism came from the competition’s jury (or the khudsovet if the portrait emerged outside the context of a competition). Just before an exhibition’s opening a Party boss walked through the rooms and removed one or two portraits, made changes in the order of hanging, or demanded that, at the eleventh hour, specific corrections be made to a given painting—retouch a cigarette here, correct Stalin’s nose there. Once opened, the exhibition garnered reviews and, after a time lag, became an object of art critical discussion in published form. Painters took much of this criticism to heart as they began their next Stalin portrait.
The next stage in the portrait’s biography was reproduction. The most individualized and elite form of reproduction was copying in oil.4 Sometimes even star painters produced copies of their successful pictures, but most copying artists were painters further down the hierarchy. Mechanical reproduction involved a multitude of media—from postcards to posters. In the process, most portraits were retouched. A painting passed through many filters of inspection before it was released into mass circulation. These ranged from the official censor at a press to Stalin’s secretariat—and, most likely, Stalin personally. Sometimes these filters, especially Stalin himself, went into action only after the portrait had been released into circulation. As a result, it sometimes occurred that all unsold copies of, for example, a book with Stalin portraits as illustrations were taken off bookstore shelves. While the Stalin cult had no all-controlling agency—a “Stalin cult commission” or a “ministry of propaganda”—it did refer to Stalin’s secretariat and Stalin himself as an Archimedean point.
It is difficult to say much about the ways in which the cult products were received, for this is an issue that raises numerous methodological problems. This book, however, has offered a way out of the conceptual cul-de-sac of reception by retracing the mechanisms whereby reactions to cult products were gathered, and by identifying the various kinds of logic that governed these mechanisms. After the Civil War, theater and other sectors of the arts began “measuring” cultural consumption. These efforts were expanded to include the visual arts and they accelerated during the Great Break, when some suggested that all state art acquisition should be based on the study of viewer opinions. After the Great Break and in concert with the expansion of the Stalin cult, these utopian, scientific approaches gave way to more symbolic approaches. The visitor comment book placed at art exhibits became a kind of performance. Its primary function was to demonstrate, both to those who entered comments and to the outside world, that Soviet art was intended for the masses—that it was unlike Western, “bourgeois” art, which was meant only for a few. For some who entered comments (and for some who passed comments on scrap paper to Stalin actor Aleksei Diky on stage at a celebrity evening), the act of performing these participatory rituals provided a real sense of participation.
Just how many resources the Stalin cult mobilized and how it captivated the bodies, feelings, and dreams of people in the Soviet Union and sympathizers abroad remains puzzling to this day. The poet Joseph Brodsky was named after Stalin and slept under a photograph of Stalin in his childhood Leningrad communal apartment room of sixteen square meters, which he shared with his parents. The founder of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Yuri Lotman, supplemented his student stipend by painting Stalin portraits for factory wall newspapers. The peasant Andrei Arzhilovsky recorded a dream in his diary less than a year before he was executed during the Great Terror in August 1937:
Someone told me I could see Stalin. A historic figure, it would be interesting to get to see him. And so . . . A small room, simple and ordinary. Stalin is drunk as a skunk, as they say. There are only men in the room, and just two of us peasants, me and one other guy with a black beard. Without a word, Vissarionovich knocks the guy with the black beard down, covers him with a sheet and rapes him brutally. “I’m next,” I think in despair, recalling the way he used to carry on in Tbilisi, and I’m thinking, how can I escape, but after his session Stalin seems to come to his senses somewhat, and he starts up a conversation, “Why were you so eager to see me personally?” “Well, why wouldn’t I be? Portraits are just portraits, but a living man, and a great one at that, is something else altogether,” said I. Overall, things worked out fairly well for me and they even gave me some dinner . . .
After Stalin’s death the mother of the future dissident émigré Aleksandr Zinoviev cut a portrait of Stalin from the newspaper and placed it in the Bible, explaining to her son that “Stalin took on his soul everybody else’s sins, that everyone is going to criticize him now and that someone has to pray for him.” And Molotov, asked in the mid-1970s if he ever dreamed of Stalin, confessed, “Sometimes. In extraordinary situations. . . . In a destroyed city . . . I can’t find a way out, and I meet him. In a word, very strange, confusing dreams.”5
Why do many authors throw up their hands and describe the effects of the Stalin cult as “hysteria,” “mass psychosis,” and other terms indicating that they understand that they do not understand? Why did Anna Akhmatova speak of the tears people shed over Stalin as an “anesthetic” that “is wearing off?”6 How did the human person, the creature whom Ernst Cassirer once termed a zoon symbolikon, a “symbolic being,” frame the person at the top of that pyramid of power?7
A study in the alchemy of power, this book has offered an analysis of how the Stalin cult was made. It has reconstructed the processes through which the various elements of the cult were chosen, combined, and interacted. Key to the alchemical process is the assumption that the end result is a sum that amounts to more than its parts. In other words, a surplus. Stalin’s elevation, his larger-than-life presence, is precisely this kind of surplus. And yet this surplus is of a different order. Ultimately we end up with a surplus of the unknowable. It, too, belongs inextricably to the alchemy of power; it is a surplus that remains beyond books.
Appendix
The Statistics of Visual Representations of Stalin in Pravda
A few technical words on the quantification of Stalin representations in Pravda are in order before we turn to the actual numbers. I defined “visual representations” as photographs, reproductions of paintings, depictions on book covers, and portrayals in plays or movies. I counted the number of these visual representations—by month, by year, and for the entire twenty-four-year span. In addition, I made the following distinctions: Stalin on the first page or on other pages of the paper; Stalin shown alone or with others;1 Stalin in the foreground (“direct” or “primary” representations) or in the background (“indirect” or “secondary” representations, as in a portrait on the wall, as a plaster bust, as a large, full-body sculpture, on a poster, or on a portrait carried by demonstrators).
The quantitative evolution of Stalin’s image in Pravda looks as follows. The public Stalin cult began when Stalin turned fifty. On 21 December 1929 the entire issue of Pravda was devoted to Stalin’s birthday. There was no slow buildup to 21 December—merely four pictures of Stalin were spread throughout the year, compared to fifteen visual depictions of Lenin in 1929. Prior to December 1929, the glorification of Stalin had always been second to that of other Bolshevik leaders such as Lenin, Trotsky, and Kalinin. Between 1930 and mid-1933 Stalin was shown rarely; when Stalin did appear, th
is was still registered. As Aleksandr Soloviev noted in his diary about the 1931 May Day celebrations in Moscow, “I was on Red Square. . . . On the Mausoleum there were Comrade Stalin and the members of the Politburo. . . . The demonstrators are carrying a few portraits of Comrade Stalin. Earlier it wasn’t like this.”2 As for images in Pravda, there was a steady increase from 1931 onward (Graph App.1). He was shown 8 times in 1931, 20 times in 1932, 32 times in 1933, 68 times in 1934, and 89 times in 1935 (including both direct and indirect representations). This number dropped to 77 in 1936. In the two subsequent years it expanded greatly and reached an all-time high of 142 representations in 1939, the year of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. Still, even at this high point his image did not appear every day, as one might have expected. Nor did Stalin agree to every request to rename a mountain, town, factory, or kindergarten in his honor. Rather there was a process of distinction, of raising Stalin’s value through scarcity and selective diffusion.
Graph App.1. Visual representations per year.
By Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949, the overall number of representations of him was down to 35 images, a drop that can be explained by the move away from photography and pictures of birthday celebrations toward other media such as film and sculpture. This drop came after a period of expansion following low wartime levels (21 representations in 1942, 22 in 1943, and 27 in 1944). To illustrate the magnitude of the wartime recession, during the three years of war the combined number of depictions of Stalin (70) was less than in any single year at the high point in the second half of the 1930s. During the eight postwar years, 1945–1952, Stalin was shown on average 37.1 times per year, with numbers varying between a high of 53 in 1945 and a low of 23 in 1952. This was less than half the median number of 82.5 depictions per year during the eight years before the war, 1933–1940, even though figures oscillated between 32 in 1933 and 142 in 1939. Several things account for the lower plateau of postwar Stalin representations. On the one hand Pravda no longer had to take part in the making of Stalin’s cult, since a canon of Stalin images had been firmly established between 1933 and the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. By the end of the war Stalin was almost everywhere, not just in Pravda. It had become practically impossible to move through Soviet space in the course of a single day and not encounter a representation of Stalin— hence the decline in Pravda’s importance in diffusing such representations. But the representations of Stalin themselves changed, too. They became increasingly indirect and figurative, showing, for example, not Stalin, but a group of people with shining faces gathered around a radio receiver, clearly engaged by listening to their leader.
In summary, the larger statistical picture shows increasing numbers after mid-1933, culminating in 1939 surrounding the celebrations of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. These years of the expansion, canonization, and diffusion of Stalin’s image were followed by three years of war, during which Stalin appeared rarely in Pravda— likely because the war had top priority, because for so long victory was uncertain, and because linking Stalin with defeats was deemed undesirable. Conversely, giving credit to Stalin for victory was considered extremely desirable. Therefore in 1945 the number of visual representations of Stalin made a huge leap, to almost double what it had been in 1944. From then on until his death, this number hovered around 40 a year, almost half of what it had been in the mid- and late 1930s. Stalin’s apotheosis had been completed, Pravda was but one of many media in which he was glorified, and indirect representations became increasingly important.
These statistical trends change if we differentiate between direct representations of Stalin and background representations. Again, visual background representations include painted Stalin portraits, Stalin busts (usually in plaster), colossal full-body sculptures, posters, and handicrafts such as the Stalin portrait woven into a Kirgiz carpet or the vase from a Leningrad porcelain factory. (Verbal background representations included banners with Stalin quotes; airplanes with “STALIN” painted on their wings; and airplanes formations making the name “S-T-A-L-I-N.”) The alltime high of direct representations was in 1935, when Stalin appeared 80 times on the pages of Pravda, but there were only 9 indirect representations (Graph App.2). In his birthday year 1939, the second most saturated year, he was shown 71 times directly and 71 times indirectly. This was only logical: even if the makers of Pravda had wanted to show more, say, Stalin portraits on the walls of kolkhoz chairmen or factory directors, in 1935 the private and public realms of Soviet life were not suffused enough with Stalin cult products to achieve this effect. The dynamics of background representations of Stalin were as follows during the two and a half decades studied: between 1929 and 1936 hardly any background representations of Stalin appeared—an average of 4.1 per year, to be precise—because Pravda was primarily occupied with establishing Stalin as the Soviet leader. Between 1937 and 1941 there were many background representations of Stalin—46 per year. Sometimes indirect outweighed direct representations, partly because after the cult production drives of the mid-1930s, such as the Stalin portrait competitions we examined in Chapter 5, there were enough Stalin cult products to be placed in backgrounds. Other reasons for the increase in indirect representation were that the process of establishing Stalin as number one leader in the collective imagination had been completed, and most likely also that it was considered unsuitable to link direct representations of Stalin with the cataclysms of the purges.
Graph App.2. Visual representations: foreground vs. background.
During the war years there were few background representations because so many photographs and pictures were from the front lines—open spaces like fields or woods without a place to put Stalin pictures. New Stalin representations were tailored to the extraordinary circumstances of the war. In the postwar period, primary representations again outweighed secondary ones. Between 1945 and 1953 there was a total of 198 primary representations and 105 secondary representations. Between 1937 and 1941, by contrast, there had been a total of 230 secondary representations and 213 primary representations. This postwar change was due to the new monumentalism of Stalin’s generalissimo image. Overall, Stalin was shown less often, but when he did appear, he did so in direct representations, on the front page, and all by himself. A scarcity of secondary representations was no longer the issue. Instead, the appearance of Stalin’s image had become highly ritualized and was limited to the holidays of the annual Soviet cycle. In fact, one could argue that the greater the number of Stalin representations circulating in society, the more limited his appearance in Pravda had to become. There was an intrinsic connection between the potential for mechanical reproduction of a leader’s countenance in the modern world and the deliberate limitation of his social presence. The more Stalin a medium could potentially supply, the greater the value of his infrequent appearance—hence the rather limited Pravda exposure in the postwar period. The less Stalin a medium could supply, the greater the value of his frequent appearance—hence the expansive Pravda exposure in 1933–1939. Cult producers themselves explicated this logic of supply and demand, of scarcity and value—much like their capitalist counterparts in Hollywood. Consider the East German Communist and editor of the journal Ost und West, Alfred Kantorowicz, who noted in his diary events surrounding the December 1949 celebration of Stalin’s seventieth birthday in the just-founded GDR:
In the first place we are supposed to celebrate Stalin’s seventieth birthday. All desks are already being flooded by Party Bureau and Kulturbund materials, three weeks before the event. We have been offered numerous celebratory articles. They are useless in their effusiveness and the epithets they employ, which incidentally only detract from the intended glorification and diminish the value of the one who is extolled. One doesn’t speak of the “ingenious” Goethe, the “sublime” Marx, the “great” Beethoven, the “universal” Michelangelo. Mentioning their names is enough. But try and explain this to the courtiers and careerists. Each shouts louder than the other; their language is out of all b
ounds, it merely screeches, howls and shrieks, and turns somersaults.3
This logic is homologous not only to Stalin’s “immodest modesty” but also to the logic that governed the field of “personality” in the early twentieth century, which Warren Susman has described as an “essentially antinomian vision” that placed a premium on self-expression while at the same time shunning selfishness.4 “But the ultimate irony of that vision of personality,” Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi explicates, “was actually the idea of being liked and likable, of appealing to the multitudes and attracting them, while being different from them.”5
The statistical trends for visual representations of Stalin alone or with others are quite similar to those of primary vs. secondary representations (Graph App.3). At the outset of the cult in 1929 a scissors opened: representations with others by far outweighed those in which he was shown by himself. This scissors gradually closed during the years of Stalin’s establishment at the top of the hierarchy, so that in 1937 for the first time ever, solitary representations prevailed over those with others. In 1938 there was an all-time high of 63 Stalin representations by himself compared with thirty-four representations with others. Stalin had become the undisputed single leader.