The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  Graph App.3. Visual representations: alone vs. with others.

  Graph App.4. Visual representations: front page vs. other pages.

  During the war Stalin was rarely shown, and if he was shown at all it was most often with other people like generals, diplomats, and foreign dignitaries. The postwar period, however, signaled a return to the prewar trend and in conjunction with the new, reigning monumentalism of the generalissimo image, he was shown more often by himself than with others.

  The presentation of Stalin on the front page or other pages of Pravda shows an overwhelming preponderance of front-page representations over those on other pages (Graph App.4). Exceptions were 1929, 1930, 1939, 1940, and 1949, though for different reasons. In 1929–1930 the cult was in its fledgling period and Stalin’s position was too fragile to secure for him the most sacral place, the front page of the paper. In the birthday years 1939–1940 and in 1949 there was an overflow of representations in general, and these had to be spread throughout the entire paper. To illustrate, in 1939 Stalin appeared in 80 visual representations in the body of the newspaper, as well as in 62 front-page representations.

  Such is the numerical evolution of Stalin’s visual image in Pravda. An exercise in quantitative history presupposes, of course, that one cares about the statistical side of the pictorial Stalin cult. There are serious reasons not to care. There is the consideration of actually how representative were the images? Why does this inquiry focus on visual rather than text-based representations? After all, Pravda was a newspaper, not a tabloid or a glossy magazine. Why consider images rather than text, audio (radio), or audiovisual (film) representations in general? And why does this research examine a single newspaper, which mediated but a minute fraction of the signs through which Stalin’s image was projected to the public?

  Then consider the issue of an image’s context. Stalin might appear in a single issue of Pravda twice but Molotov, in conjunction with a foreign policy event, four times. In another issue Stalin might appear only once but all by himself. Statistically the former example outweighs the latter. Placement and paratext are further aspects of the larger question of context. In one issue, a majestic Stalin photograph may take up a quarter of the front-page, while in another he is shown on page four as a barely discernible plaster bust in the background of a picture of a polling station at a kolkhoz election campaign. In one issue the caption may prestructure the audience’s reception of the picture, while in another there is no caption and the unrelated text of an article placed next to the picture creates unexpected meanings.

  Finally, there is the issue of how the image is perceived. As reader-response theorists have been telling us since the 1970s, meanings are neither fixed nor intrinsic to signs but arise from a communicative process between sign and reader, spectator, or listener.6 What used to be called “the receiving end” actually plays a dominant role in the construction of meaning. Hence it would make little sense to count the number of Stalin images in an issue of Pravda published on a sunny Saturday in May. Context tells us that the paper was left unread because most Pravda readers were too busy planting potatoes at their dachas—May 9 is the traditional starting day of the planting season. Similarly East Germans, faced with the public Stalin cult on the occasion of his seventieth birthday in 1949, might ascribe not the intended meanings but the meanings attached to Stalin’s effigy in Nazi propaganda, seeing not the wise and benevolent “father of peoples,” but the swarthy embodiment of “Judeo-Asiatic Bolshevism.” As should be clear by now, there is meaning to pictures beyond numbers. This is what the book that precedes this appendix has been about.

  Abbreviations and Glossary

  of Frequently Used Terms

  Academy of Arts of the USSR. Members appointed by the Communist Party, established in 1947.

  Agitprop. Agitation and propaganda, positive term akin to “enlightenment.” The Agitprop Department at the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party was responsible for cultural affairs, including the visual arts.

  AKhR. Association of Artists of the Revolution, name as from 1928 of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR), founded in 1922. Merged with the regional bodies (e.g. MOSSKh) of the Artists’ Union in 1932.

  Comintern. Communist International. Founded in Moscow to promote the spread of worldwide communism, existed 1919–1943.

  Committee for Arts Affairs. State body founded in 1936. Its Khudfond section took over responsibility for kontraktatsiia from VseKoKhudozhnik.

  Cult product(ion).This book’s collective designation for (the making of) Stalin portraits, posters, drawings, statues, busts, films, plays, poems, and songs.

  d. delo (file) (archive).

  f. fond (collection) (archive).

  g. god (year).

  GlavIskusstvo. Narkompros division engaged in financing visual arts production, founded in 1928.

  Glavlit. Main censorship agency responsible mostly for texts and visual products, founded in 1922.

  Great Break. Period of forced industrialization and collectivization of agriculture, 1928–1932. Taken from Stalin’s November 1929 Pravda article “Year of the Great Break: On the Twelfth Anniversary of the October Revolution.”

  Gulag. Literally Main Administration for Corrective Labor Camps, figuratively the Soviet system of prisons and forced labor.

  GTG. State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.

  GUM. Main State Department Store, Moscow.

  Ikonografiia. Iconography or sum of canonical visual representations of Stalin. The term was stripped of its Russian Orthodox religious connotations and no longer signified icon painting.

  IMEL. Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, archive of papers of key Marxists and institute for Party ideology.

  Iskusstvo. Visual Arts Publishing House.

  Iskusstvo. Highbrow thick journal for the visual arts, launched in 1933.

  Izo. Visual Arts Department of Narkompros. The main distributor of limited state resources for painters during the 1920s.

  IZOGIZ. Visual Arts Publishing House. Subordinate to GlavIskusstvo.

  Izokombinat. Visual art factory, responsible for the industrial production of Stalin statues, busts, portraits, etc. Visual art factories were first established in the 1930s.

  Khudfond. Art Fund, part of Committee for Arts Affairs, founded in 1936. Took over responsibility for kontraktatsiia from VseKoKhudozhnik.

  Khudsovet. Art soviet. Jury-like collective body for judging art in various organizations.

  Kniga otzyvov. Visitors’ comment book at exhibitions.

  Kolkhoz. Collective farm.

  Komsomol. Communist Youth League.

  Kontraktatsiia. System of commissioning and paying for visual art.

  Kruzhok, kruzhki. Intelligentsia circle(s) of students, artists, Bolsheviks, etc.

  Kulak. Rich peasant.

  l., ll. list, listy (folio, folios) (archive).

  Lenin Museum. Moscow museum of the life and work of Lenin that also housed Stalin art.

  LOSSKh. Leningrad Section of the Union of Soviet Artists, subsumed under unified Artists’ Union in 1957.

  Lubok. Popular print. Cheap print medium in prerevolutionary Russia.

  Maslovka. Artist housing and studio complex on Upper Maslovka Street in Northern Moscow, opened in 1930.

  M Br I. I. Brodsky Apartment Museum, Scientific Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, St. Petersburg (archive).

  MOSSKh. Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists, founded in 1932, renamed Moscow Union of Soviet Artists (MSSKh) in 1938, subsumed under unified Artists’ Union in 1957.

  Mossovet. Moscow City Soviet.

  Museum of the Revolution. Moscow museum, housed Stalin art.

  Narkompros. People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, in charge of education and culture.

  Naturshchik. Sitter for portraits, substituting for the actual person.

  NEP. New Economic Policy, 1921–1928. Period of partial return to a market economy following the Civil War; often used as a
general term for the period in Soviet history between the Civil War and the Great Break.

  NKVD. People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, name of the ministry in charge, among other areas, of the Soviet secret police, 1934–1946; often used as a general name for the secret police.

  ob. oborot (verso) (archive).

  Oblast. Administrative unit roughly equivalent to a province.

  Obraz(y). Stock image(s) for portraying Stalin, e.g. “father of peoples,” “generalissimo” or “coryphaeus of science.” The term was stripped of its Russian Orthodox religious connotations.

  Old Bolshevik. Person who had been a member of the Bolshevik Party before the October Revolution.

  op. opis’ (inventory) (archive).

  OR GTG. Manuscript Division, State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow (archive).

  OSt. Society of Easel Painters, nonfigurative artist movement, 1925–1931.

  Palace of Soviets. Tall building in central Moscow for which Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer was destroyed. Never built.

  Peredvizhniki. Wanderers, a group of prerevolutionary realist artists named after the itinerant exhibitions around which they coalesced in the 1870s. They existed until 1923, when they joined AKhRR.

  Politburo. Governing body, part of the Central Committee.

  Proletkult. Proletarian Culture movement (founded on 20 January 1918 and subsumed in the Party in November 1922).

  Pushkin Fine Arts Museum. Moscow museum housing Western art.

  RABIS. Union of Art Workers. Disbursed “soft benefits,” such as vacations.

  Repin Institute. Renamed Leningrad Academy of Arts (founded in 1932, renamed in 1944). Included art university (Art VUZ), art history institute, museum, library, and laboratories. Subsumed under the USSR Academy of Arts in 1947.

  RGALI. Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow (archive).

  RGANI. Russian State Archive of Contemporary History, Moscow (archive).

  RGASPI. Russian State Archive for Social and Political History, Moscow (archive).

  ROSTA. Russian Telegraph Agency. News agency of the RSFSR, 1918–1935. Responsible for “ROSTA Windows” posters.

  RSDRP. Russian Socialist Democratic Workers’ Party.

  RSFSR. Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.

  Russian Museum. Leningrad art museum.

  RVSR. Also Revvoensovet. Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic. Supreme military authority, 1918–1934. Headed by Voroshilov 1925–1934.

  Secretariat. Stalin’s main office, as part of his General Secretary post of the Bolshevik Party. Formally a special section of the Central Committee, de facto one of the most powerful institutions in the USSR.

  Shtiglits Art College. Leningrad institution of undergraduate art education.

  Sovetskoe Iskusstvo. Culture newspaper for visual artists. Appeared twice a week for most of its existence from 1931 onward.

  Sovnarkom. Council of People’s Commissars. Governing body.

  Stakhanovism. Productivity-raising measures to overfulfill the plan, implemented in 1935, named after a coal miner. Closely linked with shock work and socialist competition.

  Stroganov Art College. Moscow institution of undergraduate art education.

  Surikov Institute. Moscow Art Institute (renamed as such in 1948, opened in 1936 as the Moscow Institute of Visual Art and called the Moscow State Art Institute 1940–1948).

  TASS. Soviet News agency.

  Thick journal. Journal dealing with political, social, and cultural affairs—“thick” in the sense of “lengthy.” Such journals have been an important intellectual forum for Russian intelligentsia since the nineteenth century.

  TsDRI. Central House of Art Workers, Moscow. A club-like establishment for members of the artistic intelligentsia, especially artists and actors.

  TsIK. Central Executive Committee. Highest governing body of Soviet state (not Party), 1922–1938.

  TsK VKP(b). Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party.

  Tvorchestvo. Visual arts thick journal, more heavily illustrated than Iskusstvo and geared toward a wider artist audience, including amateur painters. Launched in 1933.

  VKP(b). All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks). Name of the Soviet Communist Party 1925–1952.

  Vozhd’, vozhdi. Leader(s), a term reminiscent of the Italian Duce or the German Führer. Applied not just to Stalin, but also to other high-ranking Bolsheviks.

  VseKoKhudozhnik. All-Russian Cooperative Comradeship “Artist.” Subordinate to GlavIskusstvo.

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Iurii Borev, Staliniada: Memuary po chuzhim vospominaniiam s istoricheskimi prichtami i razmyshleniiami avtora (Moscow: Kniga, 1991), 226. For another version see Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate (New York: New York Review Books, 2006), 765–766. On Kavtaradze’s Gulag sentence see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 68.

  2. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2003), 4. For another version see Evgeny Dobrenko, “Mezhdu istoriei i proshlym: Pisatel’ Stalin i literaturnye istoki sovetskogo istoricheskogo diskursa,” in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Hans Günther (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agenstvo ‘Akademicheskii proekt,’ 2000), 651.

  3. The story about the Moscow students is recounted by Zdenĕk Mlynář, a major player in the Prague Spring: Zdenek Mlynarzh, Moroz udaril iz Kremlia (Moscow: “Republika,” 1992), 18–19 (I am grateful to Elena Zubkova for reminding me of this source); on Kahlo see Patrick Marnham, Dreaming with His Eyes Open: A Life of Diego Rivera (New York: Knopf, 1998), 310; on Pasternak see diarist Kornei Chukovsky quoted in Irina Paperno, “Intimacy with Power: Soviet Memoirists Remember Stalin,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2004), 332; Bukovsky’s nightmare is in Vladimir Bukovsky, To Build a Castle: My Life as a Dissenter (New York: Viking, 1978), 81–83; for heart attacks: a week after Stalin’s death a group of women from Kuibyshev oblast wrote to Molotov, “The day that I. V. Stalin was buried, there was such grief that many of us were brought to emergency rooms with heart attacks.” RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 1465, l. 82. Dated 13 March 1953. Eugenia Ginzhurg recounted heart attacks even among Gulag internees. See Eugenia Ginzhurg, Within the Whirlwind, trans. Ian Boland (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 358.

  4. Clifford Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power,” in Local Knowledge (New York: Basic, 1983), 124.

  5. Several authors share a similar practice-oriented approach to Soviet culture— grounded in archival work and exhibiting a range of theoretical influences, among them Pierre Bourdieu’s praxeological sociology, New Historicist literary criticism, historiography in the vein of Michel de Certeau, and social history of art à la Michael Baxandall. See especially Thomas Lahusen, How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), but also Maria Gough, The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Galina Iankovskaia, Iskusstvo, den’gi i politika: Khudozhnik v gody pozdnego stalinizma (Perm: Perm’skii gosudarstvennyi universitet 2007); Oliver Johnson, “Aleksandr Laktionov: A Soviet Artist” (D.Phil. diss., University of Sheffield, 2008); Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd, eds., Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Christina Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions: The Socialist Objects of Russian Constructivism (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005); Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds., Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008); Susan E. Reid, “All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s,” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (1998): 133–173; and Kirill Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). For a landmark study of the
sociology of art see Howard Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

  6. See Benno Ennker, “Politische Herrschaft und Stalinkult 1929–1939,” in Stalinismus: Neue Forschungen und Konzepte, ed. Stefan Plaggenborg (Berlin: Arno Spitz, 1998), 166; Ennker, “‘Struggling for Stalin’s Soul’: The Leader Cult and the Balance of Power in Stalin’s Inner Circle,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism, ed. Heller and Plamper, 165–166; James L. Heizer, “The Cult of Stalin, 1929–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Kentucky, 1977), 80, 99, 138. For the thesis that intra-Party opposition to Stalin’s single leadership first had to be quelled and that “After the Central Committee plenum in January 1933, there was an extraordinary intensification of Stalin worship,” see Roy Medvedev, Let History Judge: The Origins and Consequences of Stalinism, ed. and trans. George Shriver (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 315.

  7. On the aftermath and dismantling of the Stalin cult see the work of Polly Jones, e.g., “Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Communism: A Comparison of De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation” (D.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2002).

  8. Understanding how the visual Stalin cult worked in other parts of the multiethnic Soviet Union will depend on the completion of local studies. In particular, one hopes that future research will flesh out the specifics of Stalin’s depiction in the Muslim parts of the Soviet empire where the Islamic prohibition on the depiction of human beings held sway.