The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  81. See the 19 December 1934 Politburo decision to “honor Comrade Stalin’s request to forbid all festivities or celebrations or publications in the press or in meetings on the occasion of his fifty-fifth birthday on 21 December.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1353, l. 8. Also see Sarah Davies, “Stalin and the Making of the Leader Cult in the 1930s,” in The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships, ed. Apor et al., 38–39, 45 n. 56.

  82. See the entire issue of Pravda, 4 February 1941.

  83. Ibid., 23 June 1941, 1.

  84. See ibid., 15 February 1942, 2.

  85. See ibid., 23 February 1942, 1.

  86. See ibid., 28 March 1942, 2.

  87. Caricatures of the Nazis had much in common with caricatures of Americans in times when relations with the United States were strained. On this see Kevin J. McKenna, All the Views Fit to Print: Changing Images of the U.S. in “Pravda” Political Cartoons, 1917–1991 (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 10, 56, 76.

  88. Pravda, 10 April 1942, 2.

  89. Caption: “Zapadnyi front: Pervomaiskii miting v Nevskoi gvardeiskoi chasti. Vystupaet batal’onnyi kommisar G. A. Khanchevskii,” ibid., 3 May 1943, 1.

  90. See e.g. ibid., 23 February 1944, 1.

  91. For a Stalin portrait on a flag at a workers’ rally at Airplane Factory no. 292 see ibid., 13 June 1942, 2; for a photo of Stalin between Churchill and Harriman see ibid., 18 August 1942, 1.

  92. Italo Calvino, “Il Duce’s Portraits: Living with Mussolini,” The New Yorker, 6 January 2003, 35. Thanks to Ilya Vinkovetsky for this source.

  93. Pravda, 14 December 1942, 1.

  94. Ibid., 12 March 1945, 2. Also see 8 April 1945, 2; 18 April 1945, 3.

  95. I was unable to determine whether the original was a painting or drawing.

  96. Here, too, I was unable to determine whether the original was a painting or drawing.

  97. Pravda, 13 May 1945, 1.

  98. Elena Zubkova quoted from David Hoffmann, ed., Stalinism: The Essential Readings (Malden/Oxford: Blackwell 2003), 292.

  99. This does not mean his prewar image disappeared entirely. At a Komsomol meeting in the Dynamo Stadium a large Stalin portrait adorns the tribune. In this portrait his hair is jet black. See Pravda, 18 June 1945, 1.

  100. See ibid., 1 August 1945, 1.

  101. See ibid., 25 July 1945, 1; 3 August 1945, 1–2.

  102. See ibid., 13 August 1945, 1.

  103. See, for example, “VI sessiia Verkhovnogo Soveta RSFSR 1-go sozyva: Zasedanie 5 iunia 1945 goda,” ibid., 6 June 1945, 1; “Torzhestvenno-traurnoe zasedanie v Bol’shom zale Kremlevskogo dvortsa, posviashchennoe 22-i godovshchine so dnia smerti V. I. Lenina,” ibid., 22 January 1946, 1; “Na sovmestnom zasedanii Soveta Soiuza i Soveta Natsional’nostei 19 marta,” ibid., 20 March 1946, 1.

  104. On the tribune were standing from left to right Merkulov, Vyshinsky, Gorkin, Shkiriatov, Mikoian, Molotov, Malenkov, Beria, Vasilevsky, Antonov, Bulganin, Budyonny, Kaganovich, Voznesensky, Andreev, Popov, Shvernik, and Kosygin. If anyone stood out, it was probably Molotov, who was in the center of the left half of the picture. See ibid., 8 November 1945, 1. True, Stalin perhaps compensated for his absence on 8 November with a front-page photo in the white generalissimo’s uniform, filling three-quarters of the right-hand page, on 7 November 1945. For Stalin’s last appearance on Revolution Day see Pravda, 8 November 1952, 1.

  105. A series of smaller advertisements announced the film until on 8 August it received a full-page notice, featuring a still image of Stalin swearing his oath to Lenin, a long article by Chiaureli himself on the “Making of the Great Image,” reactions of moviegoers from around the country, and several statistics of attendance in selected towns. See ibid., 8 August 1946, 2. According to André Bazin’s famous interpretation of the scene, in which Stalin comes to a park bench directly from Lenin’s deathbed in Gorki, the dead leader’s power is transferred to Stalin by way of two metaphors: on the one hand Lenin’s empty place on the park bench alludes to a widely known photograph showing the two leaders seated together on this very bench. On the other, Stalin looks at the sky and “through the fir tree branches a sunbeam penetrates and illuminates the forehead of the new Moses.” See Andre Bazen [André Bazin], “Mif Stalina v sovetskom kino,” Kinovedcheskie zapiski, no. 1 (1991): 167 (original: “Le cinéma soviétique et le mythe de Staline,” Esprit, no. 8 [1950]: 210–235). On the park bench scene in Vertov’s Tri pesni o Lenine (1934) and Chiuareli’s Kliatva also see Hans Günther, “Mudryi otets Stalin i ego sem’ia (na materiale kartin D. Vertova i M. Chiaureli),” Russian Literature, no. 43 (1998): 205–220.

  106. See Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 249.

  107. See Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts, 11–12.

  108. A poem by Vas. Lebedev-Kumach, “Golos vozhdia,” appeared in Pravda, 11 February 1946, 4.

  109. Ibid., 1 January 1947, 1.

  110. On festivals structuring Soviet time see Malte Rolf, “Constructing a Soviet Time: Bolshevik Festivals and Their Rivals During the First Five-Year Plan. A Study of the Central Black Earth Region,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 3 (2000): 447–473; Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest (1917–1941) (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2006). On Soviet festivals and holidays see also Matthias Braun, “Sowjetische und traditionelle Festkulturen im Vorkriegsstalinismus: Das Beispiel der zentrumsfernen Region Rjazan’, 1927–1941” (M.A. thesis, University of Leipzig, 2004); Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Joy Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002).

  111. In 1947 there were four Stalin pictures before 21 January, all on the front page and involving one regularly recurring event, a workers’ gathering, and two of a kind that occurred only occasionally. On 4 January a Stalin poster with a reproduction of a painting of Stalin in his generalissimo’s uniform with medals was clearly montaged into a photograph of female textile workers, who had gathered on the shop floor for a meeting. On 11 January there was a large photo of Stalin and the British Field Marshal Montgomery on the occasion of their meeting, on 15 and 16 January there were pictures of Stalin at the funeral of the minister of the coal industry V. V. Vakhrushev.

  112. Stalin’s pockmarks and a cigarette in his left hand were later retouched out. For the original picture see Edvard Radzinskii, Stalin (Moscow: Vagrius, 1997), pictorial insert 160–161. For the retouched version see Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, pictorial insert 266–267.

  113. In other Lenin-Stalin photographs, “Gender attributes reinforce the construction of Lenin as the feminized dreamer of the vita contemplativa, while Stalin embodies the vita activa as an aggressive, powerful man of action who is capable of realizing these visions.” Erika Maria Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Practice” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 198. The photograph under discussion is a montage (“The Current is Switched On”) from a 1932 Dneprostroi cycle in USSR in Construction.

  114. “To znamia, chto nad nami podnial Lenin, / Ne poshatnut ni gody, ni veka. / Kak dobryi kon’, stupaet tverdo vremia, / Idut goda, i my idem vpered. / Po tem putiam, chto zaveshchal nam Lenin, / Rodnoi tovarishch Stalin nas vedet.”

  115. I. Riabov, “Velikoe sodruzhestvo,” Pravda, 21 January 1947, 2.

  116. For such a “new,” previously unpublished Lenin letter to Stalin, dated 19 May 1922, about the “development of radio technology” see ibid., 21 January 1949, 1–2.

  117. Between 22 January and 23 February Stalin was shown five times (twice on 10 February, once on 12 February, once on 16 February, and once on 21 February) in conjunction with the elections to the Supreme Soviets of the USSR and the union republics, once while dropping his ballot in the box. The Red Army was founded by a decree of 15 January 19
18. The Day of the Red Army was first celebrated in 1918 on 10 February and from 1919 onward on 23 February. See Victor Topolyansky, “Three Riddles of an Old Holiday (observed as Red Army Day in the Past),” New Times (April 2001): 54–60. Thanks to Malte Rolf for this source.

  118. Pravda, 23 February 1947, 1.

  119. Ibid., 1 May 1947, 1.

  120. On paratext in Stalinist publishing see Brian Kassof, “A Book of Socialism: Stalinist Culture and the First Edition of the Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 1 (2005): 55–95, esp. 59–60.

  121. An airplane formation at the Tushino aerodrome in 1948 formed the words “SLAVA STALINU.” See Pravda, 26 July 1948, 2.

  122. See ibid., 4 May 1940, 1.

  123. 123. Victory Day was celebrated in Pravda every single year of the period under discussion, 1945–1952. In 1951 and 1952, however, the newspaper did not carry Stalin pictures. This finding contradicts the thesis that 9 May was discontinued as a holiday soon after the war because the regime deemed it too unruly; see Rolf, Das sowjetische Massenfest, 328. I am grateful to Malte Rolf for alerting me to these larger implications.

  124. Stalin received the Gold Star medal on his sixtieth birthday in December 1939 after having been awarded the title Hero of Socialist Labor earlier that year. See http://www.soviet-awards.com/titles1.htm (last consulted 1 June 2005).

  125. For an in-depth analysis of the 1944 Physical Culture parade see Pat Simpson, “Parading Myths: Imaging the New Soviet Woman on Fizkul’turnik’s Day, July 1944,” Russian Review 63, no. 2 (2004): 187–211.

  126. Characteristically, whenever a new standard work on postwar Stalinist politics touches on the question of succession, it centers on Stalin’s efforts to maintain an equilibrium among his lieutenants, not on grooming an heir. See Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk, Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 10, 72, 101–108, 148–151.

  127. The catch phrase “Soviet patriotism” emerged in 1936. It is seen as Russocentric nationalism packaged as multiethnic identity by, among others, David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Alan Bullock, Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives (London: HarperCollins, 1991), 2.

  128. Pravda, 27 July 1947, 1.

  129. Ibid., 28 July 1947, 1.

  130. Thus in 1946 the Day of the Soviet Air Force was celebrated on 18 August. See the photo of the Party elite in Tushino one day later in ibid., 19 August 1946, 1.

  131. “Den’ Vozdushnogo flota v Moskve: Prazdnik na Tushinskom aerodrome,” ibid., 4 August 1947, 1.

  132. Thus Stalin was both the metaphor and the synecdoche of Lenin. See Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 31–38.

  133. In 1946, for example, 24 November marked another second-tier military holiday, the Day of Soviet Artillery.

  134. Pravda, 4 December 1949, 1.

  135. E.g. ibid., 7 December 1949, 1.

  136. Both ibid., 8 December 1949, 2–3.The exhibition opened on 22 December 1949 (see Evgenii Gromov, Stalin: Vlast’ i iskusstvo [Moscow: Respublika, 1998], 413).

  137. On the exhibition see the text of a guided tour in RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1434, ll. 1–114. For photographs of the gifts see RGASPI, f. 558, d. 1421–1423. On the exhibition more generally see Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov and Olga Sosnina, “The Faculty of Useless Things: Gifts to Soviet Leaders,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism, ed. Heller and Plamper, 277–300; Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, “Heterochronia of Modernity and Birthday Gifts to Stalin, 1949,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12, no. 2 (2006): 355–375; Olga Sosnina and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, eds., Dary vozhdiam—Gifts to Soviet Leaders (Moscow: Pinakoteka, 2006).

  138. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1419, l. 141.

  139. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1419, ll. 131–1310!).

  140. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1419, l. 130.

  141. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1419, l. 112.

  142. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1419, l. 250b.

  143. The “transmediality” or blurring of boundaries between various media, as in the visualization of text or the textualization of the visual, has been identified as a hallmark of socialist realist culture. See Jurij Murašov and Georg Witte, eds., Die Musen der Macht: Medien in der sowjetischen Kultur der 20er und 30er Jahre (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 24, 173–186.

  144. Pravda, 17 December 1949, 1, 3.

  145. The 7 November 1941 Stalin photo is ibid., 21 December 1949, 8.

  146. See ibid., 22 December 1949, 4.

  147. The last rubric appeared ibid., 9 October 1951, 2.

  148. See ibid., 25 January 1950, 3.

  149. See ibid., 13 March 1950, 1, 3.

  150. See ibid., 15 March 1950, 1.

  151. Ibid., 4 May 1950, 1. Likewise there was a Stalin portrait in the background of a photo of Ukrainian miners collecting signatures for the Stockholm appeal against nuclear weapons. See ibid., 4 July 1950, 1.

  152. For the Baku photo see ibid., 25 December 1950, 1. Stalin also appeared in an article on the inauguration ceremony of the fifty-meter high Stalin sculpture in Erevan, dedicated to the Armenian Republic’s thirtieth anniversary. See ibid., 21 December 1950, 3.

  153. P. Pavlenko, “Spasibo vozhdiu,” ibid., 24 September 1950, 2.

  154. See ibid., 8 November 1950, 1–2.

  155. See ibid., 22 January 1951, 1.

  156. See ibid., 1 May 1951, 1; 2 May 1951, 1, 3.

  157. Ibid., 3 May 1951, 1.

  158. “Shestidesiatiletie Matiasa Rakoshi: Torzhestvennoe zasedanie v Budapeshte,” ibid., 9 March 1952, 5; “Shestidesiatiletie Prezidenta Pol’skoi Respubliki Boleslava Beruta,” ibid., 19 April 1952, 3.

  159. Ibid., 3 May 1952, 1.

  160. See ibid., 6 October 1952, 1.

  161. See ibid., 15 October 1952, 1.

  162. See ibid., 8 November 1952, 1; 10 November 1952, 1.

  163. See ibid., 5 December 1952, 1; 21 January 1953, 2.

  164. See ibid., 20 July 1953, 4; 27 July 1953, 1.

  165. See ibid., 24 August 1953, 3.

  166. See ibid., 9 November 1953, 2.

  CHAPTER 3. STALIN’S IMAGE IN SPACE

  1. V. V. Sadoven’, “Metodicheskaia razrabotka ekskursii po GTG na temu: ‘Obrazy Lenina i Stalina v sovetskom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve’” (1947). See OR GTG, f. 8.III, d. 926, ll. 1–2.

  2. OR GTG, f. 8.III, d. 926, ll. 14, 16.

  3. OR GTG, f. 8.III, d. 926, ll. 16–17.

  4. Here I follow Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3, 5.

  5. Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 278. On Moscow as the sacral center of Soviet Russia in the 1930s see also Hans Günther, “Das Massenlied als Ausdruck des Mutterarchetypus in der sowjetischen Kultur,” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, no. 44 (1997): 348.

  6. Istoriia vsesoiuznoi kommunisticheskoi partii (bol’shevikov): Kratkii kurs (1945; reprint, Moscow: Pisatel’, 1997), 3.

  7. Ibid., 17.

  8. Ibid., 18.

  9. Ibid., 31.

  10. Rainer Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Prestel, 1975).

  11. Henri Barbusse, quoted in Stalin: K shestidesiatiletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: Pravda, n.d. [1939 or 1940]), 75. The Barbusse quote on Stalin was disseminated widely and was reprinted in Pravda, 7 November 1935, 2.

  12. RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 292, ll. 92–92ob. Dated 15 July 1933.

  13. Signed by “M. M. Gromov, A. B. Iumashev, S. A. Danilin, Negoreloe-Moskva, 23 August 1937.” Pravda, 24 August 1937, 2.

  14. Mount Stalin (pik Stalina) was renamed Mount Communism (pik Kommunizma) in 1962 after the second wave of de-Stalinizat
ion and in 1998 Mount Ismail Samani in independent Tadzhikistan.

  15. Pravda, 17 September 1937, 6. For the story on the ascent of Mount Lenin see ibid., 7 September 1937, 6.

  16. Ibid., 5 October 1935, 6.

  17. This flag was clearly retouched into the photograph. See ibid., 1 February 1940, 1.

  18. In his collection of panegyric court poetry from the 1650s to 1670s Simeon Polotsky frequently compared tsars, such as Fedor Alekseevich, to the sun: “I dare to call Russia heaven / For I find planets in it. / You [O Tsar] are the sun; the moon is Tsaritsa Mariia; / and Tsarevich Aleksei is the bright morning star” (“Nebom Rossiiu nareshchi derzaiu / Ibo pla-nety v onei obretaiu. / Ty solntse; luna—Mariia tsaritsa; / Aleksei svetla tsarevich denitsa.”) See Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 35 (translation by Ram).

  19. See Evgenii Gromov, Stalin: Vlast’ i iskusstvo (Moscow: Respublika, 1998), 44–45.

  20. On Soviet folklore, sometimes called fakelore, see Frank Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore in the Stalin Era (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Felix Oinas, Essays on Russian Folklore and Mythology (Columbus: Slavica, 1985). Alma Kunanbaeva and Izaly Zemtsovsky have insisted on the falsification of Soviet folklore and the often violent pressure exerted on such pre-Soviet folklore performers as Dzhambul to take on new Stalinist roles; this pressure is rarely documented and only transpires from oral sources. See their “Communism and Folklore” and the discussion surrounding it in Folklore and Traditional Music in the Former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, ed. James Porter (Los Angeles: Department of Ethnomusicology, UCLA, 1997), 3–44. Also see Ursula Justus, “Vozvrashchenie v rai: Sotsrealizm i fol’klor,” in Sotsrealisticheskii kanon, ed. Evgeny Do-brenko and Hans Günther (St. Petersburg: Gumanitarnoe agenstvo Akademicheskii proekt,’ 2000), 70–86; Justus, “Vtoraia smert’ Lenina: Funktsiia placha v period perekhoda ot kul’ta Lenina k kul’tu Stalina,” ibid., 926–952.