The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  21. See Levon A. Abramian, “Tainaia politsiia kak tainoe obshchestvo: Strakh i vera v SSSR,” Etnograficheskoe obozrenie, no. 5 (1993): 38.

  22. “Stalin, solntse moe, ia ponial v Moskve:/Serdtse mudrogo Lenina b’etsia v tebe. / V den’ siiaiushchii, kak biriuza, / Byl v Kremle ia v krugu druzei. / Uvidali moi glaza / Veli-chaishego iz liudei. / Ty, ch’e imia dostiglo zvezd/Slavoi pervogo mudretsa, / Byl vnimatelen, laskov prost / I rodnei rodnogo ottsa. / Za radushnyi, ottsovskii priem v Kremle, / Stalin, solntse moe, spasibo tebe.” Quoted in Abramian, “Tainaia politsiia,” 38.

  23. “A esli u nashei liubimoi zastavy / Poiaviatsic polchishcha liutykh vragov, / My gria-nem desantom neslykhannoi slavy / Po cherepu vrazh’ikh fashistskikh polkov. // My tam pro-letim, gde do nas ne letali. / My vse sovershim, chto svershit’ my dolzhny. // Da zdravstvuet solntse! Da zdravstvuet Stalin! / Da zdravstvuet liudy sovetskoi strany! (2 raza) A. Bezymen-skii.” Pravda, 6 November 1935, 4.

  24. “STALIN—SOLNTSE ZOLOTOE NASHE (Iz materialov dlia toma ‘Narodnoe tvorchestvo,’ prislannykh v redaktsiiu ‘Dvukh piatiletok’) / Stalin—solntse zolotoe nashe. / Dlia vragov smertel’no slovo— / ’Stalin.’ / Grozovye tuchi razognavshi, / Ty otkryl nam solnechnye dali. // . . . // Posredi boitsov, pered srazhen’em, / Bogatyrski velichav i stroen, / Boevym sverkaet snariarzhen’em / Voroshilov—znamenitsy voin. / Nikogda v boiakh ne pobezhdennyi,/On odet v broniu krepchaishei/stali, / Smelyi voin, solntsem/osveshchennyi . . . / Eto solntse zolotoe—Stalin. . . .” Frauda, 10 September 1936, 10. Also see an “uncredited poem by a child published soon after Stalin’s death [that] was marked as a child’s work by metrical irregularities that would not have been forgiven a mature poet”: “Little bird, take to the Kremlin / My warm greetings. / To the sun of the world, the capital, / To dear Moscow / To Stalin, my friend and my father!” “Ptitsa, v Kreml’ otnesi / Moi goriachii privet. / Solntsu mira, v stolitsu, / V rodnuiu Moskvu, / Stalinu—drugu—ottsu moemu!” Catriona Kelly, “Riding the Magic Carpet: Children and Leader Cult in the Stalin Era,” Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 2 (2005): 199–224.

  25. See “Shein is das Leb’n,” in G. von Poehl and M. Agthe, Das Judentum: Das wahre Gesicht der Sowjets (Berlin: Otto Stollberg, 1943), 83. The transliterated original stanza reads: “Er hat die groijße scheine Sunn / Op der Erd’ arofgebracht, / a bliehendik’n Garten / Fun unser Land gemacht.” This Soviet Yiddish Stalin folklore is from a Nazi propaganda publication, eager to prove the alleged “Judeo-Bolshevik” connection. For the Nazi volume, Yiddish ditties (chastushki) dedicated to Stalin were extracted from Dobruzhin, Jiddische Volkslieder weg’n Stalinen (Moscow: Der Emes, 1940). I am grateful to Frank Grüner for sharing this source with me.

  26. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 717, l. 102. Letter by V. I. Vitkevich. N.d. but stamped “received 31 January 1945.”

  27. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1377, l. 114.

  28. RGALI, f. 2368, op. 2, d. 36, l. 16.

  29. Hans Blumenberg and Martin Jay, among others, have identified as typical for modern discourse the privileging of the sense of vision and the frequency of luminary metaphors. See Hans Blumenberg, “Light as a Metaphor for Truth,” in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Levin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 30–62; Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

  30. See Poehl and Agthe, Das Judentum, 85–86.

  31. David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 62.

  32. Katerina Clark is among the many scholars to have noted Stalin’s immobility; in her words, Stalin “was also of a different temporal order—of being, rather than becoming—and so was depicted in film and art as static and vertical or, if moving at all, doing so at an exaggeratedly slow and deliberate, monument-like pace.” Clark, Petersburg, 302.

  33. For the vitality of “gender codes” in “naturalizing” power relations, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 48.

  34. Ironically, in real life Stalin apparently used expensive British pipes. In 1948 Ivan Maisky, the Soviet ambassador in London, sent Stalin pipes as complimentary gifts from two British pipe-making companies. Earlier the British ambassador in Moscow, Sir Archibald Clark Kerr, had given Stalin a pipe, a fact that was publicized in the British press. See RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 775, l. no. Letter by Ivan Maisky from Moscow, dated 18 August 1948.

  35. Consider postmodernist writer Viktor Pelevin’s novel Generation “P,” in which the main hero Tatarsky composes a new television ad spot: “He had a new idea. He picked up his pencil again and wrote under his first caption: advertisement/poster for ‘Sony Black Trinitron.’ A close-up of uniform cuffs. Fingers are breaking ‘Gertsegovina Flor’ and rummaging the table. A voice [with a Georgian accent]: ‘Did you see my pipe (trubka), Comrade Gorky?’ ‘I threw it away, Comrade Stalin.’ ‘Why is that?’ ‘Because, Comrade Stalin, the leader of the world proletariat can only have a “Trinitron-Plus” television tube (trubka).’” Viktor Pelevin, Generation “P” (Moscow: Vagrius, 1999), 111. This quote is not in Andrew Bromfield’s English translation Homo Zapiens (New York: Penguin, 2003).

  36. For the long history of the “female” disease of hysteria see e.g. the literature cited in Sander L. Gilman et al., Hysteria beyond Freud (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), xviii–xxiv. Trotsky, too, was portrayed as hysterical and effeminate. For example, in the screenplay of V. V. Vishnevsky’s Unforgettable 1919, Stalin’s calm but realistically sober evaluation of the situation of the Reds in the Russian Civil War is presented as the ideal golden mean between, on the one hand, overly optimistic reports (igra v spokoistvie) and, on the other hand, the “hysterical fits of Trotsky.” See “Rol’ I. V. Stalina iz p’esy V. V. Vishnevskogo ‘Nezabyvaemyi 1919-i,’ sygrannoi A. D. Dikim v Malom teatre: Mash, s pometkami A. D. Dikogo [1949],” RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 16, l. 1.

  37. Henri Barbusse, Stalin: A New World Seen Through One Man, quoted in Philip Boobyer, The Stalin Era (New York: Routledge, 2000), 109. Stalin’s unpretentious rhetorical style was seen as a strength rather than a weakness and taken as a sign of his modesty. Galina Shtange, a professor’s wife and member of the intelligentsia, in 1937 noted in her diary about a radio address by Stalin: “Stalin speaks very slowly and distinctly—extremely simply, so simply that each word penetrates into your consciousness and I think the man cannot be found who would not be able to understand what he says. I really love that, I don’t like highfaluting, bombastic speeches that are aimed at creating an acoustic effect.” Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: New Press, 1995), 205.

  38. Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler Was My Friend (London: Burke, 1955), 114.

  39. Joachim C. Fest, Hitler: Eine Biographie (Frankfurt/Main: Ullstein, 1973), 709–710.

  40. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 344, l. 11. Gerasimov gave this speech on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday at the Central House of Art Workers during an evening devoted to “The Image of Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin in Works of Art.”

  41. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 344, l. 11.

  42. Katerina Clark noted that “The spatial hierarchy was articulated in a series of concentric circles, somewhat like a national matrioshka doll: the outer rim was the country at large (the periphery), the first inner circle was Moscow, and then came the Kremlin. There was also an innermost inner, Stalin’s study in the Kremlin, but it was generally considered too sacred to be actually represented; it could be seen only as ‘the light in the window.’ In its stead, commonly either St. George’s Hall, the place of public ceremonial and investiture, or a tower of the Kremlin functioned as that solid, innermost doll of the matrioshka. “ Katerina Clark, “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology
of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 11.

  43. The painting was not only Stalinist Russia’s most famous. Ekaterina Voroshilova, Kliment Voroshilov’s wife, in 1955 noted in her diary: “A. M. [Gerasimov] at various times painted a number of paintings of K. E. [Voroshilov], of which I don’t like a single one, with the exception of the group portrait I. V. Stalin and K. E. Voroshilov in the Kremlin. “ RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 439, l. 76. Entry dated 17 November 1955.

  44. At a 1938 meeting at the Central House of Art Workers, Gerasimov was asked, “The landscape for the portrait Stalin and Voroshilov is completely painted from life or changed?” He answered, “It is painted from life, but for the composition I had to move closer two characteristic houses (dlia kompozitsii mne prishlos’ dva kharakternykh domika priblizit’).” See RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 701, l. 33.

  45. See Mikhail Yampolsky, “In the Shadow of Monuments: Notes on Iconoclasm and Time,” in Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia, ed. Nancy Condee (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 93. According to Yampolsky, one of the reasons that the Kremlin has had no anthropomorphic monuments “may be connected with the fact that its cathedrals have absorbed such a concentration of history that a monument, which denies history’s progression, could not withstand the powerful weight of historical evidence. By their historical gravity, the cathedrals would destroy the pathos of any anthropomorphic monument.” Ibid., 96.

  46. True, the Lenin Mausoleum on Red Square, right outside the Kremlin walls, can be regarded as an anthropomorphic monument. As Lenin’s successor, celebrated as “Lenin today” from the late 1920s to the mid-1930s, Stalin drew legitimizing power from the presence of the dead leader in the mausoleum.

  47. Interestingly, the Soviet star on Voroshilov’s belt can be seen as being linked through a diagonal axis with the red star on the Kremlin tower.

  48. The leader, however, is always in the center, and the masses remain in the periphery; see Clark, Petersburg, 306.

  49. See I. S. Rabinovich’s introductory article to Stalin i liudy sovetskoi strany v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve: Katalog vystavki (Moscow: Izdanie Gosudarstvennoi Tret’iakovskoi Gallerei, 1939), 7.

  50. See Timothy J. Colton, Moscow: Governing the Socialist Metropolis (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1995), 259–262, 331–334, 365–367; Sona Stephan Hoisington, “‘Ever Higher’: The Evolution of the Project for the Palace of Soviets,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (2003): 41–68; Dmitrii Khmel’nitskii, Zodchii Stalin (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2007), 42–100.

  51. Hoisington, “‘Ever Higher,’” 62.

  52. Pravda, 20 February 1934, 2 (from the original “Postanovlenie Soveta Stroitel’stva Dvortsa Sovetov pri Prezidiume TsIK Soiuza SSR 19 Fevralia 1934 goda”).

  53. On Soviet-style communism as eschatology see Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).

  54. Katharina Kucher, “Raum(ge)schichten: Der Gor’kij-Park im frühen Stalinismus,” Osteuropa 55, no. 3 (2005): 157. Also see Kucher, Der Gorki-Park: Freizeitkultur im Stalinismus 1928–1941 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2007).

  55. Kucher, “Raum(ge)schichten,” 160–161.

  56. Begicheva closed by proposing two more projects, the implementation of a Stalin medal and the removal of Lenin from money bills, because Lenin “did not like money. He did not like gold with its dark power over people. Tsars and despots were shown on coins, but they acknowledged the omnipotence of money; I don’t want LENIN’S image, the purest of images, to be crumpled by (often dirty) hands.” RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 506, ll. 142–145. Dated 12 September 1945.

  57. TsDRI was the result of a 1935 merger of the RABIS (Union of Art Workers)–initiated and Lunacharsky-supported Club of Theater Workers (founded on 25 February 1930) and the Club of Moscow Artists (founded on 16 July 1932) into a Club of Art Masters. On 26 December 1937 this Club of Art Masters was renamed Central House of Art Workers. See the CD-ROM by N. B. Volkova and Klaus Waschik, eds., Russian State Archive of Literature and Art: The Complete Archive Guide (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), synopsis of TsDRI. f. 2932. According to another source, the Club of Art Masters was located on Staropimenovskii pereulok until it moved to Pushechnaia ulitsa in 1939 and was renamed Central House of Art Workers. See Vigdariia Khazanova, Klubnaia zhizn’ i arkhitektura kluba 1917–1941 (Moscow: “Zhiraf,” 2000), 94–95 n. 74.

  58. The meetings at TsDRI involved a question-and-answer period, at which criticism from the audience might be voiced. Following our meeting, someone asked: “Honestly, isn’t your painting Stalin at the Sixteenth Party Congress weak? Your last painting, Stalin and Voroshilov, is more interesting.” Gerasimov replied: “At the exhibition I received praise for this picture not because I am Gerasimov. Therefore it was not weak among the paintings exhibited there. In comparison to the picture Stalin and Voroshilov it is, of course, weaker.” RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 701, l. 31.

  59. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 701, l. 25. The painting was first exhibited at the 1938 “Twenty Years of the Red Army” exhibition (see OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, l. 59).

  60. For a photograph of Gerasimov during the actual painting of Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin see V. S. Manin, Iskusstvo v rezervatsii: Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Rossii 1917–1941gg. (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999), 217.

  61. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 2, d. 6, l. 4. It appears that two rival publishing houses, IZOGIZ and Iskusstvo, conducted Stalin portrait competitions during the same year, 1937, on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Both were closed competitions, in which only selected artists were invited to participate; open competitions were publicized widely and garnered more entries. The IZOGIZ competition was financially even more rewarding than that of Iskusstvo: a first prize received twenty thousand rubles, whereas Iskusstvo paid fifteen thousand. For Iskusstvo’s competition, see RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112.

  62. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 8, d. 6, l. 3.

  63. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 8, d. 6, l. 3. To be sure, the participants also had “the right to suggest their own theme to the publishing house, as long as it [did] not diverge from the purpose of the competition.” See RGALI, f. 2020, op. 8, d. 6, l. 4.

  64. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 8, d. 6, l. 4.

  65. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 701, ll. 26–27.

  66. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 776, l. 5. An Iskusstvo article about Stalin Prize winners (“Prazdnik sotsialisticheskoi kul’tury,” Iskusstvo, no. 2 [1941]: 6), published shortly before the German attack on the Soviet Union in World War II, claimed that the title Na strazhe mira was in fact not Gerasimov’s invention but of popular origin: “Not surprisingly, the viewer gave the group portrait I. V. Stalin and K. E. Voroshilov in the Kremlin a different name: Guarding Peace (Na strazhe mira).”

  67. OR GTG, f. 8.III, d. 926, ll. 16. Sadoven further echoed Gerasimov: “The picture was painted for the twentieth anniversary of the Red Army and had a different title—Guarding Peace (Na strazhe mira). It is a vivid example of the evolution from portrait subjects in Soviet art to historical subjects, executed in the monumental style. The painting conveys the spirit of the epoch of Stalin’s prewar Five-Year Plans, which pushed the country forward on the Leninist path. Our reception of this painting is particularly emotional in our days, when our Motherland, after the victorious Great Patriotic War, under the leadership of Stalin has resumed creative, constructive labor.” OR GTG, f. 8.III, d. 926, ll. 17–18.

  68. Dva vozhdia posle dozhdia, a piece of oral lore, was told to me by Gábor Rittersporn, whom I wish to thank. It is confirmed by Mariia Chegodaeva, Dva lika vremeni (1939: Odin god stalinskoi epokhi) (Moscow: Agraf, 2001), 40.

  69. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 344, l. 9.

  70. Also see V. I. Vikhtinskii et al., Vo imia mira (Podpisanie dogovora mezhdu Sovetskim Soiuzom i Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respublikoi), illustration in Huber
tus Gassner and Alisa Liubimova, eds., Agitatsiia za schast’e: Sovetskoe iskusstvo stalinskoi epokhi (Bremen: Edition Temmen, 1994), 107; D. A. Nalbandian’s Dlia schast’ia naroda: Zasedanie Politbiuro TsK VKP(b), illustration ibid., 100.

  71. Significantly, in Shegal’s picture of 1937, Lenin is still larger than life: he appears in the background as a statue about three times bigger than Stalin. In Nalbandian’s Dlia schast’ia naroda (see note 70), Lenin appears only in a small picture on a wall at back; Stalin himself had become so much the center that he no longer needed any sort of legitimacy from the older leader, Lenin.

  72. See illustration 276 in Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 253.

  73. See illustration ibid., 104. The same could be said of Gorky in Anatoly Iar-Kravchenko’s A. M. Gor’ky Reads to Stalin (A. M. Gor’kii chitaet Stalinu; see illustration ibid., 106). Gorky is reading to Stalin, Voroshilov, and Molotov, but here the axis Gorky-Stalin is so strong as to break through the circular spatial arrangement—the presence of the country’s sacral center, Stalin, is literally overpowering.

  74. The competing metaphor here is that of Stalin the gardener. For Stalin’s applications of this metaphor to himself, see Jochen Hellbeck, “Laboratories of the Soviet Self: Diaries of the Stalin Era” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1998), 64–66. On the change from machine to garden metaphors for Soviet society see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), chap. 4. On the related metaphor of the gardening state see also Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 13, 71, 91–92; Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27–31.

  75. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 7 (14 February 1947): 1.

  76. See ibid., no. 6 (20 January 1951): 1.