The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  77. Different folk arts, it should be noted, were gendered differently. Embroidery was considered a typically female art form.

  78. Zamoshkin then turned to the process of production and stressed the time-consuming manual creation of the portrait, which Tselman worked on “over the course of one-and-a-half years.” Time-consuming manual labor, the paragon of conscious deceleration, is seen as possessing great value—against the backdrop of fast industrial production in the modern age. Unsurprisingly, in line with this evocation of the personalized nature of preindustrial artistic production, the embroideress personally delivered her portrait as a gift to Stalin: “Comrade Tselman gave her work as a gift to Comrade J. V. Stalin. The portrait, as a piece of artwork, is currently being shown in the State Tretyakov Gallery.” But in this reliquary of Stalin art it only ended up after both a number of painters, representing a high art as opposed to Tselman’s folk art, and an institution, the Institute of Art Industry, had given their approval: “Prominent Soviet artists examined her portrait: the USSR People’s Artist A. Gerasimov, the RSFSR People’s Artist V. Iakovlev, the Stalin Prize laureate V. Efanov, the artist P. Vasilev, creator of many works dedicated to V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin. They all unanimously noted the great artistic merit of this work. The Institute of Art Industry also gave a first-class appraisal of Comrade Tselman’s work, noting that her portrait has great artistic value and is executed with high technical mastery and great subtlety in color tones.” Pravda, 9 June 1946, 2.

  79. Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting c. 1830–1865 (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 1.

  80. Ibid., 21–22.

  81. Ibid., 9–10. In his 1836 “Essay on American Scenery,” Thomas Cole wrote: “Where the wolf roams, the plough shall glisten; on the gray crag shall rise temple and tower— mighty deeds shall be done in the now pathless wilderness” (quote Boime, The Magisterial Gaze, 53). Boime comments on this passage: “Here is the textual delineation of his graphic rendition of the idea of futurity and the overcoming of the human and material obstacles to this progress. It is this challenge to the Euro-Americans that makes the civilizing process so basic to their idea of advance—carried out with the sense of a God-ordained mission” (ibid.).

  82. One could claim that Morning of Our Motherland cannot be compared with the American paintings since Cole, for example, belongs to the genre of landscape painting, and Shurpin to portraiture. Yet the dividing line between these genres is in fact quite blurred, and both paintings feature a mixture of portrait and landscape components. More importantly, Stalinist landscape painting from the 1930s onward, as Mark Bassin has observed, differed from American landscape painting in its attempted reconciliation of the innate elementalism (stikhiinost’) of nature and the Soviet people’s mastery over precisely this elementalism— witness the hydroelectric plants and the industrial construction sites. “The result,” writes Bassin, “was an entire category of artistic production, the individual examples of which were all united by the deliberate effort to demonstrate how Soviet reality was actually achieving the utopian goal of preserving the unique elemental splendour of the natural world at the very time that it was transforming this same world into something completely different and incalculably superior.” Mark Bassin, “‘I Object to Rain that Is Cheerless’: Landscape Art and the Stalinist Aesthetic Imagination,” Ecumene 7, no. 3 (2000): 334.

  83. Boime, The Magisterial Gaze, 75–76.

  84. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 344, l. 11. Also see Samokhvalov’s 1940 Lenin picture, which at first sight suggests a spatial arrangement in circular motion, but actually is quite different; here, Lenin also moves forward, quite literally out of the picture, in the direction of the viewer (see illustration in Gassner and Liubimova, Agitatsiia za schast’e, 97).

  85. RGALI, f. 2942, op. 1, d. 133, l. 430b. The occasion was a 4 March 1939 meeting of the Moscow Sculptors’ Union dedicated to the subject of “the image of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin in sculpture.”

  86. “PORTRET VOZHDIA / Znakomy mne vsekh morshinok cherty, / Vse iskorki v pristal’nom vzore; / V nem stol’ko prekrasnoi, rodnoi / Prostoty! / V nem volia naroda, v nem nashi mechty, / V nem myslei bezhrezhnoe more.//I kazhdaia tonkaia skladka na lbu / Rasska-zhet pro trudnye gody./Pro t’iur’my Sibiri, s vragami bor’bu, / Pro to, kak pobedno v ogne i dymu / Shagali rabochie vzvody. // Pro to, kak zavody v pustyniakh rosli,/ Kak v tundre tsvety rastsvetali,/Pro to, kak my golod i stuzhu proshli,/ Proshli i bogatymi stali. / Znakomaia vsem nam, rodnaia shinel’, / Dymok serebristyi ot trubki . . . / I vizhu ia khleb ukrainskikh stepei,/Kavkazskuiu neft’, zhar donbasskikh uglei,/Linkorov vysokie rubki./Ia vizhu, kak sotni geroev truda, / Tvoeiu zabotoi sogrety, / Vozvodiat zavody, dvortsy, goroda . . . / Tvoriat vdokhnovenno poety./Piloty—geroi vozdushnykh morei—/Tumany i mrak pobezhdaiut, / I tysiachi nashikh sovetskikh detei / Imia vozhdia proslavliaiut. ALEKSANDR KARACHUNSKII. 16 let. g. Aleksandriia, Kirovogradskaia obi.” Pravda, 1 May 1941, 5.

  87. “Lunacharski,” writes Matthew Cullerne Bown, “in his book The Great Turning (Velikii Povorot, 1919), provided an extended, passionate description of his [Lenin’s] head.” Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 56.

  88. RGALI, f. 2368, op. 2, d. 36, l. 12. This statement is by Evgeny Katsman.

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

  90. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 344, l. 21. The fixation on eyes had a long cultural heritage. Suffice it to recall Romanticism’s eyes as “windows of the soul” or the differing depiction of men’s and women’s eyes in French Impressionism (see Stephen Kern, The Gaze in English and French Paintings and Novels, 1840–1900 [London: Reaktion, 1996]). For Russia Richard Wortman describes the cultural significance of the tsar’s eyes as expressing his character more than any other part of his body. He cites a number of contemporary memoiristic impressions of Alexander II’s weak gaze, in comparison with the domineering eyes of his father, Nicholas I. See Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 22–23.

  91. RGALI, f. 2932, op. 1, d. 344, ll. 21–22.

  92. On the heroes of socialist realist novels acquiring this ability see Clark, The Soviet Novel, 141–145; Abram Tertz [Andrei Siniavsky], The Trial Begins and On Socialist Realism, trans. Max Hayward and George Dennis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 149.

  93. From the magazine of the Union of Soviet Writers of the Lithuanian SSR, Pergale, no. 4 (1950): 52, quoted in Czeslaw Milosz, The Captive Mind, trans. Jane Zielonko (New York: Knopf, 1953), 231. Thanks to Malte Rolf for this source.

  94. For illustration see Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 21 (22 May 1948): 1.

  95. For illustration see Gleb Prokhorov, Art under Socialist Realism: Soviet Painting 1930–1950 (Roeville East: Craftsman House, 1995), 101, 48.

  96. Diana Leslie Cheren comes close to such an exegesis in her study of a painting of Deneika, occupying the border zone between avant-garde and socialist realism, “Recovering Uncertainty: An Interpretation of Aleksandr Deineka’s ‘The Defense of Petrograd,” (M.A. thesis, University of California Berkeley, 1995). So does Christina Kiaer in her own work on Aleksandr Deineka: see, for example, Christina Kiaer, “Was Socialist Realism Forced Labour? The Case of Aleksandr Deineka in the 1930s,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (2005): 321–345. Typically, however, these studies are on a stylistically ambiguous painter, not on a full-fledged socialist realist like Aleksandr Gerasimov or Dmitry Nalbandian.

  97. Boris Groys, “The Art of Totality,” in The Landscape of Stalinism, ed. Dobrenko and Naiman, 98–99.

  98. On this see Schoch, Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts, 9, 25.

  99. Quoted from A. Schmarsow and B. Klemm, eds., W. Bürgers Kunstkritik, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1909), 317.

  CHAPTER 4. THE POLITICAL IS PERSONAL, ART IS POLITICAL

  1. “Vdrug iz ‘PRAVDY’ rezko-zvonnaia / Treskotnia telefonnaia: /
—’Dem’ian!’ / —Ta ne slyshu! Oglokh!’ / —’Bros’ shutit’!’ / —’Nu, ne budu!’ / —’V redaktsii perepolokh: / Tele-grammy—gruda na grudu! / . . . / Po sluchaiu polustoletiia Stalina! / Pust’ tam Stalin, kak khochet, / Serditsia, grokhochet, / No ‘PRAVDE’ nel’zia uzhe dal’she / Molchat’. / Pishi o Staline bezotlagatel’no. / Stalinskii nomer sdaetsia v pechat’ / Dvatsatogo dekabria obiazatel’no!’. . .” Pravda, 21 December 1929, 4. Thanks to Evgenii Bershtein for help with the translation.

  2. See Claus Scharf, “Tradition—Usurpation—Legitimation: Das herrscherliche Selbstverständnis Katharinas II.,” in Rußland zur Zeit Katharinas II.: Absolutismus—Aufklärung—Pragmatismus, ed. Eckhard Hübner, Jan Kusber, and Peter Nitsche (Cologne: Böhlau, 1998), 98–99. On the continuity between Lomonosov’s panegyric odes and Stalin poetry see Joachim Klein, “18. Jahrhundert,” in Russische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Klaus Städtke (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2002), 84–85. Thanks to Ingrid Schierle for directing me to these publications.

  3. True to sentimentalism, writers representing Nicholas I are overwhelmed by their feelings so that they cannot truly express what they intend to express. “This results in the frequent resort to aporia, the confession of the artist’s inability to express or describe what he wishes.” Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 1, 285.

  4. Stalin: K shestidesiatiletiiu so dnia rozhdeniia (Moscow: Pravda, n.d. [1939 or 1940]), 58.

  5. In the same book, Stalin was quoted as saying of Lenin: “the simplicity (prostota) and modesty (skromnost’) of Lenin, is his urge to remain unnoticed or, at least, not to stand out and emphasize his high position.” Ibid., 74.

  6. Ibid., 159.

  7. Vladimir F. Alliluev, Khronika odnoi sem’i: Alliluevy, Stalin (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1995), 201. Quoted in Evgenii Gromov, Stalin: Vlast’ i iskusstvo (Moscow: Respublika, 1998), 411.

  8. Lion Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937: My Visit Described for My Friends (New York: Viking, 1937), 76–77. Quoted in Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), 407.

  9. Emil Ludwig, Stalin (Zurich: Carl Posen, 1945), 188, 190.

  10. See Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 245–246 n. 3, quoting Ervin Sinkó, Egy Regény Regénye: Moszkvai Naplójegyzetek, 1935–1937, 3rd ed. (Újvidék, Serbia: Forum Könyvkiadó, 1988), 540.

  11. For more reviews of the sources regarding Stalin’s “modesty” see Leonid Maksimenkov, “Kul’t: Zametki o slovakh-simvolakh v sovetskoi politicheskoi kul’ture,” Svobodnaia mysl’, no. 10 (1993): 26–31; Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin: A Study in Twentieth-Century Revolutionary Patriotism (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002), 164–165. For a review of the sources including Stalin’s personal archive at RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, which became available in 2000, see Sarah Davies, “Stalin and the Making of the Leader Cult in the 1930s,” in Stalin and the Eastern Bloc: The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships:, ed. Balázs Apor et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 29–46. Also see Aleksander M. Etkind, “Psychological Culture,” in Russian Culture at the Crossroads: Paradoxes of Postcommunist Consciousness, ed. Dmitri N. Shalin (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996), 112–113: “Contrary to the ‘cult of personality’ thesis, Soviet power was not vested in a person; it derived from the state and the party, whose comrades had to exude modesty and reticence and act as conduits for its collective wisdom. Trotsky showed too much personal ambition, which violated the Bolsheviks’ personal beliefs. . . . Stalin, by comparison, was a paragon of modesty and collegiality. His demonstratively noncompetitive style in public suited the spirit of the time well.”

  12. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5088, l. 1210b.

  13. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 203, ll. 22–23. 20 April 1933 letter by I. Ionov, deputy director of publishing house Stary Bolshevik, with appended dedication by Bibineishvili.

  14. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 203, l. 21. Copy of Stalin’s reply letter to I. Ionov, 21 April 1933.

  15. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 163, d. 1020, l. 12. Original: “TsK VKP(b) Politbiuro, Protokol No. 6, Punkt 6 ot 4. V. 1934g. Slushali: o stroitel’stve Instituta Stalina v Tiflise. (t.t. Stalin, Beria). Postanovili: (1) Priniat’ predlozhenie t. Stalina ob otmene resheniia Zakpromkoma o postroike v Tiflise Instituta Stalina. (b) Reorganizovat’ stroiushchegosia v Tiflise Institut v filial Instituta Marksa-Engel’sa-Lenina.”

  16. Yaroslavsky’s 1 August 1935 letter indicated that only Stalin’s fiat would open to him the doors of the archive at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute (IMEL): “C[omrade] Stalin! Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] called me today before his departure and told me that he talked to you about my planned book ‘Stalin.’ The exceptional obstacles in this affair that he told you about can only be removed by you: it is indispensable that you or Comrade Poskryobyshev order IMEL or AOR [Archive of the October Revolution] that they allow the use of all available materials and documents. Without this they will not give me a chance to use them.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 1, d. 5089, l. 1. Stalin was also always the ultimate arbiter of what constituted sycophancy and what did not. In answer to a 1940 letter by Yaroslavsky, he wrote: “The painting ‘Stalin visits the sick Voroshilov’ by the artist Shapiro is the outgrowth of a misunderstanding, since there was no ‘Stalin visit to the sick Voroshilov’ either in 1907 or 1908. . . . False merits should be attributed neither to me nor to Comrade Voroshilov—we have enough true merits and real authority. But obviously some of the careerist authors of ‘memoirs’ and the authors of several suspect articles ‘about the leaders’ need this. They want to advance their careers through excessive and sickening praise of the leaders of Party and state. Do we have the right to cultivate in our people such feelings of servility and toadyism? Clearly we do not. More than that: it is our duty to eradicate these disgraceful and slavish feelings.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 842, ll. 45, 49–50 (original of 29 April 1940 letter by Stalin to Yaroslavsky in answer to Yaroslavsky’s questions).

  17. Quoted in Leonid Maksimenkov, Sumbur vmesto muzyki: Stalinskaia kul’turnaia revoliutsiia 1936–1938 (Moscow: Iuridicheskaia kniga, 1997), 292–293.

  18. See Vance Kepley, In the Service of the State: The Cinema of A. Dovzhenko (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), 494, quoted in Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 148 (155 n. 23 for source). The original document is in RGASPI, f. 71, op. 10, d. 127, 11. 188–189. Published in Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, eds., Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia: Dokumenty TsK RKP(b)-VKP(b), VChK-OGPU-NKVD o kul’turnoi politike. 1917–1953 gg. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia,” 1999), 350–351. (Cited as first published in: Anatolii Latyshev, “Stalin i kino,” in Surovaia drama naroda: Uchenye i publitsisty o prirode stalinizma, ed. lu. P. Senokosov and lu. G. Burtin [Moscow: Politizdat, 1989], 494–495.)

  19. Quoted from V. A. Nevezhin, ed., Zastol’nye rechi Stalina: Dokumenty i materialy (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2003), 154–155. Original file entitled, “Rechi Stalina I.V. za sentiabr’–noiabr’ 1938 goda, ne voshedshie v Sobranie Sochinenii,” in RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1122, ll. 161–162. Table talk recorded by R. Khmelnitsky and incorrectly dated 7 November 1938 (rather than 1937).

  20. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 1121, l. 24. This particular file is entitled, “Doklady, rechi, stat’i, interv’iu Stalina I. V., ne voshedshie v Sobranie Sochinenii. Rechi, pis’ma Stalina I. V. na ianvar’–mart 1938 goda, ne voshedshie v Sobranie Sochinenii.” Later in 1938 Stalin wrote the comment “a sycophantic piece (podkhalimskaia shtuka)” across a Poem About a Flower by the Persian poet Lakhuti, translated from Farsi into Russian and dedicated to “The Leader. The Comrade. Stalin.” RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 760, l. 25. The poem is dated 31 December 1938.

  21. The function as signal of the Stalin comments on Smirnova’s book can be gleaned from the Institute of Marxism-Leninism director M. A. Savelev’s 1938 letter to the journal Molodaia gvardiia. In the context of a ban on a new work on Lenin he alluded to Stalin’s comments: “I st
rongly recommend to the editorial board to familiarize yourselves with the comment Stalin wrote regarding the depiction of his childhood (you have this comment at your own publishing house Molodaia gvardiia).” In late 1953, Stalin’s comment was made famous when the leading Soviet history journal, Voprosy istorii, mustered it as support for its indictment of the cult of personality (though not yet of Stalin’s person). For the posthumous quoting of the comment see the publication (without archival attribution) in P. N. Pospelov, “Piat’desiat let kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soiuza,” Voprosy istorii, no. 11 (1953): 21. Pospelov’s article was based on a 19 October 1953 talk given at the Academy of Sciences.

  22. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 167, ll. 102–103. Stalin’s corrections are dated 23 May 1940.

  23. On the transfer of the modesty ethos from sainthood—via the sons of priests—to the left intelligentsia see Laurie Manchester, “Harbingers of Modernity, Bearers of Tradition: Popovichi as a Model Intelligentsia Self in Revolutionary Russia,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 50, no. 3 (2002): 343; Manchester, Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2008), 74.

  24. RGASPI, f. 81, op. 3, d. 255, l. 159, 11. 118–118ob. Tovstukha’s note bears a handwritten “7/VII” date without a year, except a “192” (with a blank space for the specific year in the 1920s) letterhead (of the Tsentral’nyi Komitet R.K.P [B-ov] Moskva).

  25. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 801, l. 17. Letter to Stalin by M. Rafailov dated 21 August 1924.

  26. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 801, l. 18. Letter to Mekhlis by M. Rafailov dated 21 August 1924.

  27. This history of fond 558 is based on a 25 September 2005 email communication by Oleg Khlevniuk, to whom I am very grateful.

  28. For many of Stalin’s most important decisions there is no documentation at all. His penchant for the telephone is legendary and goes back at least to his behind-the-scenes dealings against the opposition during the 1920s, when a special telephone system allowed him to eavesdrop on his opponents, if the Soviet defector Boris Bazhanov is to be believed. See Boris Bazhanov, Vospominaniia byvshego sekretaria Stalina (N.p.: SP ‘Sofinta’ Informatsionno-reklamnyi tsentr ‘Infodizain,’ 1990), 55–60.