by Jan Plamper
3. This and the following are based on G. A. Iankovskaia, Iskusstvo, den’gi i politika: Khudozhnik v gody pozdnego stalinizma (Perm’: Perm’skii gosudartvennyi universitet, 2007); Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Bown, Art under Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Bown, “Aleksandr Gerasimov,” in Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a One-Party State, 1917–1992, ed. Bown and Brandon Taylor (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 121–139; Mariia Chegodaeva, Dva lika vremeni (1939: Odin god stal-inskoi epokhi) (Moscow: Agraf, 2001); Brandon Taylor, “On AKhRR,” in Art of the Soviets, ed. Bown and Taylor, 51–72; V. S. Manin, Iskusstvo v rezervatsii: Khudozhestvennaia zhizn’ Rossii 1917-1941gg. (Moscow: Editorial URSS, 1999); T. M. Goriaeva et al., eds., Instituty upravleniia kul’turoi v period stanovleniia: 1917–1930-e gg. Partiinoe rukovodstvo; gosudarstvennye organy upravleniia; Skhemy (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2004); Vern G. Swanson, Soviet Impressionism (Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2001).
4. See Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 56–59.
5. These private collectors also bought artwork left in the studios of deceased artists, whose families were at a loss as to where to store this art since the studios reverted to the state. See M. P. Lazarev, “‘Garmoniia i algebra’” (unpublished typescript, commissioned by L. S. Shishkin, Moscow art gallerist), 10. The artist Fridrikh Lekht called the Old Bolshevik Sergei Mitskevich a “Soviet metsenat” of the 1920s. See Tat’iana Khvostenko, Vechera na Maslovke bliz “Dinamo”: Vospominaniia, vol. 2: Za fasadom proletarskogo iskusstva (Moscow: Olimpiia Press, 2003), 61. To get an inkling of the astonishing dimensions private collecting assumed in post-Stalin Russia see the Museum of Private Collections (Muzei lichnykh kollektsii), a part of Moscow’s Pushkin Fine Arts Museum.
6. Diary entry (17 March 1925), quoted in Khvostenko, Vechera na Maslovke bliz “Dinamo,” vol. 2, 71.
7. Grigoriev, like Radimov a graduate of the influential prerevolutionary Kazan art school, in the early 1920s had worked in the Soviet museum administration under Trotsky’s wife. He was purged during the Terror and mention of him disappeared from accounts of the trip to Repin. See Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 72, 82, 202.
8. Thus in 1919 Aleksandr Gerasimov contributed a Lenin portrait and Katsman a portrait of Marx to the 1 May celebrations on Moscow’s Red Square. See Katsman’s diary account, retold in Khvostenko, Vechera na Maslovke bliz “Dinamo,” vol. 2, 66.
9. For examples of these late paintings see Ingrid Brugger and Joseph Kiblitsky, eds., Kasimir Malewitsch (Bad Breisig: Palace Editions, 2001). It should be mentioned that dating Malevich’s paintings is tricky, because he was notorious for backdating.
10. See Khvostenko, Vechera na Maslovke bliz “Dinamo,” vol. 2, 156–162.
11. To delve into a little more detail, the first phase of the First Five-Year Plan was characterized by a renewed revolutionary zealousness that engulfed the visual arts, too. A new modernist association named Oktiabr’ (October) was founded in 1928. Several events in art institution-building foreshadowed unification and centralization in 1932: the Federation of Organizations of Soviet Artists was founded on 18 June 1930 and in May 1931 came the creation of the Russian Association of Proletarian Artists, which drew on the leftist nucleus of Oktiabr’, AKhR, and others. In other words, unification in 1932 was the culmination of a process initiated some three to four years earlier. On this see also John Barber, “The Establishment of Intellectual Orthodoxy in the U.S.S.R., 1928–1934,” Past and Present, no. 83 (1979): 141–164.
12. Narkompros was subordinate to the Council of People’s Commissars, Sovnarkom, renamed Sovmin, Council of Ministers in March 1946.
13. GlavIskusstvo is not to be confused with the much smaller successor to Izo Narkompros, Glaviskusstvo, which was founded in early 1921 and which was subordinate to Glavnauka within Narkompros.
14. Apart from the various Narkompros organizations and their successor, the Committee for Arts Affairs, there was another disbursor of “soft benefits” such as vacations and other leisuretime outlets for tired artists: the Union of Art Workers (RABIS, Profsoiuz Rabotnikov Iskusstv). Besides vacation resorts, it ran the Central House of Art Workers.
15. For an Iskusstvo letter to Kaganovich’s secretariat, asking, on behalf of the painter Anatolii Iar-Kravchenko, for “at least temporary usage of the newest photographs in your possession and approved by Comrade Kaganovich,” see RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 157, l. 89. Dated 22 August 1937. For a letter by IZOGIZ’s deputy editor to “Boris Zakharovich” (Shumiatsky? Head of the Soviet film industry), asking that two editors get access to documentary film and be allowed to “watch the movies in which Comrade Stalin took part” from 1934 to 1936 for “a unique album, ‘Stalin,’” see RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 97, l. 46.
16. In June 1938 the publishing house Selkhozgiz, which had published Aleksandr Gerasimov’s portrait of the botanist Ivan Michurin, transferred its expired rights to the portrait to the publisher Iskusstvo. For his agreement to this transfer Iskusstvo wired money to Gerasimov’s bank account. For the correspondence, see RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 144, ll. 21–24.
17. See above, p. 30, and Chapter 2, note 6.
18. Sovetskoe iskusstvo was targeted at visual artists and theater people. Writers and cinema artists had their own newspapers. Sovetskoe iskusstvo succeeded the newspaper Rabochii i iskusstvo and was published from 1931 until June 1953, when it was followed by the newspaper Sovetskaia kul’tura. During World War II between January 1942 and 1944 Sovetskoe iskusstvo temporarily merged with Literaturnaia gazeta and was called Literatura i iskusstvo.
19. Iskusstvo did not appear between 1942 and 1946 while publication of Tvorchestvo was suspended between July 1941 and December 1945, and from 1948 to 1956.
20. On amateur painters see S. Iu. Rumiantsev and A. P. Shul’pin, eds., Samodeiatel’noe khudozhestvennoe tvorchestvo v SSSR: Ocherki istorii, 1930–1950gg., vol. 1 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennyi institut iskusstvoznaniia, 1995).
21. “Of the AKhRR membership,” writes Bown, “Fedor Bogorodski was the best-known chekist, although how active he was in this field in the 1920s is hard to tell.” Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 76.
22. Witness, for example, the case of N. I. Mikhailov, whose sketch of Kirov’s funeral had a few stains that created the impression of a “ghost or skeleton, seemingly grabbing Comrade Stalin.” RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 292, ll. 123. Mikhailov’s letter to Voroshilov is dated 28 January 1935 and was not signed because of his arrest by the NKVD during the night of 25–26 January, as a note by his wife and parents explained.
23. “Nakanune iubileinoi vystavki ‘Khudozhniki RSFSR za piatnadtsat’ let,’” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 21 (8 May 1933): 1.
24. Ibid., no. 24 (27 May 1933): 4.
25. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112, ll. 15–16, 67.
26. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112, l. 50.
27. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112, l. 72.
28. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112, l. 25.
29. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112, l. 1.
30. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 112, l. 2.
31. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 2, d. 6, 1. 3. Ekaterina Degot’ has argued that the original socialist painting was but a template for technical reproduction. Traditional realist painterly qualities—in fact, technical craftsmanship—were reduced to the capability of creating a perfect template. Consequently reproductions acquired greater aura than originals. See her “Sichtbarkeit des Unsichtbaren: Die transmediale Utopie der russischen Avantgarde und des sozialistischen Realismus,” in Musen der Macht: Medien in der sowjetischen Kultur der zoer und 30er Jahre, ed. Jurij Murašov and Georg Witte (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2003), 145–147. Yet at the same time official culture elaborately staged the authenticity of the original. Consider the following Pravda article: “The Narkompros USSR Museum Department bought in Kharkov from the widow of the artist Kozlov a drawing of Lenin, which had been unknown so far. The artist Kozlov made his past
el drawing at the Kremlin in Moscow on 29 May 1921. It shows Vladimir Ilyich listening to the Italian deputy Lazzari’s comments. Vladimir Ilyich’s autograph is on the drawing: ‘V. I. Ulianov (Lenin).’” Pravda, 19 December 1935, 6.
32. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 2, d. 6, l. 4.
33. “Industry of Socialism” has been dubbed “arguably the most important artistic event of the 1930s, both in defining the stylistic and iconographie parameters of socialist realism at a particular historical moment, and in implementing, on an unprecedented scale, the planned production of art under state patronage, in line with the centralized control of industry and agriculture.” Susan E. Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The Industry of Socialism Art Exhibition, 1935–41,” Russian Review 60, no. 2 (April 2001): 153.
34. Nevertheless, as late as 1944 competitions for leader portraits still seem to have been an occasional part of the repertoire of Soviet art politics. Early that year the Moscow Artists’ Union was reprimanded for not following through on its decision to start a competition for a Stalin portrait (the decision “remained on paper only,” as the stenographic record critically noted). RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 427, l. 3.
35. A. Gushchin, “Lenin i Stalin v narodnom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve,” Iskusstvo 7, no. 3 (May–June 1939): 76.
36. Susan Reid writes that “MOSSKh announced a competition in November 1938 for commissions for work dedicated to the image of Lenin and Stalin (RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 227, l. 11).” See Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror,” 168 n. 63. There is a slight chance that this competition was connected with the 1939 exhibition.
37. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 992, ll. 16, 21.
38. In fact, the deadline of Stalin’s birthday was so pressing that the organizers asked the trade union to which the scholarly personnel and the various workers who equipped the rooms belonged to agree to extend the eight-hour workday. See OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, l. 88.
39. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 992, ll. 5, 29.
40. “It needs to be pointed out as a gratifying fact that different artistic institutions are competing for the right to run this exhibition.” OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 5ob.
41. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993,l. 7.
42. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 8.
43. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 21–21ob. Stenographic record of the “meeting for the preparation of the exhibition” of 7 October 1939.
44. It bears noting that artwork from the periphery was always judged in the center, if an exhibition took place in Moscow. In the exhibition “Achievements of Soviet Realist Art,” for example, the chairman of the Moscow jury, Boris Ioganson, explained that “in Leningrad, in Kiev, in Minsk, in Kharkov, in Tbilisi, in Baku, in Tashkent, in Erevan and other places assisting commissions have been formed, that is commissions that select the best artwork on location according to their judgment and send it to Moscow for final discussion and selection by our jury here.” The judging then proceeded by majority vote (with the painter, if present in the jury, abstaining from voting). Thus Vasily Efanov’s Girl with a Jug was accepted with twenty-two favorable votes and one negative vote. OR GTG, f. 18, d. 183, ll. 3, 8. Stenographic record dated 1 October 1940.
45. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 8. About Central Asia the same functionary, Veimark, said: “The art in the Central Asian Republics is more random. So far we do not see the kind of great activity as in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, where artists were mobilized for Stalin themes. . . . In Turkmenia we have the portrait carpet. . . . In Kazakhstan and Kirgiziia we also have something: Kazakh tapestries with portraits. . . . In Tadzhikistan we have murals. . . . In Buriat-Mongolia, I believe, there should also be something fitting. . . . I think that we could thus get a minimum of 100 pieces of artwork out of the national republics for this exhibition, even if we select rigorously.” OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, ll. 11–12.
46. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, l. 3.
47. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, l. 115.
48. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 22ob.
49. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 23.
50. See, for example, the Leningrad artist Vladimir Kuznetsov’s letter in OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 62.
51. See the protocols of the jury in OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, ll. 89–92, 94–99, 105–107, 142–152.
52. For telegrams of individual artists or local artist unions saying that their contributions were going to be late see OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, ll. 119–122.
53. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, l. 59. Letter dated 4 November 1939. Voroshilov gave his agreement on 14 November.
54. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 25.
55. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 26.
56. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, ll. 28ob.–29.
57. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 26ob.
58. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 28.
59. On the Georgian exhibition and Beria’s involvement see Judith Devlin, “Beria and the Development of the Stalin Cult,” in Stalin: His Time and Ours, ed. Geoffrey Roberts (N.p.: Irish Association for Russian and East European Studies, 2005), 25–46.
60. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 763. l. 3.
61. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, ll. 191–192.
62. In 1938–1939, for example, a “mobile exhibition Lenin-Stalin in the Fine Arts,” consisting mostly of reproductions and plaster casts of existing artwork, was prepared by the Tretyakov Gallery for travel through the Soviet Union. See OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 888. In 1949, the Irkutsk art museum organized an exhibition entitled “Stalin and the Stalin Era in Works of Art.” The exhibition showed artwork from the museum’s collection, especially paintings focusing on Stalin’s experience of Siberian exile, and several masterpieces acquired from Moscow painters; however, there were also painted copies of famous paintings. See the catalogue, Vystavka: Stalin i Stalinskaia epokha v proizvedeniiakh izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva (Irkutsk: Izdanie Irkutskogo oblastnogo khudozhestvennogo muzeia, 1949). In Kursk an exhibition of Stalin art from all over the Soviet Union (“Stalin and the Stalin Epoch in the Works of Soviet Graphic Artists”) opened shortly after Stalin’s sixtieth birthday. See Pravda, 22 January 1940, 6.
63. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, l. 203.
64. At a discussion in the organizing committee about how to increase the recently opened “Industry of Socialism”‘s attractiveness to visitors, one participant suggested that “Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin should find time to visit the exhibition. Will his judgment not be a stimulus for the toiling masses to visit this exhibition? The visit of Comrade Stalin and the Politburo members will be our greatest reward, this is what we ought to strive for and then there will be no more obstruction, the artwork will be evaluated properly, and we will occupy an appropriate place.” OR GTG, f. 18, d. 136, ll. 28–29. Stenographic record dated 14 April 1939.
65. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 994, ll. 211–214. Quote on l. 212.
66. See M. P. Lazarev, “Problemy tsenoobrazovaniia na proizvedeniia izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva v SSSR: Popytka analiza” (unpublished typescript, commissioned by L. S. Shishkin, Moscow art gallerist), 3.
67. Some commissions were produced directly for the Art Fund, which then could take paintings out of storage for sale or exhibition.
68. Lazarev, “Problemy tsenoobrazovaniia,” 14.
69. Lazarev, “‘Garmoniia i algebra,’” 22. Dugladze continued, “But I have to say that there were also honoraria of five thousand rubles, which they paid for a small landscape painting. This is how much prices differed!”
70. Lazarev, “Problemy tsenoobrazovaniia,” 16.
71. Lazarev, “‘Garmoniia i algebra,’” 31.
72. Lazarev, “Problemy tsenoobrazovaniia,” 18; Yankovskaya, “The Economic Dimensions of Art in the Stalinist Era,” 788.
73. For an example of a painter being paid directly by the publisher, consider S. V. Gerasimov, who received 5 percent of the rated value (nominal) of an album of wall paintings, in which his painting V. I. Lenin at the Second Congress of Soviets was included. See RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 157, l. 14. On
the Bureau for the Protection of Authors’ Rights, see RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 144, l. 11.
74. As the Leningrad artist G. Vereisky in October 1937 wrote to his Moscow publisher Iskusstvo from Sukhumi, the subtropical Black Sea port, “I am very interested to find out when I can get the money Iskusstvo owes me for prints of my portraits.” He continued, stressing the hope he placed in the personal influence of his addressee, one Tamara Mikhailovna, “I write to you with the earnest request that you push this matter; without this the publisher does not hurry to pay back its debts (I speak from experience).” RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 157, ll. 26–26ob.
75. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 144, l. 3. Dated 15 July 1938.
76. See the akty and protokoly of the commissions in charge of retouched Stalin portraits by Gerasimov in 1938 in RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 144, ll. 14–15, 17.
77. It also reflects a more general ambivalence toward the photograph in Stalinist Russia, whose claim to authenticity was exploited while its power to produce less filtered representations was feared. On this, see Leah Dickerman, “Camera Obscura: Socialist Realism in the Shadow of Photography,” October, no. 93 (2000): 139–153.
78. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 97, l. 10. N.d., but file from 1940.
79. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 144, l. 103. Dated 9 March 1938.
80. RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 147, l. 28. Dated 13 May 1938.
81. See, for example, RGALI, f. 652, op. 8, d. 157, l. 47.
82. See Jan Plamper, “Abolishing Ambiguity: Soviet Censorship Practices in the 1930s,” Russian Review 60, no. 4 (2001): 531.
83. 1938 art soviet protocols of the “MOSSKh manufacturing bureau” (no place given) of the Art Fund “sculpture department” commented, for example, on a “composition Stalin with a Child by G. Lavrov, plaster, 2.5 meters in height, for reproduction”: “Suggest working on the portrait likeness of J. V. Stalin’s head. Find the right proportions of J. V. Stalin’s hands and head, of the girl’s head relative to J. V. Stalin’s head.” RGALI, f. 2942, op. 2, d. 2, l. 14 (dated 29 August 1938). In 1940 we learn of a sculpture factory in Mytishchi in Moscow oblast, which offered fifty-seven ready sculptures ranging in subject from Chernyshevsky to Henri Barbusse to Stalin to a Pioneer with a drum to a little bear, priced from ten rubles to three thousand rubles (the Stalin statue cost two thousand rubles). See RGALI, f. 2942, op. 2, d. 12, ll. 47–48.