by Jan Plamper
84. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 22 (11 May 1935): 4.
85. Ibid., no. 48 (17 October 1937): 6.
86. This was the Mytishchi sculpture factory. See RGALI, f. 2942, op. 2, d. 12, l. 87.
87. In the early 1980s, this factory merged with the Russian Visual Propaganda (Rosizopropaganda, located on Petrovka 28, Moscow) organization and was known as the Vuchetich All-Union Artistic-Manufacturing Association (Vsesoiuznoe Khudozhestvenno-Proizvodstvennoe Ob”edinenie im. Vucheticha). Today it is still on Profsoiuznaia 76, Moscow, and is still abbreviated VKhPO, even if it has turned into a corporate business and its acronym is now deciphered as All-Russian Artistic Manufacturing Association (Vserossiiskoe Khudozhestvenno-Proizvodstvennoe Ob”edinenie im. Vucheticha).
88. For one such case see RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 18, l. 63.
89. See a Glavizo Komitet letter in RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 18, l. 2.
90. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 18, ll. 46–46ob.
91. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 18, l. 7. The meeting was on 8 February 1949. Also consider a 22 February 1949 meeting, at which 302 sketches of paintings submitted for a competition (leading up to Stalin’s seventieth birthday exhibition?) were judged anonymously. Of these, 43 were accepted and 259 turned down. Of the 43 accepted, one got a first prize, two a second prize, three a third prize, and four a fourth prize. Thirty-three were ordered to be turned in as finished paintings. See RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 18, ll. 11–18ob. A typical interior visual factory inventory for the year of 1949 listed artists alphabetically, with number and date of contract, the sum paid according to contract, and, interestingly, a fee for “social insurance and production costs” (sotsstrakh, proizvodstvennye raskhody), which, in the case of artist F. V. Antonov amounted to 1,296.74 rubles of a total of 13,026.69 rubles (9.96 percent). RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 67, l. 32.
92. Author’s interview with Vladilen Aleksandrovich Shabelnikov, A. M. Gerasimov’s son-in-law, Moscow, 28 April 2000.
93. At least in the case of the Moscow Painting-Sculpture Factory’s art soviet and the Moscow Artists’ Association, the governing board of the association seems to have been superior to the art soviet. In one case the art soviet wrote to the governing board asking that it approve its stenographic protocol so that it could act upon the protocol and definitively draw up contracts for those paintings that had been approved and turn down those that had been rejected. See RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 18, l. 5.
94. The art soviet, however, declined to criticize the sketch in depth and demanded that the artist first produce more elaborate sketches. Apparently the larger issue was whether the art soviet would recommend funding by the association for a future painting. See RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 20, ll. 29–30.
95. If absent, the artist was expected to read the stenographic record of the discussion. When the art soviet discussed, for example, A. S. Stavrovsky’s painting Harvesting the Grain on 29 August 1949, the chairperson asked: “But how are we going to speak in the absence of the painter?” One art soviet member answered: “What do we need the painter for? If there are going to be suggestions for change, he will look at the stenogram.” RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 47. Likewise, in order to refresh their memory, artists could reread the stenogram. At least they were told to do so if their resubmissions failed to show the changes recommended at the relevant session of the art soviet. See, for example, RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 183: “The remarks at the last art soviet were correct and the painter should carefully read the stenogram.”
96. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 166.
97. See RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 63.
98. It is also possible that Yerushev’s painting was planned long before the 1946 release of the film, The Oath, and that he had the misfortune of now, after the appearance of the film, being held to the images canonized by the film. The art soviet in fact reproached Yerushev for failing to appreciate the canonical moment of The Oath: the transfer of legitimacy from one leader to another. A pivotal moment did not receive its proper treatment by the artist—perhaps quite simply (and unfortunately for Yerushev) because of bad timing.
99. It was precisely through implementation that socialist realism was actually fleshed out, as Erika Wolf has argued: “Socialist Realism took shape only through the development of a working practice and this required a period of adaptation and experimentation.” Wolf, “USSR in Construction: From Avant-Garde to Socialist Realist Practice” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1999), 271–272. Studies of socialist realism in the visual arts (in addition to those previously cited) include Antoine Baudin, Le réalisme socialiste soviétique de la période jdanovienne (1947–1953): Les arts plastiques et leurs institutions, vol. 1 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997); Baudin and Leonid Heller, Le réalisme socialiste soviétique de la période jdanovienne (1947–1953): Usages à l’intérieur, image à exporter, vol. 2 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1998); Mariia Chegodaeva, Sotsrealizm: Mify i real’nost’ (Moscow: Zakharov, 2003); Thomas Christ, Der Sozialistische Realismus: Betrachtungen zum Sozialistischen Realismus in der Sowjetzeit (Basel: Wiese Verlag, 1999); Ekaterina Degot’, Terroristicheskii naturalizm (Moscow: Ad Marginem, 1998); Degot’, Russkoe iskusstvo XX veka (Moscow: Trilistnik, 2000); Igor Golomstock, Totalitarian Art in the Soviet Union, the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and the People’s Republic of China (New York: IconEditions, 1990); Jørn Guldberg, “Socialist Realism as Institutional Practice: Observations on the Interpretation of the Works of Art of the Stalin Period,” in The Culture of the Stalin Period, ed. Hans Günther (London: St. Martin’s, 1990), 149–177; Aleksandr Morozov, Konets utopii: Iz istorii iskusstva v SSSR 1930-kh godov (Moscow: Galart, 1995); Morozov, Sotsrealizm i realizm (Moscow: Galart, 2007); Mif i real’nost’: Kul’tura i iskusstvo strany Sovetov (1920–1950-e gody): Nauchnaia konferentsiia. Materialy i issledovaniia (Kirov: Promizdat, 2002). For further titles see the review article by Oliver Johnson, “Alternative Histories of Soviet Visual Culture,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, no. 3 (2010): 581–608.
100. Katerina Clark has characterized High Stalinist culture as neo-Platonist: empirical knowledge is no longer telling, inner truths count more than outward appearances. See her The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 141.
101. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 20, ll. 54ob.–57ob.
102. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, ll. 62–65.
103. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 20, ll. 57ob.–58.
104. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 20, l. 98.
105. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 20, ll. 125–126.
106. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 22, l. 84.
107. Interview with Shabelnikov, Moscow, 28 April 2000.
108. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 65.
109. The exigency here probably was the demand of the Kalinin Museum to single out four delegates and to display them prominently in the form of portraits en miniature. In other words, local heroes were to be emphasized, whereas the art soviet recommended a group portrait. See RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, ll. 65–66.
110. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, ll. 121–122.
111. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 22, l. 287.
112. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 22, l. 179.
113. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 123.
114. RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 6. In the same painting, the books on Lenin’s table were criticized by Fedor Shurpin, who “associated [them] with religious books.” RGALI, f. 2470, op. 2, d. 21, l. 7.
115. For an introduction to Western Marxist and Soviet art criticism see Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s Lost Aesthetic: Karl Marx and the Visual Arts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984). On the beginnings of art criticism in Russia also see Andrei Makhrov, “The Pioneers of Russian Art Criticism: Between State and Public Opinion, 1804–1855,” Slavonic and East European Review 81, no. 4 (2003): 614–633.
116. For an alternative view that landscape painting constituted a central genre in Stalinist art, that “the depiction o
f nature was a major preoccupation of Socialist Realism,” see Mark Bassin, “‘I Object to Rain that Is Cheerless’: Landscape Art and the Stalinist Aesthetic Imagination,” Ecumene 7, no. 3 (2000): 313.
117. Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 101.
118. Ibid.
119. On the shift from Sergei Eisenstein ‘s and Dziga Vertov’s tipazhnost’ to lichnost’ and Liubov Orlova’s star cult, see Oksana Bulgakowa, “Der erste sowjetische Filmstar,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2004), 365–389.
120. RGALI, f. 2368, op. 2, d. 38, ll. 11–12.
121. See K. Sitnik, “O populiarnoi monografii,” Iskusstvo, no. 1 (1947), 78–80.
122. Pictures that did not fit into this taxonomy often ended up in the storage rooms of the Art Fund as nelikvidy. See Lazarev, “‘Garmoniia i algebra,’” 17.
123. Particularly after the postwar resurrection of the Academy of Arts, many painters and sculptors produced both a work of art and a written comment on their work—a “dissertation.” Together, these two elements bestowed upon the artist the Russian equivalent of a Ph.D. in art history, kandidat iskusstvovedeniia.
124. A. V. Protopopov, “I. V. Stalin (skul’ptura)” (avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata iskusstvovedeniia, Akademiia khudozhestv SSSR, Institut zhivopisi, skul’ptury i arkhitektury im. I. E. Repina, Leningrad, 1953), 6–7.
125. V. L. Rybalko, “I. V. Stalin v molodye gody (skul’ptura)” (avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata iskusstvovedeniia, Akademiia khudozhestv SSSR, Institut zhivopisi, skul’ptury i arkhitektury im. I. E. Repina, Leningrad, 1950), 6.
126. Unidentified author, Avtoreferat dissertatsii Instituta im. I. E. Repina, Akademii Khudozhestv SSSR, Leningrad, 1 June 1950, 5.
127. V. G. Val’tsev, “I. V. Stalin sredi rybakov Eniseia (zhivopis’)” (avtoreferat dissertatsii na soiskanie uchenoi stepeni kandidata iskusstvovedeniia, Akademiia khudozhestv SSSR, Institut zhivopisi, skul’ptury i arkhitektury im. I. E. Repina, Leningrad, 1953), 7.
128. “Prazdnik sotsialisticheskoi kul’tury,” Iskusstvo, no. 2 (1941): 6.
129. On the nineteenth-century roots of socialist realism see Irina Gutkin, The Cultural Origins of the Socialist Realist Aesthetic, 1890–1934 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999).
130. RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 295, l. 23. The letter to Stetsky is dated 1 April 1933, the copy to Voroshilov used here has a date of 2 April 1933. Photography was a constant point of reference in this art criticism. Also in 1933, one critic wrote: “The photographic naturalism (naturalistichnost’) of some portraits at the exhibition probably does not need to be emphasized. It would be ridiculous to take away from artists an auxiliary tool as powerful as photography, which nowadays almost all of the Western European masters use. Photography undoubtedly has more advantages over quick, impressionistic sketches from life, but the artist must turn the photograph into a true work of art, not a poor copy of the photograph.” See Sergei Romov, “Krasnaia armiia v zhivopisi: Iubileinaia vystavka 15 let RKKA,’” Iskusstvo, no. 4 (1933): 27.
131. Romov, “Krasnaia armiia v zhivopisi,’” 25–26.
132. S. Razumovskaia, “Sergei Gerasimov,” Iskusstvo, no. 2 (1934): 65. A reproduction of Sergei Gerasimov’s 1932 oil painting Stalin among the Cadets is on p. 60.
133. Ibid., no. 53 (17 November 1935): 4.
134. L. Gutman, “O portretakh vozhdei,” Iskusstvo, no. 1 (1935): 5.
135. In Gutman’s words: “Through the generalization and synthesis of reality—extracting the content of depicted images from the real world—the artist creates portraits that are also convincing with regard to their form; and in the development of the portrait genre there already emerges a bounded, vital, and dialectical unity of form and content that cannot be reached in any other way.” Ibid., 10.
136. Ibid.
137. Ibid., 11.
138. See Mark Neiman, “Novye portrety tovarishcha Stalina,” Iskusstvo, no. 6 (1937): 61. As also manifest in this 1937 article, once narratives of Stalin’s life appeared in print after the mid-1930s, they became a second important source (apart from visual iconography) on which art criticism drew in analyzing a Stalin portrait’s “intertextuality.” At the Tretyakov’s Georgian exhibition (1937–1938), the pictorial representation of Stalin’s childhood and his later activities in the Caucasus was clearly based on such verbal accounts as Henri Barbusse’s Stalin biography (which had appeared in Russian in early 1936) and Lavrenty Beria’s memoirs. See the article on the exhibition by Evg. Kriger, “Istoriia, voploshchennaia v zhivopisi,” ibid., no. 1 (1938): 3–20.
139. OR GTG, f. 18, d. 173, ll. 86–87. “Rukopis’ F. S. Mal’tseva: Individual’nyi portret i tipicheskii obraz v sovetskom iskusstve” (1940).
140. B. Keller, “Skul’ptura na vystavke,” Iskusstvo, no. 2 (1941): 45–47.
141. Osip Beskin, “O kartine, naturalizme i realizme (v sviazi s rabotami Leningradskikh molodykh khudozhnikov),” ibid., no. 4 (1939): 12.
142. The term signified the established representations of a person (rarely an object). For a use of the term with respect to someone other than Stalin see e.g. I. S. Rabinovich, “Kist’iu druzei i vragov: Khudozhestvennaia ikonografiia Marksa,” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 13 (14 March 1933): 1.
143. Consider the example of Brodsky, who refused to do a commissioned group portrait after the start of the Great Terror in 1937: “I will paint the painting and then one of the persons turns out to be an enemy of the people, and again they will prohibit the painting! I won’t do this painting.” M Br, “Vospominaniia syna I. I. Brodskogo, E. I. Brodskogo,” 25. Or consider the example of Gerasimov, who was painting a group portrait of political leaders in 1937. As this was the height of the Great Terror, he kept receiving calls from the Party’s Central Committee, announcing that “unfortunately, Comrade X also turned out to be an enemy of the people.” At first Gerasimov painted over individual figures, adding a palm leaf or a column here and there. When the number of “enemies of the people” became unmanageable Gerasimov simply covered the entire picture with lilacs, lest he be accused of making propaganda for the condemned enemies of the Soviet Union. Interviews with Shabelnikov, Moscow, 28 April and 10 May 2000.
144. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, ll. 181–181ob. Denisov’s letter is dated 11 May 1955.
145. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, l. 180. Lepeshinskaia’s letter is dated 3 June 1954.
146. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, l. 180. Dated 7 April 1955.
147. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, l. 181.
148. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, l. 181ob. The term trafaretchik (from trafaret, stencil) was taken from the reproduction of Soviet posters. Beginning in the early 1920s the press agency ROSTA sent stencils to provincial ROSTA outlets, which artists painted or airbrushed one after another onto paper stock until a “ROSTA Window”—a multicolored poster with a schematic touch—emerged. For an illustration of this process, see Klaus Waschik and Nina Baburina, Werben für die Utopie: Russische Plakatkunst des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bietigheim-Bissingen: edition tertium, 2003), 202. For an illustration of the related technique of copying and magnifying visual art using numbered squares, in this case a 1927 Lenin poster, see Svetlana Malysheva, Sovetskaia prazdnichnaia kul’tura v provintsii: Prostranstvo, simvoly, istoricheskie mify (1917–1927) (Kazan: Ruten, 2005), 322.
149. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, l. 178. In this Central Committee note Denisov is identified as a khudozhnik-kopiist, “born in 1890, Party member since 1907, without higher education, has been working at the Moscow division of the Khudozhestvennyi Fond since 1946.”
150. RGANI, f. 5, op. 33, d. 27, ll. 183–184. Letter dated 28 October 1957.
151. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 543, ll. 186–187ob).
152. Interview with Professor Yuri Romakov, program Namedni on NTV, 21 December 1999.
153. See Pravda, 14 November 1935, 2.
155. RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 292, l. 180. Voroshilov’s remark is dated 5 January 1935.
CHAPTER 6. THE AUDIENCE AS CULT PRODUCER
1. For discussions of the svodki see Paul Corner, ed., Popular Opinion in Totalitarian Regimes: Fascism, Nazism, Communism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
2. For like-minded conceptions of reception see Jochen Hellbeck, “Speaking Out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 1, no. 1 (2000): 71–96; Lynne Viola, “Introduction” and “Popular Resistance in the Stalinist 1930s: Soliloquy of a Devil’s Advocate,” in Contending with Stalinism: Soviet Power and Popular Resistance in the 1930s, ed. Viola (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), 2, 43, 18. For more on the specificity of Stalin-era subject construction see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006).