The Stalin Cult

by Jan Plamper

  3. See Jean-Jacques Becker, The Great War and the French People, trans. Arnold Pomerans (Dover, N.H.: Berg, 1985), 97.

  4. See Evgeny Dobrenko, The Making of the State Reader: Social and Aesthetic Contexts of the Reception of Soviet Literature, trans. Jesse Savage (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).

  5. See Peter Kenez, Cinema and Soviet Society, 1917–1953 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 82, 86, 90–91; Yuri Tsivian, Early Cinema in Russia and Its Cultural Reception, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Alan Bodger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Denise Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Youngblood, Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985).

  6. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 113, l. 5.

  7. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 113, l. 36.

  8. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 312, l. 1.

  9. On surveys of the success of Soviet advertisements among consumers, and the German and American models for such surveys, see Randi Barnes Cox, “The Creation of the Socialist Consumer: Advertising, Citizenship and NEP” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2000), 303–311. I am grateful to Randi Cox for directing me to these pages.

  10. On comment books in the Soviet Union see the literature cited in Susan E. Reid, “In the Name of the People: The Manège Affair Revisited,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 4 (2005): 676 n. 10; Oliver Johnson, “Assailing the Monolith: Popular Responses to the 1952 All-Union Art Exibition,” Meno istorija ir kritika / Art History and Criticism, no. 3 (special issue “Art and Politics: Case-Studies from Eastern Europe”) (Kaunas: Vytautas Magnus University, 2007): 45–51; G. A. Iankovskaia, Iskusstvo, den’gi i politika: Khudozhnik v gody pozdnego stalinizma (Perm: Perm’skii gosudartvennyi universitet, 2007), 221–223. In addition, on comment books cited in an official publication of the 1939 Industry of Socialism exhibition see Susan E. Reid, “All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s,” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (1998): esp. 152 n. 59; on a comment book at a 1929 exhibition of a porcelain sculptor, see Karen L. Kettering, “Natalia Dan’ko and the Lomonosov State Porcelain Factory, 1917–1942” (Ph.D. diss., Northwestern University, 1998), 152–153; on comment books at the 1934 exhibition of the model of the Palace of Soviets by Boris Iofan et al. in the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum, see Stephan Hoisington, “‘Ever Higher’: The Evolution of the Project for the Palace of Soviets,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (2003): 62; on comment books at ethnographic exhibitions see Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 211–215. On post-Stalin comment books see Aleksei Fominykh, “‘Kartinki s vystavki’: Knigi otzyvov Amerikanskoi vystavki v Moskve 1959 goda—vozvrashchenie istochnika,” Ab Imperio no. 2 (2010): 151–170; Susan E. Reid, “The Exhibition Art of Socialist Countries, Moscow 1958–9, and the Contemporary Style of Painting,” in Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture in Post-War Eastern Europe, ed. Susan E. Reid and David Crowley (Oxford: Berg, 2000), 101–132.

  11. Interviews with Aleksandr Morozov, professor of art history, Moscow, 24 February 2000, and Mikhail Lazarev, art historian, Moscow, 1 March 2000. Elizabeth Valkenier makes no mention of comment books in her studies of the Peredvizhniki; see Valkenier, Russian Realist Art: The State and Society. The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1977); Valkenier, Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). On Western comment books see Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 677, n14.

  12. Interview with Natalia Masalina, senior research associate OR GTG, Moscow, 30 March 2000.

  13. See, for example, OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 513 (“Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years” exhibition, 1933).

  14. Interview with Masalina.

  15. RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 429, ll. 110ob.–111. Entry dated 3 May 1949.

  16. Interview with Masalina.

  17. See “Dve vystavki. 1. ‘Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let.’—2. ‘15 let Krasnoi Armii,’” Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, no. 27 (14 June 1933): 1.

  18. See ibid., no. 41 (8 September 1933): 1.

  19. For example: “The anniversary exhibition ‘Artists of the RSFSR over the Past Fifteen Years’ in its first 13 days drew 42,581 visitors. Of these, 33,000 visited the painting section, 8,000 the sculpture section, and 1,581 the poster section.” See ibid., no. 32 (14 July 1933): 1.

  20. About this exhibition, which opened on 19 March 1923, Katsman observed in his diary: “They laid out a book for visitor opinions. From these recorded opinions it was clear that the exhibition was successful, that it amazed many. Trotsky wrote: ‘Good, but I am prohibiting the painting of generals for the next five years.’ Indeed, there was one big drawback—we painted too few ordinary heroes—but this was the fault of the Revolutionary War Soviet, which gave us commissions.” Evgeny Katsman, diary entry (17 March 1925), quoted in Khvostenko, Vechera na Maslovke bliz “Dinamo”: Vospominaniia, vol. 2: Za fasadom proletarskogo iskusstva (Moscow: Olimpiia Press, 2003), 76.

  21. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 432, ll. 69–69ob. The letter by I. I. Abramov, “instructor at Ural oblast political education,” is dated 13 April 1925 and part of a file about the 1928 exclusion proceedings of Isaak Brodsky from AKhRR. Presumably, Brodsky produced this letter in his own defense. The reasons for Brodsky’s temporary ouster lay in AKhRR’s turn toward a less mimetic style of representation during the Cultural Revolution. See Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 158–159; Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 115–116.

  22. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 432, l. 4.

  23. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 432, l. 21ob.

  24. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 485, l. 31.

  25. On the didactic approach to museums during the First Five-Year Plan, which overburdened pictures with surrounding explanations and preceded the early 1930s turn to a more iconophilic stance, which treated pictures as objects to be revered rather than explained, see Adam Jolles, “Stalin’s Talking Museums,” Oxford Art Journal 28, no. 3 (2005): 429–455.

  26. RGALI, f. 645, op. 1, d. 485, ll. 34–35ob. The collective letter is not dated.

  27. RGALI, f. 642, op. 1, d. 38, l. 1.

  28. RGALI, f. 642, op. 1, d. 38, l. 1.

  29. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, d. 85, l. 18.

  30. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, d. 85, ll. 21–22.

  31. For a public Soviet representation of the comment book as standing for a shift from bourgeois art for a few to socialist art for the masses, consider the words of one newspaper commentator: “The relationship between our viewer and our artist is entirely different; there is a different creative collaboration. The Soviet artist paints and creates for his proletarian viewer, he puts his art in the service of these masses of toilers and . . . listens very carefully to their voice, judgment, praise, and critical remarks.” Val. V., “Na vystavke kartin ‘Vsekokhudozhnika’: Zritel’ u poloten,” Stalinskii rabochii, 8 August 1935.

  32. RGALI, f. 2368, op. 2, d. 38, ll. 16–17.

  33. See “Stenogramma zasedaniia VIII plenuma Orgkomiteta Soiuza Sovetskikh Khudkov i-yi den’: Vystuplenie B. V. Iogansona ‘Sovetskaia zhivopis’ v period Otechestvennoi voiny,’” OR GTG, f. 18, d. 396, ll. 22–23. Dated 3 June 1943.

  34. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 993, l. 191.

  35. For example, to prevent the closing of an outdoor exhibition of his sculptures outside Yalta, the wood sculptor Bezrukov in 1967 deftly instrumentalized popular enthusiasm. The mythical narod, the sculptor claimed, “not only expressed its enthusiasm verbally but also left behind twenty books of comments with tens of thousands of expressions of gratitude.” See Bezrukov’s petition letter to Voroshilov in RGASPI, f. 74, op. 1, d. 311, l. 90.

  36. RGALI, f. 2020, op. 1, d. 114, ll. 1–1ob. The letter is not dated.

  37. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 23, l. 1.

  38. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 23, l.
1.

  39. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 23, l. 2. “Otzyvy zritelia o vystavke ‘I. V. Stalin v izobrazitel’nom iskusstve’” (1949–1950).

  40. OR GTG, f. 8.II, d. 771, ll. 1–1ob.

  41. See pp. 114–116.

  42. Diky was born on 25 February 1889 in Ekaterinoslav into a family of Ukrainian theater artists and died in Moscow on 1 October 1955.

  43. Evgenii Gromov, Stalin: Vlast’ i iskusstvo (Moscow: Respublika, 1998), 233. An encyclopedia of the Moscow Arts Theater laconically notes about Diky’s arrest: “He was subject to repressions, but Nemirovich-Danchenko did a lot to save him.” See A. M. Smelianskii, Moskovskii Khudozhestvennyi Teatr: Sto let, vol. 2: Imena i dokumenty (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo “Moskovskii Khudozhestvennyi teatr,” 1998), 64. According to a biographical dictionary, “Diky was arrested and spent five years in a correctional labor camp.” V. A. Torchinov and A. M. Leontiuk, eds., Vokrug Stalina: Istoriko-biograficheskii spravochnik (St. Petersburg: Filologicheskii fakul’tet Sankt-Petersburgskogo gosudarstvennogo univer-siteta, 2000), 195.

  44. Diky also played Stalin in the following plays at the State Malyi Theater: Southern Knot and Unforgettable 1919. Oddly, the movie Aleksandr Matrosov is listed neither in the standard filmography, A. V. Machereta, ed., Sovetskie khudozhestvennye fil’my: Annotirovannyi katalog, vol. 2: Zvukovye fil’my, 1930–1957 (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1961), nor in such histories as Jay Leyda’s Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 3rd ed. (Boston: George Allen and Unwin, 1983). And yet, Diky himself repeatedly mentioned the movie, recounting, for example, in a 1949 radio address: “At the same time as my work in the theater [of 1947], I starred in the role of Comrade Stalin in the movie Aleksandr Matrosov.” RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 128, l. 3. “A. D. Diky. Vystupleniia po radio i o rabote nad obrazom I. V. Stalina v kinofil’makh i spektakliakh Malogo teatra” (1949).

  45. Incidentally, it is not true that Semyon Goldshtab, a Jew, was banned forever from the role of Stalin after the Hitler-Stalin Pact, as is widely assumed. Goldshtab played Stalin, for example, in Aleksandr Parkhomenko (1942).

  46. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 109, l. 1.

  47. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, ll. 1–1ob.

  48. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 2. Dated 14 May 1949.

  49. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, ll. 16–16ob. Dated 2 July 1949.

  50. Witness the following letter from Nina Gerasimova, a student at Vladimir’s machine-building vocational college, who first congratulated Diky on his Stalin Prizes and then asked him to help her out of the following situation: “Because of difficult family relations, I cannot receive an education, despite my great desire to obtain one.” RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 5. Dated 3 June 1949.

  51. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, ll. 7–7ob.

  52. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 46. Also see RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, ll. 26–27, 37, 39–40.

  53. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 32.

  54. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 20. However, the Stalin acting of Diky cannot have been as distinctive as we might like to believe, for a group of four soldiers congratulated Diky on his performance as Stalin in The Oath, where in actuality Mikhail Gelovani played the role. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 12.

  55. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 28.

  56. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 34.

  57. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 33.

  58. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 43.

  59. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 18.

  60. RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 197, l. 45.

  61. Personal communication by Vinzenz Hedinger, Bochum, 26 February 2005. On Hollywood’s early measuring of the reception of its films from the 1920s onward in general and on the tailoring of Hollywood films to international audiences in particular see Susan Ohmer, “Measuring Desire: George Gallup and Audience Research in Hollywood,” Journal of Film and Video 43, nos. 1–2 (1991): 3–28; Lea A. Handel, Hollywood Looks at Its Audience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950). I am grateful to Vinzenz Hedinger for these references.

  62. In another example of performed participation in a mass medium, Pravda presented the building in 1937 in Kiev of a monument in honor of just-deceased Sergo Ordzhonikidze as an outgrowth of a democratic workers’ wish—“the workers of the Lenin Forge factory voiced their wish to have a monument build for unforgotten Sergo.” Prauda, 6 July 1937, 6.

  63. Pierre Bourdieu, “Public Opinion Does Not Exist,” in Communication and Class Struggle, ed. Armand Mattelart and Seth Siegelaub, vol. 1 (New York: International General, 1979), 125.

  64. Ibid., 681–682. “Speaking Bolshevik” is from Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 198–237.

  65. See the reactions to Valerii Chkalov in Pravda, 21 March 1941, 4.

  66. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 499, l. 99.Letter dated 24 July 1954.

  67. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 499, l. 100.

  68. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 499, l. 100.

  69. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 499, l. 101.

  70. On complaint books see Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 683 n. 36.

  71. The Central Committee archives contain a petition letter by an editor of the journal Ogonek, which had featured a story on Erzia by Boris Polevoi, asking for a new studio and adducing entries from the comment book ranging from those of art students to those of such well-known sculptor colleagues as Vadim Sidur. RGANI, f. 5, op. 17, d. 499, ll. 13–32. The letter from Ogonek to Petr Pospelov at the Central Committee is on l. 13 and dated 3 March 1954.

  72. Khudozhnik i Rossiia (Düsseldorf: Grad Kitezh, 1980), 157–159.

  CONCLUSION

  1. On Stalin’s death, funeral, and eventual burial see B. S. Ilizarov, “Stalin: Bolezni, smert’ i ‘bessmertie,’” Novaia i noveishaia istoriia, no. 6 (2000): 125–145.

  2. For examples see Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934–1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 168–182; for iconoclastic belletristic attacks on the Stalin cult during and after Stalin’s reign see Rosalind Marsh, “Literary Representations of Stalin and Stalinism as Demonic,” in Russian Literature and Its Demons, ed. Pamela Davidson (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 473–511; for an account of annual celebrations of Stalin’s passing by Gulag returnees in Moscow see Barbara Honigmann, Ein Kapitel aus meinem Leben (Munich: Hanser, 2004), 67.

  3. John Borneman, “Introduction: Theorizing Regime Ends,” in Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority, ed. John Borneman (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 2. Also see John S. Schoeberlein, “Doubtful Dead Fathers and Musical Corpses: What to Do with the Dead Stalin, Lenin, and Tsar Nicholas,” ibid., 201–219.

  4. There was a general awareness that possession of an original or oil copy was a mark of belonging to the elite. In 1947 young Andrei Sakharov was invited to the office of Igor Kurchatov, the father of the Soviet atomic bomb and one of the most powerful figures in the science establishment: “As we talked, Kurchatov stroked his bushy black beard, his expressive brown eyes gleaming. On the wall facing me hung a larger-than-life oil portrait of Stalin with his pipe and the Kremlin in the background. The painting, clearly by one of the ‘court’ artists, symbolized Kurchatov’s high standing in the state hierarchy; it remained in place for some time even after the Twentieth Party Congress.” Andrei Sakharov, Memoirs, trans. Richard Lourie (New York: Knopf, 1990), 93.

  5. On Brodsky see Lev Losev, Iosif Brodskii: Opyt literaturnoi biografii (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 2006), 19; on Lotman see Catriona Kelly, “‘A Laboratory for the Manufacture of Proletarian Writers’: The Stengazeta (Wall Newspaper), Kulturnost’ and the Language of Politics in the Early Soviet Period,” Europe-Asia Studies 54, no. 4 (2002): 590; for Arzhilovsky see Véronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds., Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: New Press, 1995), 132–133; Aleksandr Zinov’ev, Ispoved’ otshchepentsa (
Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 247 (thanks to Nikolai Mitrokhin for this reference); for Molotov see Albert Resis, ed., Molotov Remembers: Inside Kremlin Politics. Conversations with Felix Chuev (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1993), 198.

  6. Anna Akhmatova as quoted from Lidiia Chukovskaia’s diaries and cited in Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 102.

  7. Ernst Cassirer, Versuch über den Menschen: Einführung in eine Philosophie der Kultur (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1996), 43.

  APPENDIX

  1. In the borderline case of three photographs next to each other—Stalin all by himself on the left, in the middle a coffin and wreathes at the funeral for aviators of the crashed Maxim Gorky airplane, Molotov alone on the right—I counted as “Stalin with others.” For the pictures see Pravda, 21 May 1935, 1.

  2. Quoted from Moskovskie novosti, 5 May 1996, 28.

  3. Entry of 30 November 1949, quoted in Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006), 203–204.

  4. Susman quoted in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “The ‘Culture’ of Personality: Mussolini and the Cinematic Imagination,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism—Personenkulte im Stalinismus, ed. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2004), 88.

  5. Ibid.

  6. For reception theory in art history see Wolfgang Kemp, Der Betrachter ist im Bild: Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik (Berlin: Reimer, 1992). Foundational texts of reception studies in literary scholarship are Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Hans Robert Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

  Index

  A. M. Gor’ky Reads to Stalin (painting), 262 n. 73