IMAGINE, FOR A moment, a citizen living in the mid-twentieth century, under postwar Stalinism. Further imagine that, perhaps as a reward for overfulfilling the production quota at a local coal mine, this citizen gets to take a trip from the Soviet provinces to Moscow. After visiting the major landmarks such as the Lenin Mausoleum and the Kremlin, and after taking a ride on the magnificent metro, our visitor from the Russian provinces might sign up for an excursion to the Tretyakov Gallery. There the visitor will likely be offered a guided tour that focuses on artistic representations of Lenin and Stalin. The museum guide may have graduated from a crash course based on the 1947 essay “Methodical Elaboration of Excursions in the State Tretyakov Gallery on the Subject: ‘The Images of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Fine Arts’” by Vladimir Sadoven. And this being the Soviet Union, the guide will probably follow the Sadoven pamphlet quite closely. It teaches that the subject of Lenin and Stalin in Soviet art “is of great, exciting interest for every Soviet person.” The depiction of Lenin and Stalin embodies “the best features of the Bolshevik-revolutionary and the builder of socialism and [therefore] the tour has a great moral-political, educational goal.” It goes on to explain that “by invoking through the artistic images of Lenin and Stalin . . . different stages in the history of the Party and the Soviet state, the tour also has great political and historical edifying value.” “Because of these goals,” Sadoven warns, “the tour must be conducted in an accessible, politically accurate, and emotional manner.”1
The tour will probably start with a short introductory lecture, followed by a powerful visual salvo of two emblematic paintings, Isaak Brodsky’s Lenin at the Smolny (1930) and Dmitry Nalbandian’s Portrait of J. V. Stalin (1945) (Plates 1, 2). Then visitors will pass through rooms displaying a series of drawings and sculptures of Lenin by Nikolai Andreev. Adulatory quotes about Lenin and Stalin from the poetry of Mayakovsky, Lunacharsky, and the Kazakh folklore performer Dzhambul (Dzhambul Dzhabaev) will be interspersed throughout the entire tour. To “sustain the mounting impressive impact on the viewer from the images of the ‘Leniniana,’” the tour will probably then gloss over a number of paintings and hurry to “subtheme Stalin”—specifically, a room exhibiting Aleksandr Gerasimov’s monumental Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938).2 There, visitors will hear the tour’s lengthiest exegesis:
The picture shows Comrades Stalin and Voroshilov during a walk in the Kremlin against the backdrop of the wide panorama of Moscow. The figures of Stalin and Voroshilov are given in full size in the foreground. On the second plane are the ancient towers of the Kremlin; on the third is Moscow under reconstruction. Stalin and Voroshilov are looking into the distance. They are walking along the pavement, which is still wet from the rain that has just fallen, and their figures are distinctly recognizable against the backdrop of the city and the cloudy sky with blue breaking through here and there. The subject of the picture is very simple and taken, as it were, from everyday life, from a genre painting. But the picture captivates the spectator with a feeling of elation and importance. The artist managed to create this impression both with his composition and with the harmonious uplifting colors; he successfully used the motif of the weather, when everything seems illuminated by the recent rain, and even the color gray looks cheerful. Likewise, the artist has attained a unity of pictorial tone that enables the wholeness and compelling sublimity of the impression. In the appearance of Stalin and Voroshilov one can sense calm strength and vigilance. The result is an unpretentious and majestic image of the leader of the Soviet people and his closest comrade-in-arms, the People’s Commissar of Defense, against the background of the great city, the capital of a new world, Moscow. They are standing in the ancient Kremlin, the heart of the city and the world, are guarding this new world, and are vigilantly looking into the distance.3
Clearly, the guide’s miniature lecture was replete with corporeal-spatial metaphors—the Kremlin as “the heart of the city” and “the heart of the new world,” Stalin and Voroshilov gazing “into the distance.” All of these metaphors are bound up with centrality.
In the Soviet Union there was a connection between centrality and sacrality: no place was more sacrally charged than society’s center. The closer a person was to the center of society, the more sacred was that person. The person placed closest to the center of society embodied the sacred most powerfully.4 As we have seen, it was during the Great Break that Stalin successfully maneuvered himself into the center of Soviet society and firmly established a system of single, dictatorial rule that was to last until his death. This principle of power came to encompass all spheres of society; in the words of Katerina Clark, “the entire country in all its many aspects—political, social, symbolical, and cultural— became unambiguously centripetal and hierarchical in its organization.”5 On the level of symbolic representations too, Stalin was moved into the center. Cult products accorded Stalin center stage and other persons and objects began to be assembled around Stalin, the center, in circles.
If throughout its history the Russian state was usually centered on a single person, then this pattern extended to the micro level as well. The institution of the intelligentsia circle (kruzhok) is a case in point. As we saw in Chapter 1, most Bolsheviks had been members or leaders of Marxist study circles (kruzhki), each grouped around a single leader. During the Stalinist 1930s, textual cultural representations of the Communist Party unabashedly placed the circle at the beginning of the Party’s genealogy. Organized Russian Marxism started as a kruzhok and ended up as the Party, according to the Short Course: “The VKP(b) formed on the basis of the workers’ movement in prerevolutionary Russia out of Marxist circles and groups, which connected with the workers’ movement and brought Socialist consciousness to it.”6 Lenin himself had begun as the leader of a circle: “Lenin entered a Marxist circle, organized by Fedoseev, in Kazan. After Lenin’s move to Samara, the first circle of Samara Marxists soon formed around him.”7 Later, in St. Petersburg, Lenin reshaped many smaller circles into a single larger circle, an embryonic party: “In 1895 Lenin united all Marxist worker circles (already about twenty) in Petersburg into one ‘Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.’ Hereby he prepared the foundation of a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party.”8 But the reconfiguration of circles turned out to be more difficult than expected and demanded superhuman efforts from the shapers, Lenin and Stalin: “The rise of the workers’ movement and the manifest closeness of revolution demanded the foundation of a single, centralized party of the working class, capable of guiding the revolutionary movement. But the state of the local party organs, the local committees, groups, and circles was so poor, and their organizational disunity and ideological differences so great, that the creation of such a party posed incredible difficulties.”9
Bolshevik textual self-presentation, as in the Short Course, is one thing, visual representation another. In searching for a starting point in visual genealogy for the sacralizing of the khruzhok, the court portrait (paradnyi portret) would probably be a good choice. The quintessential court or ruler portrait (German, Herrscherbild) was centered on the courtly person or sovereign.10 Anton von Werner’s painting of the proclamation of the German Empire on 21 January 1871 in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles illustrates this point—with an interesting twist: it famously places Bismarck, in his white uniform, in the center of the picture, despite the presence of King Wilhelm I and other members of the Prussian royal family in the painting (Fig. 3.1). The artist, according to the common interpretation, centered the picture on Bismarck to suggest that the statesman, rather than the monarch, deserved credit for the foundation of a German Empire.
Figure 3.1. Anton von Werner, The Proclamation of the German Empire (1877). Bismarck (in white uniform), not Kaiser Wilhelm I (to the left on the dais), is placed in the center. According to the common interpretation, the artist centered Bismarck to express that he, not the Kaiser, deserved the credit for founding the German Empire. Original at Bismarck-Museum, Friedrichsruh.
These principles of spatial arrangement applied to cities as well. Moscow can be seen as always having been governed by a circular spatial order rather than an axial or linear order, because it was organized in ring roads around the Kremlin. This was further reinforced in the “general plan” for the reconstruction of Moscow in 1935. By contrast, St. Petersburg–Petrograd-Leningrad was organized around the axis of Nevsky Prospekt, pointing toward the Neva River, which, as the “window onto Europe,” leads to the Neva delta and out to the Baltic Sea and the world. Similar to its place of origin, the Revolution itself was always represented as linear, forward movement.
Thus the pictorial representations centering on Stalin were but a late addition to a long visual genealogy. Just as the Russian state had always been centered on a single leader, images of the Russian state, its rulers, and its religion had usually been organized in concentric circles. The years of the Revolution and the period of the New Economic Policy (1921–1928) were the exception rather than the rule. This is not to suggest that linear movement was banished altogether from the genre of the Stalin portrait. Stalin quite simply monopolized linear movement: his gaze came to figure as the only axis pointing outside the circular pictorial patterns. Stalin’s gaze at a focal point outside the picture became a distinguishing feature of visual representations of the vozhd’. It is worth recalling that this representational strategy was anything but new. The novelty of socialist realism was to frame the gaze of Stalin—linear, materialist history personified—as the apprehension of the dawning of the future, a future of communism that the Soviet Union would soon enter.
The late 1920s saw the eclipse of the Russian avant-garde and the rise of realist art. Within realism changes took place as well. For our purposes it is important to remember that a reordering of the hierarchy of artistic genres was taking place: the portrait was established as the primary genre, and all other genres (landscape, still life) were devalued. This was a necessary condition that led to the development of the Stalin portrait genre. Stalin began to occupy center stage in other fields of cultural production, too. He engendered uncountable metaphors and became a metaphor himself. Indeed, Stalin and the Soviet Union—its nature, its topography—were locked in a loop of mutual signification. If Stalin’s physical body functioned as a signifier for nature (the gaze directed into no-time and no-place—utopia), then nature functioned as a signifier for Stalin. Stalin’s coming to power ushered in a toponymical revolution. Villages and cities, canals and roads, mountains and islands began to bear his name. It became impossible to move through Soviet space without encountering Stalin coordinates.
At the same time, Stalin was consistently likened to nature in the work of writers, poets, and artists. His biographer, Henri Barbusse, wrote: “Here he is, the greatest and most important of our contemporaries. . . . In his full size he towers over Europe and over Asia, over the past and over the present. He is the most famous and yet almost the least known man in the world.”11 In the aftermath of Stalin’s and Voroshilov’s famous meeting with three artists, Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Evgeny Katsman, on 6 July 1933 at Stalin’s dacha, Katsman wrote to Voroshilov:
Stalin has enchanted us all. What a colossal man! To me he seems as huge and beautiful as nature. I was on the top of Mount Tupik (na verkhnem Tupike) in Dagestan at sunset. The mountains radiated like bright gems, I couldn’t take my eyes off this, and wanted to remember everything for the rest of my life. Stalin is just like that: I looked at him, wanted to look at him forever and couldn’t. I wanted to remember Stalin and couldn’t. He very much resembles nature—the oceans, the mountains, the forests, the clouds. You wonder and are amazed and fascinated, but you know that this is nature. But Stalin is the peak of nature—Stalin is the oceans, mountains, forests, clouds, coupled with a powerful mind for the leadership of humanity12
In 1937 Pravda framed the flight to America via the North Pole by a team of explorer-aviators (so popular at the time) as a voyage from the center to the periphery and back to the center, placing Stalin in “the heart of Moscow,” the Kremlin. Such trips to the periphery were indispensable in recharging and reinforcing the notion of the center:
Forty-two days ago we left our native Moscow. After taking off from the Shchel-kovsky aerodrome our airplane set course for the North Pole. From that moment on all our thoughts constantly centered on Moscow. When making every effort to overcome the difficulties of our flight, we thought about Stalin who works in the heart of Moscow, in the Kremlin. . . . Now, during the final hours of our way to Moscow, all our thoughts are about Stalin, about the motherland. It is the greatest of all joys to return to one’s native land with the feeling of an accomplished duty, so that we can report to our beloved teacher and leader Comrade Stalin: The mission you entrusted to us is accomplished!13
Pravda also featured articles about a group of mountaineers who climbed the Soviet Union’s second-highest mountain, Mount Lenin in the Pamir Mountains of Tadzhikistan, and then the country’s highest mountain, also in the Pamirs, Mount Stalin:14
Soviet mountaineers on top of the USSR’s highest mountain. According to information from Moscow, on 13 September at 5:30 P.M. a detachment of the mountaineering expedition of Comrades Aristov, Barkhash, Beletsky, Gusak, Kirkorov, and the physician Fedorkov reached the top of Mount Stalin in the Pamir Mountains. On the northwestern rocky ridge of the USSR’s highest mountain, at a height of 7,495 meters above sea level, they emplaced a bust of Comrade Stalin. Thus the objective of the expedition—to conquer the highest peaks of the USSR: Mount Korzhenevskaia, Mount Lenin, and Mount Stalin—has been attained.15
Figure 3.2. . “Recently, after the harvest fifty-one combine operators and tractor drivers from the Azov–Black Sea Territory climbed to the peak Mount Kazbek. On the hillside leading to the peak the combine operator–mountaineers placed themselves in rows that formed the name ‘Stalin,’ which was shot by our photo reporter.” Pravda, 5 October 1935, 6.
From now on the highest Soviet elevation not only carried Stalin’s name but also featured a Stalin bust. Shortly following these articles Pravda ran a photograph of Mount Kazbek’s snow-covered peak in the Caucasus. “On the hillside of Kazbek’s peak,” elaborated the caption, “fifty-one combine operators and tractor drivers from the Azov–Black Sea Territory” had “placed themselves in rows that formed the name ‘Stalin’” (Fig. 3.2).16 Yet Stalin had to occupy all of the globe’s extremities, not just the highest mountain, but also the northernmost pole. In 1940 Pravda depicted two sailors from the icebreaker ship Sedov, raising two flags on an ice floe, one with hammer and sickle, the other with Stalin painted on it.17
Another typical nature trope (with roots going as far back as to Russia’s first court poet, Simeon Polotsky [1628–1680]), was that of Stalin as light or the sun.18 From Stalin’s personal library we know that he drew a red circle around the word “sun” and wrote in the margin “Good!” next to this passage in a book about Napoleon I: “Had Napoleon been forced to choose a religion, he would have chosen to worship the sun, which fertilizes everything and is the true god of the earth.”19 As for metaphors of Stalin as sun: if the earth revolves around the sun, then the Soviet Union revolved around Stalin. Looking at Stalin therefore required a celestial, upward gaze. The quintessentially central trope of Stalin as light or sun was especially prominent in Soviet folklore.20 According to a quantitative analysis, an Armenian collection for Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, Stalin in the Works of the Armenian People, contains 151 appellations of “great,” 119 of “father,” and 116 of “sun.”21 And Dzhambul sang:
Stalin, my sun, in Moscow I realized
That the heart of wise Lenin beats in you:
On a day that shone like turquoise,
I was in the Kremlin among a circle of friends.
My eyes saw
The greatest of men.
You, whose name has reached the stars,
With the glory of the first wise man,
Were attentive, affectionate, simple,
And dearer to me than my own father.
For the joyous, fatherly reception in the Kremlin
Stalin, my sun, I thank you.22
Likewise the last stanza of A. Bezymensky’s “March of Parachutists” resounded:
And if in our favorite outpost
Appear hordes of vicious enemies,
We beat with a landing of unheard-of glory
The skulls of the enemy’s fascist regiments.
We will fly where no one has flown before us.
We will finish what we must finish.
Long live the sun! Long live Stalin!
Long live the people of the Soviet land! (repeat)23
And a “fakelore” poem, “Stalin—Our Golden Sun,” “recorded” (supposedly by ethnographers) in Kabardino-Balkaria, as Pravda explicated, read:
Stalin—our golden sun.
The word is deadly for our enemies:
“Stalin.”
Having chased away the thunderclouds,
You opened sunny expanses for us.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Among the soldiers before the battle,
Tall and majestic,
Sparkles in his military outfit
Voroshilov—the famous warrior.
Never vanquished in battle,
He is dressed in armor of strongest
steel,
This brave soldier, enlightened
By the sun . . .
This is the golden sun—Stalin. . . . 24
Yiddish folklore also eulogized Stalin: “He has raised the great shining sun / Over the earth, / Has turned our land / Into a blossoming garden.”25 The topos of Stalin-sun further came up in letters to Stalin, as in that of the Moscow professor who in January 1945 introduced his suggestion that a documentary film be made about the vozhd’ during his lifetime with the words, “You are our SUN, you are our PRIDE.”26 Or in a compilation of popular suggestions for celebrating Stalin’s seventieth birthday: these included the idea to “make from sun-colored metal a sun with an engraved image of Stalin in its middle and the words around the sun—‘Stalin is our sun,’ and to write to the left of the image ‘1879’ and to the right ‘1949.’”27 Artists too echoed the metaphor of Stalin as light or sun. In Katsman’s words after the 1933 meeting of artists with Stalin: “It was as if the life of everyone of us was illuminated with a specially life-giving light (kak by osvetilos’ osobo zhivitel’nym svetom).”28 Light here might have had Christian connotations, but there is also the modern transmutation (of the old Christian luminary motif) of the role of light in enlightened modernity.29 Finally, a Yiddish ditty (cbastushka) posed the question of metaphor itself: “Stalin, what can we compare you with? You cannot be compared with anything.” The conclusion of Stalin’s incomparability is reached, of course, only after attempting to liken him to each of the elements of nature—sun, clouds, winds, ocean, fire, and water, in that order.30 Here we have a trace of the long tradition in Western culture of denigrating attempts to depict the divine with human hands. “The common cry throughout is that gods cannot be represented by dead objects of wood and stone, worked by human hands—let alone be present in them and worshiped,” as David Freedberg has summarized the aniconic tradition.31
As banal as it may sound, Stalin was not born into the Kremlin or destined by right of birth to inhabit the center of the Soviet Union’s cultural representations. He had to be actively placed there. In the case of pictorial representations, this involved concrete visual strategies, directed at distinguishing Stalin from other Party leaders. To remind us of a few such strategies from the preceding chapter, they revolved around his place in the picture, his relative size, and the color of his clothing. Stalin’s distinction was further marked by portraying him as motionless whereas others were shown in a state of movement.32 Stability in general became one of the key tropes in representations of Stalin, and the words “calm” (spokoinyi) and “confident” (uverennyi) proliferated. Objects of everyday life in Stalin’s immediate proximity—the pipe in his hand, a map, a newspaper or book—also set him apart from others. And the proximity of Stalin to the figure of Lenin or an image of Lenin—a poster or painting on a wall—was another distinguishing marker.
The sense of Stalin’s uniqueness was enhanced by setting him off against others, to whom were ascribed the negative sides of culturally latent binary pairs. For example, the male-female gender code, to use Joan Scott’s term, evoked a series of other binaries, such as strong-weak, mind-body, and reason-emotion.33 This principle of binary definition was later extrapolated outside of the Soviet context. The pipe stuffed with cigarette tobacco (Gertsegovina Flor was allegedly his favorite brand) came to signify Stalin, whereas the cigar—together with the top hat—acquired the status of the pipe’s bourgeois Other. No picture illustrates this better than a 1935 Deni caricature of Stalin with his “peace pipe” and a bulldog-faced Western capitalist (perhaps reminiscent of Churchill?) wearing a bowler hat, with a phallic, cannon-shaped cigar pointing from his mouth, spewing bullets (Fig. 3.3).34 In Russia Stalin’s pipe is an abiding cultural myth producing legends, reiterations, and new adaptations.35
Figure 3.3. “Peace pipes.” Caricature by Deni. Pravda, 17 April 1935, 1.
Stalin’s male-coded composure was juxtaposed against Hitler’s female-coded hysterical fits.36 And Stalin’s unpretentiousness as a speaker was contrasted with Hitler’s inflated rhetorical fireworks—“he has never made use of that tumultuous force of eloquence which is the great asset of upstart tyrants,” as Stalin’s hagiographer Henri Barbusse put it in 1935.37 Conversely, for Hitler too cigars and cigarettes were loaded signs, though with a different twist. After the forging of the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939, Hitler prohibited the publication of photographs of Stalin with a cigarette, reasoning, according to his photographer Heinrich Hoffmann, that among the German population such images would threaten the respectable status of the statesman with whom the Führer had struck a deal: “‘But a cigarette-smoking Stalin is exactly typical of the man,’ I objected. But Hitler wouldn’t have it. The German people, he asserted, would take offence. ‘The signing of a Pact is a solemn act,’ he said, ‘which one does not approach with a cigarette dangling from one’s lips. Such a photograph smacks of levity! See if you can paint out the cigarettes, before you release the pictures to the press.’” The cigarette in Stalin’s mouth was duly retouched away.38 Hitler further tried keeping Göring from smoking cigars in public, arguing that whoever had been turned into a monument should not be shown “with a cigar in one’s mouth.”39
Artists spoke openly about placing Stalin in the center of their paintings. Aleksandr Gerasimov stressed, for example, on one hand the historical accuracy of his Tehran Conference, painted on the premises of the 1943 meeting of the Allied powers. On the other hand, he told his audience unabashedly “it was important that the necessary person be the center of attention. In my case Stalin.”40 And about his monumental 1942 Hymn to October—406 by 710 centimeters in size—Gerasimov told his listeners: “This is a huge picture. Yet I must say with confidence here that, regardless of its size, regardless of the fact that the chandeliers and golden loges shine there—the attention still falls on Comrade Stalin.”41 (Fig. 3.4). Gerasimov achieved this effect by pointing a spotlight at the comparatively small figure of Stalin, who stands at a rostrum at the Bolshoi Theater off to the left of center stage, and by pointing the heads of the entire audience in Stalin’s direction. Moreover, a silhouette of Stalin towers on the Bolshoi’s curtain above a large Lenin sculpture. The silhouette is topped only by the Roman numerals XXV, which signify the twenty-fifth anniversary of the October Revolution.
Figure 3.4. Aleksandr Gerasimov, Hymn to October (1942). Oil on canvas, 406 × 710 cm. © 2007, State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
By about 1935, after Stalin had been firmly established in the center of visual culture, pictures of various kinds changed their strategies. After 1936, Stalin was shown by himself (rather than in groups) more frequently, and often he was merely invoked through a Stalin image or sculpture in the background. Again, concentric circles became the dominating pattern of spatial organization.42
Perhaps no other painting illustrates this pattern better than Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, and perhaps no other painting in the Soviet Union ever attained more fame (Plate 3).43 Stalin and Voroshilov are shown walking along the sidewalk of the inner Kremlin with a Kremlin tower in the immediate background. The Moscow River and the city of Moscow lie in the more distant background. The spatial arrangement of this painting is predicated on concentric circles grouped around Stalin, the center. Technically speaking, even though Voroshilov’s folded hands (or more precisely, his army greatcoat cuff) occupy the picture’s geometric center Stalin takes center stage in every other respect. In perspective, he is closer to the viewer and therefore painted as the taller figure. Immediately next to him, in the closest circle, is his closest guard, Voroshilov—a member, incidentally, of the coterie around Stalin also known as his “inner circle” (blizhnyi krug). The subsequent concentric zones are occupied by the Kremlin tower, then the Kremlin wall, followed by the Moscow River and the masses crowding along the embankment right behind it. Finally we see the city sprawl of Moscow. The new Moscow, reconstructed according to Stalin’s general plan, is signified by the House of the Government (Dom pravitelstva), the newly built Great Stone Bridge (Bolshoi kamennyi most) across the Moscow River to the far right, and the smokestacks beyond. The old Moscow, symbolized by the three cupolas of a Russian Orthodox Church, has moved to the background. The old Russia, as it were, had been overcome. The House of the Government was specifically moved into the picture, as Gerasimov admitted, perhaps to imply that the Party and intelligentsia elites who resided there were ideologically close to Stalin.44
The circle was the seminal Stalinist shape used to structure space. In the case of Gerasimov’s painting, Stalin is the sacral center of the Soviet cosmos. Following an observation from Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary, Mikhail Yampolsky noted the absence of an anthropomorphic monument inside the walls of the Kremlin.45 Thus the sacral center of the Kremlin was uniquely freed for Stalin.46 Stalin (and Gerasimov) did not have to fear sacral doubling that might be caused by the proximity of a monument, nor would the monument be threatened with sacral overcharge from Stalin’s proximity. Stalin’s sacrality is underlined by his size, by the immobility of his body—a center, by definition, does not move—and by his lack of ornamentation. Whereas Voroshilov bears the full insignia of a high representative of the Soviet army (a star-shaped cap, collar badges, a belt buckle, an officer’s chest belt, and badges on his sleeves), Stalin does not need these, because he is already firmly established in the collective imaginary as the country’s sacral center.47 Stalin is dressed in nothing but his simple gray greatcoat, his cap, and army boots. This central circle containing Stalin and Voroshilov remains open toward the viewer, who is drawn into the picture and merges with the leader.
If Stalin embodies the Soviet body politic, then Voroshilov embodies the Red Army. Thus the Soviet people, incarnated in Stalin, are protected by their army, incarnated in Voroshilov. The railing is a further symbol of defense. It is broken, jarringly and incongruously, at only one place, right behind Voroshilov, in order to show the Moscow River in more detail and, more importantly, the masses on the embankment. The gap in the railing permits the creation of a visual axis between Voroshilov and the people on the Moscow River embankment. The motif of the connection between the leader, Voroshilov, and the masses is thus unmistakably present in the painting.48 But the main theme is one of defense against outside aggression, against fascist encirclement, a theme that also finds symbolic expression in the smokestacks that represent the preparation of Soviet industry against outside attack.
Figure 3.5. 1—Kremlin. 2.—Palace of Soviets. 3—Gorky Park. 4—Monument of the Stalin Constitution. Map on inside front cover, General Flan for the Reconstruction of Moscow (Moscow: Union of Soviet Architects, 1935).
Other readings of the picture are possible. In 1939, one year after the appearance of the painting, one critic suggested that Stalin’s gaze was directed at a specific focal point: “Stalin and Voroshilov are standing on the Kremlin mountain, gazing to the place where a majestic monument in honor of V. I. Lenin is being erected—the Palace of Soviets.”49 Indeed, the winning design by Boris Iofan et al. of the 1931 architectural competition for the Palace of Soviets (415 meters high) had included an eighty-meter-high Lenin statue on its apex (2 in Fig. 3.5). The building was to be the world’s largest and tallest—topping the Empire State Building completed in 1931—and was to be erected at the site of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer, Russia’s largest church, located five hundred meters southwest of the Kremlin (1 in Fig. 3.5) on the Moscow River bank. The destruction of the cathedral was duly finished by December 1931, the foundation poured, and the nearby metro stop was named Palace of Soviets station. But the building never got off the ground. Water filled the foundation pit, and after numerous redesigns the building ended up as a white elephant, eventually opening as the Soviet Union’s (the world’s, it was often suggested) largest open-air swimming pool.50 The Lenin statue on top of the Palace of Soviets had raised doubts from the beginning and in March–April 1934, visitors to an exhibition of the Iofan model at the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum remarked in the comment book that the “significance of the leader of the masses, ascending into the clouds far from the people, is utterly lost here. What is more, Lenin is depicted in the pose of a provincial actor. Unbelievably inflated and banal.”51 Other critics of the Lenin statue worried that parts of it would be covered by the clouds, creating unintended meanings, if, say, only his genital region were visible. Yet the axis between the Kremlin and the Lenin statue on top of the Palace of Soviets had been intentional, as a 1934 decree—published in Pravda, thereby testifying to the centrality of this building to the state—goes to show: “The Lenin sculpture and the building’s main façade are oriented toward the Kremlin, from whose side a wide, monumental staircase leads which can also serve as a tribune for the reception of demonstrations.”52 How, then, are we to understand this version? One reading would view Lenin as the beginner of communism, Stalin as the completer and living incarnation; therefore the Lenin statue on the Palace of Soviets points to the living center of power: Stalin in the Kremlin. Another reading would see Stalin looking at Lenin and thus into the embodied beginning of the utopian timeline, for beginning and end are equally timeless and thus ultimately interchangeable. The Adamistic ur-moment, Lenin, is as utopian as the eschaton of “the bright future.”53 An absolute beginning of time and an absolute end are both literally and equally inconceivable, unthinkable—in a word: utopian.
Yet there are more examples. Other Moscow construction projects were also reoriented toward the planned Palace of Soviets. In 1928, construction began on Gorky Park, officially termed the “Central Culture and Recreation Park” (3 in Fig. 3.5). Since the 1931 architecture contest for the Palace of Soviets, Gorky Park was supposed to create an axis from its location (between the banks of the Moscow River, Krymsky Val, and the Lenin Hills, formerly the Sparrow Hills) to the location of the palace diagonally across the river at the former site of the Cathedral of Christ the Redeemer. The axis of the Palace of Soviets–Lenin Hills “was supposed to direct the masses from the Kremlin, the center of power, to their site of political representation (the Palace of Soviets) along places of ideology and knowledge (the Institute of Red Professors, Komakademia) to ‘bread and circuses’ at Gorky Park.”54 Further along the embankment of the Moscow River, away from the Kremlin, was the proposed site of the Monument of the Stalin Constitution (4 in Fig. 3.5). It was supposed to be built on the top of the Lenin Hills, which today are topped by the Moscow State University skyscraper. There was going to be a huge “staircase of the peoples of the USSR,” each step representing one people or republic. Most importantly, there was the intention to create an axis from the Kremlin to the Palace of Soviets to the Monument of the Stalin Constitution.55 Therefore it is also possible to interpret Stalin’s gaze in the Gerasimov painting as being directed not only at Lenin on top of the Palace of Soviets, but also at his own work, the 1936 Constitution. Seen this way, Stalin’s gaze became self-referential and circular.
On the other hand, perhaps the Palace of Soviets was never built because no second, competing center to the Kremlin, and to Stalin within its walls, was supposed to exist. The Kremlin, ideally suited because it was without monuments, was to be filled by Stalin’s body and serve as the single center. At least the appearance of a competing center to Stalin was what a letter writer named Ganna Begicheva, a self-described “simple ordinary laborer (prostoi riadovoi truzhenik),” worried about in a 1945 epistle to Beria that was forwarded to Malenkov and to Molotov, into whose archive it found its way:
Do not punish me for this bold letter; this boldness comes from the miraculous secret of the new life which allows the man in the street (malen’komu cheloveku) to address the very greatest people with the word “comrade” and to muse about the fate of our mother country. . . . I HAVE IN MIND THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE PALACE OF SOVIETS. The intended site for its construction is not sound for the following reasons: . . . First, given its size the grandiose building of the Palace in the very center of town kills, squashes the architectural ensemble of the Kremlin. . . . The Moscow River will seem like an insignificant rivulet, not to mention St. Basil’s Cathedral and the Mausoleum, which will look like mere toys. This monster will destroy the wonderful appearance of historical Moscow with its streets extending like sun rays from the heart of the city—the Kremlin. It will destroy the remarkable intention of the construction of the Kremlin—of the sun city, gazing in all four directions (na vse chetyre storony) and embodying Great Ivan’s ideal of Moscow as the Third Rome. . . . The Palace will profit from some distance to the center of town, say, at least on the Sparrow Hills where it will “rise above” the old Moscow, especially considering that the LENIN monument will be covered by clouds half the year long.
Begicheva then went on to formulate her own, quite concrete, proposals for new buildings in Moscow. She suggested building a “Palace of Glory” with “reliquaries of the victories of 1812 and 1945” and tombs for the heroes. Enter Stalin:
Maybe this is excessive Ukrainian lyricism speaking, but when I go to Ekaterina DZHUGASHVILI‘S tomb in Tbilisi I think with great tenderness and love about the woman who gave the world a magnificent son—the man of all men, and I mourn her like my own mother. Gravestones always touch the heart, through them you feel the interconnectedness of the ages (sviaz’ vremen). No monument speaks more to the heart than the shrine of LENIN, than the tombs of TOLSTOY, PUSHKIN, KUTUZOV, and others, only getting close to Gorky’s grave is impossible. Be patient, Comrade BERIA, do not take my words as an idle fantasy.
Begicheva then returned to the subject of the Palace of Soviets and cast herself as a simple woman of the people, daring to say what everyone was thinking. All of Moscow, she contended, was afraid that the Palace of Soviets would dwarf the old town and that one would have to “raise one’s head to look at this monster like at a nice elephant who wandered into a room.”56
Gerasimov spoke about his picture in public on at least three occasions: in November 1938, in 1947, and in December 1949. Each time the occasion was an evening at Moscow’s Central House of Art Workers (TsDRI), a club-like establishment where members of the artistic intelligentsia, especially actors and artists, gathered to watch plays, listen to lectures, and socialize.57 At the first meeting Gerasimov began by pointing out that Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin was originally his entry in a 1937 Stalin portrait competition:58
I painted this picture for the IZOGIZ [Visual Arts Publishing House] competition “Portraits of our Leaders.” I could have painted Stalin . . . and other leaders with Comrade Stalin, but I chose Stalin and Voroshilov because it is impossible to paint portraits from photographs, without seeing the people; it is impossible, the photograph does not render the face exactly. You have to know a person well so that he is in your visual memory as though alive. Then the photograph will help you preserve the proportion, form, and everything else you must give from yourself. I had the high honor of being at Comrade Stalin’s several times. I was at Comrade Voroshilov’s many times. He posed for me.59
From a letter to another painter, Isaak Brodsky, inviting him to participate in the competition, we can place Gerasimov’s description in context and trace the conditions of the contest—and ultimately the construction and constructedness of the picture—more fully.60 The competition was actually called the “IZOGIZ Competition for the Best Portrait of Comrade Stalin and His Closest Comrades-in-Arms.”61 Although some portrait competitions were public and open to all, in this one only fifty select artists were invited to participate. Portraits were acceptable “in any technique—oil, watercolor, gouache, drawing, lithography, linoleum cut, etching.” The painting was supposed to have a size of fifty by sixty centimeters and had to “satisfy the demands of reproduction for mass printing.”62 Upon signing a contract, the artists each received fifteen hundred rubles for their expenses and were allotted about half a year to finish their entries, so that the winners could be presented at an exhibition during the celebrations of the October Revolution. The jury included the members of the Party elite and of the artistic and literary intelligentsia, among them Aleksei Stetsky, Platon Kerzhentsev, Dmitry Moor, and Aleksei Tolstoy. Stalin’s own influence was guaranteed through the presence of a member of his personal Central Committee secretariat, Lev Mekhlis. The themes for the paintings were in fact more scripted than Gerasimov would have us believe. They included the “portrait/bust” of Stalin and images of Stalin “on the tribune of the Extraordinary Congress of Soviets,” “on the tribune of the mausoleum,” “with a raised arm/at the evening of the opening of the metro or at the Congress of Soviets ‘Forward to New Victories,’” “on the Moscow-Volga Canal,” “among children, aviators, heroes of the Soviet Union,” and “in the Gorky Park of Culture and Recreation.” The organizers further suggested a number of high Party figures with whom Stalin might be portrayed: Molotov, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kalinin, Mikoian, and Yezhov.63
Gerasimov’s statement about the disadvantage of painting from photographic examples and the importance of live posing was a hint at the distribution of photographic and cinematic templates among the artists—an issue that was usually taboo in public discourse about art. “The publishing house is providing each participant of the competition with all the photographic records on the designated themes from its archive and is organizing the screening of the necessary films,” in the words of the invitation letter for the competition.64 During the 1930s, Stalin never posed for Soviet artists, and their sources for portraits of him were photographs, movies, the existing iconography, and—in the case of a privileged few—sketches drawn on occasions when Stalin spoke publicly and the artists were permitted to attend. Indeed, Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin was possibly inspired by a Pravda photograph by A. Kalashnikov, showing Stalin and Molotov walking inside the Kremlin (Fig. 3.6).
Nonetheless, Gerasimov would have us believe that the subject of his painting was the product of his artistic inspiration alone: “I began to think about this theme and decided that they must be painted as incarnations of the Red Army and of all peoples. And yet, in poses that convey firmness (nepokolebimost’) and confidence (uverennost’). These poses are supposed to express that the peoples and the Red Army are the same, are one monolith.” Here, Gerasimov perpetuated the Romantic myth of autonomous artistic inspiration. He also unwittingly perpetuated the tensions that typically accompanied the continuity of this myth in Soviet Russia, where art was created according to plan, copied, and mass-produced.
Gerasimov further said about his painting: “I liked the silvery gamut [of colors]. And suddenly I thought: what could be easier than to paint them in front of the Kremlin Palace, in which government meetings take place. I remember this sidewalk well. They might have come out, stood there, waited for a car, or looked at Moscow. As far as the idea was concerned, it was decided. I had to do a whole number of sketches because the silvery gamut was hard for me—I am used to cheerful colors, and the gray tone is awfully difficult. There are such a great number of nuances in it that I struggled with this painting for a long time.”65
Figure 3.6. “Comrades Stalin and Molotov in the Kremlin on 14 May 1935.” Pravda, 5 June 1935, 1.
After the war, Gerasimov gave a different gloss to his painting and claimed that he had sensed, in 1937, that the war was approaching. In his own words at a 1947 meeting at the Central House of Art Workers: “I painted Stalin several times, and I began the last portrait when war was already threatening on the horizon. . . . Earlier I called this painting Guarding Peace (Na strazhe mira). . . . The clouds appear to sense what is about to happen. It is clear that there will be a spring thunderstorm, but the clouds will pass, it is not going to be terrible and the clear day will return. The premonition was supposed to come to a good end.” He continued, “And so I ended up at the Kremlin and saw a standing person at the railing and understood at that point that this was what I was looking for. The painting went fast. The next day I had completed a sketch of the Kremlin. The Kremlin is not only the heart of Moscow but the hope of all of humanity”66 This 1947 interpretation and the detail of the thunderstorm must have led Vladimir Sadoven, the author of the course for Tretyakov Gallery excursion guides, to conclude that the pavement on which Stalin and Voroshilov were walking was “still wet from the rain that has just fallen.”67 And this interpretation must have laid the groundwork for the popular tongue-in-cheek rhymed epithet viewers later gave to the painting, “Dva vozhdia posle dozhdia” (“Two leaders after the rain”).68
Figure 3.7. Viktor Vasnetsov, Three Warriors (1898). Oil on canvas, 321 × 222 cm. Original at State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.
In 1949, Gerasimov added an interesting new detail. He asserted that Viktor Vasnetsov’s Three Warriors (1898) had been his inspiration for the painting (Fig. 3.7). After applauding the anti-Impressionism of Vasnetsov, Gerasimov said: “I admit that this picture was constantly before my eyes; there are three warriors there, and here stand two warriors—our Soviet ones.”69 Vasnetsov (1848–1916), a preeminent Wanderer, repeatedly produced illustrations of the ancient Russian oral epic poems (bylini) about heroic Russian warriors. Three Warriors shows three mythical medieval Russian knights—Dobrynia, Ilya Muromets, and Alyosha Popovich—in full armor on horses in a mountainous countryside. The two at left are looking into the distance, as if to spot the enemy. The third knight is set back somewhat and gazes in a different direction. Unlike in Gerasimov’s painting, all three figures are portrayed flatly rather than in three-quarter view, and the two main knights look toward the viewer’s left, whereas Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov look to the right. Thus the gaze of the three bylina heroes is meant to depict the defense of the Russian land, whereas the gaze of Stalin and Voroshilov holds the dual connotation of vigilance against exterior enemies and the embodiment of history—the gaze into the socialist future.
Let us now return to the circle, which serves as an organizing theme in many other paintings. One example is Vasily Yefanov’s An Unforgettable Meeting (1936–37), which foregrounds a triangle of three figures arranged in circular movement: Stalin, a woman, and Molotov (Fig. 3.8). The three heads indeed create the immediate visual impression of a triangle, but there are in fact more points: the three heads, the arms of Stalin and the woman, joined in a warm handshake (Stalin envelops the woman’s hands). Together these points create a circle in the center of the picture. The remaining Party luminaries, with flowers and microphones, create a second circle around the central one. Other paintings that are arranged in circles around Stalin include Yury Kugach et al.’s “Glory to the Great Stalin!” (1950),70 Boris Ioganson et al.’s J. V. Stalin Among the People in the Kremlin (Our Wise Leader, Dear Teacher.) (1952), and Grigory Shegal’s Leader, Teacher, and Friend (J. V. Stalin in the Presidium of the Second Congress of Kolkhoz Farmer–Shock Workers in February 1935) (1936–1937) (Plates 4, 5, 6),71 as well as David Gabitashvili et al.’s Youth of the World—for Peace (1951), in which Stalin is shown on a poster carried in the center of a crowd of people at a procession.72
Figure 3.8. Vasily Efanov, An Unforgettable Meeting (1936–37). Oil on canvas, 270 × 391 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
The circular arrangement held wherever Stalin was, even if the painting concerned a scene from the distant past. For example, Iosif Serebriany’s At the Fifth (London) Congress of the RSDRP (April–May 1907) (1947), which shows the young Stalin and the already older, balding Lenin, is arranged circularly around the young Stalin (Plate 7). Sometimes the circular arrangement was projected back onto other spheres of society, without Stalin’s presence. This practice was particularly true of the artistic intelligentsia. For example, Vasily Yefanov’s picture of the theater director Konstantin Stanislavsky shows him in the center of a circle of people.73
Fedor Shurpin’s 1949 Morning of Our Motherland shows Stalin standing in the Soviet countryside in his white postwar generalissimo’s uniform, carrying his greatcoat (Plate 8). His hands are folded, his hair is gray, the wrinkle on his forehead has deepened. This is the canonical postwar Stalin, seasoned by a world war and the loss of millions of people. The exact geometric center is the place where Stalin’s heart would be beneath his uniform; this is also the lightest spot in the picture. Here Stalin is the immobile center of the picture. The land is already transformed and moving in no larger, metaphysical direction, only in its self-referential circles (consider the smoke of the smokestacks in the far background, the tractors, the little trees planted symmetrically behind Stalin and expected to grow to a certain height but no higher).74 The agents of transformation are collectivization and industrialization, as is visible from the tractors and the smokestacks. There are overtones of Christian transcendence: the green behind Stalin symbolizes fertility; the white of his uniform, godlike creation. The only linear movement—Stalin’s gaze—is directed outward, with a vanishing point outside the picture. While the land is “utopia become real,” Stalin’s gaze is directed toward an even brighter future.
Soviet art criticism itself noted the direction of Stalin’s gaze. The newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, for example, wrote that “the gaze of the great leader and military commander” in an 18.5-meter-high Stalin sculpture to be erected at the White Sea–Baltic (Belomor) Canal “is directed into the distance.”75 At times the gaze into the “bright future” became so overpowering that it overshadowed conventional strategies of pictorial composition. In Peisakh Rozin’s picture V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin at the Bay (1950), Lenin and Stalin are saying farewell and should be looking at each other. Instead, their gazes do not meet and are both directed into the distance.76
This interpretation of Stalin’s gaze also entered public discourse. Witness a 1946 Pravda article by the Tretyakov Gallery’s director, Aleksandr Zamoshkin, about a “New Portrait of J. V. Stalin” by “the master embroideress Comrade Tselman from Sudzha, Kursk oblast.” Zamoshkin began formulaically by summarizing Stalin’s place in the folk arts: “Comrade J. V. Stalin’s image, already engraved in many works of Soviet artists, invariably catches the attention of folk arts masters. Their eyes are fixed on the man who led our motherland to power and prosperity. In artistic embroideries, in bone-carving, in artistic rugs, in lacquer painting the masters of folk arts realize the image of Comrade Stalin, in whom the people sees the embodiment of its achievements and victories.” After this preliminary paragraph Zamoshkin turned to the embroidery by Tselman of “Generalissimo of the Soviet Union J. V. Stalin,” thus indicating the obraz genre—Stalin as military commander (not statesman, not father of peoples, nor Marxist theoretician).77 “This portrait,” he continued, “executed in colored silks, is the most important work of a number of works created earlier by folk masters and is a valuable contribution to our art. This talented artist has managed to express boundless love for the leader of peoples in her great work.” Zamoshkin went on to offer as analytical an interpretation of the artwork as socialist realist art criticism—in a central newspaper—was able to offer. In doing so he expressly described Stalin’s face as the surface onto which utopia was inscribed:
In the austere purity of Comrade Stalin’s face the artist has managed to express the proud creature of victory, an immense inner power. Comrade Stalin’s gaze is directed into the distance. It is as if our bright future is reflected in his face, illuminated by deep thought (V litse, ozarennom glubokoi mysl’iu, kak by otrazheno nashe svetloe budushchee). The artist has convincingly conveyed all this in the expression of the eyes, which are full of life, and in the position of the head, which is lifted and slightly turned back.78
For heuristic purposes, it is worth contrasting Shurpin’s painting of Stalin with paintings reflecting the Lenin iconography and, more jarringly and productively, with nineteenth-century American landscape painting. We begin with the second comparison and return to the first.
Albert Boime has identified “the magisterial gaze” in American landscape painting during the period of Manifest Destiny, circa 1830–1865, as an “elevated viewpoint of the onlooker” that “traced a visual trajectory from the uplands to a scenic panorama below.”79 The assumption of this viewpoint, the “Olympian bearing,” is deeply ideological and constitutes the discursive expression of an underlying structural disposition for key tenets of the national American pioneer spirit: the subjugation of the wilderness and the concomitant destruction of the Native Americans who inhabited this wilderness, as well as the expectation of continued westward movement into a utopian paradise on earth. Boime convincingly juxtaposes the peculiarly American “magisterial gaze” with the nearly contemporaneous Romantic German “reverential gaze” of a Caspar David Friedrich. In Friedrich‘s paintings, “his point of view moves upward from the lower picture plane and culminates on or near a distant mountain peak.” According to Boime, “the reverential gaze signified the striving of vision toward a celestial goal in the heavens, starting from a wide, panoramic base.”80 It is perhaps best to further illustrate the American pioneer stance with one of Boime’s readings of a specific picture. Of Thomas Cole’s River in the Catskills (1843; Fig. 3.9) he writes:
Figure 3.9.Thomas Cole, River in the Catskills (1843). Oil on canvas, 69.85 × 102.55 cm. Original at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
A young farmer standing in for the spectator leans on his axe and gazes from a hilltop foreground across the wide vista below. The foreground is strewn with thickets and storm-blasted trees symbolizing the undomesticated landscape that the farmer prepares to clear. We follow his gaze from the boundary of the wilderness across the river to the cultivated middleground zone and the farm dwellings. Moving perpendicularly to the youth’s line of vision is a train in the middle distance crossing a bridge. The line of vision extends into the remotest distance where smoke arises from scarcely seen manufactories on the horizon. Cole’s picture tells us that the future lies over the horizon, with time here given a spatial location. . . . Of course, in actuality, the farmer would be facing in the opposite direction, away from the boundary of civilization toward the forest wilderness to be cleared. I see this reversal, however, as a metaphorical mirror of the pioneer’s vision of the future prospects awaiting him. In looking backward, the farmer declares from the edge between wilderness and savagery on the one hand, civilization and order on the other, that progress moves along a timeline of the landscape.81
Shurpin’s Morning of Our Motherland, by contrast, features a fundamentally different arrangement and perspective. The onlooker does not assume the place of Stalin and follow his gaze, but rather looks at Stalin face-on. Whereas the viewer of Cole’s River in the Catskills is proffered, by following the gaze of the young farmer—whose face remains invisible—a pictorialized idea of the utopian future lying ahead, our only hint at the Soviet future is Stalin himself and his gaze. In the American case landscape itself embodies utopia, whereas in the Soviet case Stalin embodies the bright future.82 As obvious as this may seem, in the American case we are ultimately dealing with a liberal-democratic society, whereas in the Soviet case we have a person-centered dictatorship. The comparative perspective opens up yet another vista on the inner logic of the cult surrounding its dictator.
Moreover, Boime writes of Asher Durand’s Progress (1853) that “the diagonal line of sight is synonymous with the magisterial gaze, taking us rapidly from an elevated geographical zone to another below and from one temporal zone to another, locating progress synchronically in time and space. Within this fantasy of domain and empire gained from looking out and down over broad expanses is the subtext of metaphorical forecast of the future. The future is given a spatial location in which vast territories are brought under visual and symbolic control” (Fig. 3.10).83 One reading of Morning of Our Motherland might likewise posit an encoding of the temporal line—progress—in the painting via the tractors moving in the background, the trees growing, and the rising smoke of the factories. But another reading is possible: the dominant encoding of progress in this painting is via Stalin’s gaze, which is placed in the foreground; the tractors, trees, and smokestacks are marked by cyclical movement in self-referential circles. They are but the background achievements of the foreground Stalin, who can claim these as his very own achievements, as lying “behind” himself. If, in the iconography of industrial construction during the First Five-Year Plan, progress was inscribed in the portrayal of construction itself, then during the postwar era Stalin has consummated a monopolization of progress.
Figure 3.10. Asher Durand, Progress (1853). Oil on canvas, 121.92 × 182.72 cm. Original atThe Warner Collection, Gulf States Paper Corporation, Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
Figure 3.11. Viktor Tsyplakov, V. I. Lenin (Lenin at the Smolny) (1947). Oil on canvas, 270 × 210 cm. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
Turning to a comparison of Shurpin’s image of Stalin with the Lenin iconography, it is noticeable that the latter features a Lenin who is entirely in motion. In Viktor Tsyplakov’s V. I. Lenin (Lenin at the Smolny) (1947), for example, Lenin’s gaze into the future is echoed not only by his body, which is in dynamic motion, but also by the bayonets of the soldiers around him and by the bodies of these soldiers as well (Fig. 3.11). Gerasimov, a painter who created pictorial representations both of Lenin and Stalin, spoke of his differential approach to movement and immobility with regard to the two leaders. “The Gorky Museum commissioned a large watercolor portrait [of Stalin] with outstretched arm,” he recounted:
I wanted to convey the loving face of Joseph Vissarionovich [Stalin], this gesture of reaching out to the audience. There is no audience in the picture, because I had been ordered to paint a portrait only. Here all my methods are opposed to the technique I used when I did a portrait of Comrade Lenin. There we have an impetuous pose, the expression of the face matches [the pose], there’s the cry of the Revolution, the cry for the Revolution. Here in all my pictures the image of Joseph Vissarionovich is calm confidence (spokoinaia uverennost’) in the position of the cause that he leads, complete trust in his powers (polnaia uverennost’ v svoi sily), nothing harsh, and calm, convincing speech (nichego rezkogo, spokoinaia, ubeditel’naia rech’).84
At another point Gerasimov asked rhetorically, “Why is V. I. [Lenin] shown talking in this portrait? Because,” he answered, “this was the moment of the Revolution.” By contrast, in his portraits of Stalin he wanted to show “in his poses and gestures a different stage of the Revolution. Then there was struggle, but here we have construction—not without struggle, to be sure, but nonetheless, this is not the kind of struggle when the fate of the Revolution was still up in the air.” Finally, for Gerasimov, Stalin “embodies calm, certain power,” hence “the always calm gesture, the calm and utterly convincing manner of speaking.”85
The topography of Stalin’s face furthermore doubled the topography of the Soviet Union. Consider the poem by Aleksandr Karachunsky, a lyrically inclined sixteen-year-old from Aleksandria, Kirovograd oblast, in Pravda:
PORTRAIT OF THE LEADER
I know the lines of all wrinkles
All sparkles of his attentive gaze;
In him there is so much wonderful, dear
Unpretentiousness!
In him is the will of the people, in him are our dreams,
In him is a boundless ocean of dreams.
And every fine wrinkle on his forehead
Tells tales of difficult years.
About the prisons of Siberia, about fighting the enemy,
About the workers’ platoons marching victoriously
In fire and smoke.
About how factories rose in the desert,
How in the tundra flowers blossomed,
How we survived hunger and frost,
Survived and got powerful.
We all know his dear greatcoat,
The silver smoke from his pipe . . .
And I see the bread of the Ukrainian steppes,
The Caucasian oil, heat from Donbass coals,
The bridges of battleships.
I see how hundreds of heroes of labor,
Are warmed by your care,
They build factories, palaces, towns . . .
Inspired poets compose.
Pilots—the heroes of the air—
Conquer fog and darkness,
And thousands of our Soviet children
Bring glory to the name of the leader.86
The central features of Stalin’s face are usually his eyes (with Lenin, by contrast, the head itself was more signifying than the face).87 Artists continually focused on the eyes in their discussions and descriptions of Stalin. At the 1933 “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” exhibition, Stalin, Voroshilov, Molotov, and Ordzhonikidze (all in all, about fifteen Politburo members and other luminaries) came to visit. A crowd of artists (Bogorodsky, Brodsky, A. Gerasimov, Lvov, Merkurov, Modorov, Perelman, Shegal, the art historian Mashkovtsev, and others) moved behind the Politburo. “Everyone carefully studies Stalin. Everyone noticed the beauty of Stalin’s face, the harmony of proportions, the beautiful posture, the calmness, the courage, the self-control, the eyes of amber (piva) color with dark outlines, around the eyes his wrinkles of kindness and laughter, which run downward from the eyes and upward on his forehead. That is a very characteristic trait of Stalin’s. A rather small, medium nose, and pleasant, tanned hands.”88 After Stalin’s July 1933 dacha meeting with Gerasimov, Brodsky, and Katsman, the latter wrote about Stalin’s eyes: “During lunch we came to talk about Lenin, and Stalin said with a warm and tender look on his face: ‘He is unique, after all (On ved’ u nas edinstvennyi).’ In my mind I painted Comrade Stalin’s portrait, admiring his eyes, in which his entire genius is expressed, and I felt his expressive and strong look on me.”89
The eyes were also the point of origin for connecting axes between the leader and his people. The sculptor Nikolai Tomsky said of a meeting of Stakhanovites with Stalin that
when one of Leningrad’s best Stakhanovites spoke—a metalworker of the Kirov Factory—I had the fortune to watch Joseph Vissarionovich very closely, and as an artist I naturally tried to capture every gesture, every expression of his face. And when the metalworker Kardashov, if I remember his name correctly, began to speak about the achievements of the factory, about the new people of the factory, the eyes of Joseph Vissarionovich began to shine with some inexpressible light. It seemed to me, thanks to the fact that his eyes are very close to one another—I am saying this as an artist—that a single radiant star shone through the entire room. At that point I understood what kind of living power, what continuous threads connect our worker, our man, with Comrade Stalin (kakie nepreryvnye niti sviazi mezhdu rabochim, mezhdu nashim chelovekom i tovarishchem Stalinym).90
In his sculpture Stalin’s Oath, Tomsky “wanted to find in this oath the uninterrupted bond of the Soviet people with its great leader.” The gaze between Stalin and his people is mutual. Tomsky also professed to see his objective in “finding the closest bond of our people, the bond of the peoples, whose looks are fixed on Comrade Stalin.”91 Conversely, whoever had seen Stalin acquired the ability to “see” both literally and figuratively, progressing to a higher level of ideological clairvoyance.92 Consider this final example of a person who took Stalin’s portrait off the wall and turned to his leader’s countenance for advice: “I approached Stalin’s portrait, took it off the wall, placed it on the table and, resting my head on my hands, I gazed and meditated. What should I do? The Leader’s face, as always so serene, his eyes so clear-sighted, they penetrate into the distance. It seems that his penetrating look pierces my little room and goes out to embrace the entire globe. I do not know how I would appear to anyone looking at me at this moment. But with my every fibre, every nerve, every drop of my blood I felt that, at this moment, nothing exists in this entire world but this dear and beloved face. What should I do?”93
In the early 1930s, visual culture was preoccupied with establishing Stalin as the center of representation. By 1948 his apotheosis had reached such proportions that he was sometimes represented indirectly. Stalin is present, for example, only on the attentive faces of the people clustered around the radio in Pavel Sokolov-Skalia’s The Voice of the Leader,94 and only in the joyful faces of the boys in Dmitry Mochalsky’s After the Demonstration (They Saw Stalin) (1949; Fig. 3.12). Likewise, in Robert Sturua’s She Saw Stalin (1950) a woman has returned from a meeting with Stalin to her native Caucasus village. She is entirely self-engrossed, and wears an entranced, “knowing” look that veers off to the left-hand lower corner. She tries to speak, to describe the meeting, but obviously cannot: Stalin is too great for words. Enraptured, the villagers look at her and seem to be daydreaming about their leader.95
Like the Stalin cult, socialist realism itself was expansive and sought to break down borders in order to fill space totally and completely. This striving for ubiquity did not stop short of the viewer, not even the viewing critic, who was to lose distance and be drawn into the art. Nor did these totalizing ambitions allow for the existence of art criticism as a separate field; consequently art-critical treatises became indistinguishable from the comments workers entered in an exhibition’s comment books. Seen from this angle, socialist realism implied the end of art criticism and art history as we know it. Considering the absence of conventional art-historical or visual studies exegeses of socialist realist painting today it would seem that socialist realism successfully deployed its empire-building ambitions.96 As Boris Groys put it, socialist realist art “presents a rare example in today’s cultural context—in a world where otherwise ‘anything goes’—of a truly irreducible other.”97
Figure 3.12. Dmitry Mochalsky, After the Demonstration (They Saw Stalin) (1949). Oil on canvas, 69.5 × 132 cm. © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Within the realm of socialist realist leader portraits, there may be more historical continuity to socialist realism’s usurpation of art criticism than is discernible at first sight. Professional art history has squared poorly with ruler portraits since the Enlightenment. As soon as the metaphysical legitimizing source for the ruler crumbled, his (in a few cases, her) representations too were subjected to the same formal-aesthetic criteria to which a rapidly professionalizing scholarly discipline had begun subjecting all artwork—in the egalitarian, universalist fashion so typical of the bourgeois age. Crudely put, while criticism of a baroque portrait of an absolutist monarch amounted to lese majesty, a critical comment on a nineteenth-century monarchical portrait could claim to be a sign of connoisseurship.98 “How is it,” wondered the French critic Théophile Étienne Joseph Thoré in 1861, “that contemporary art has become incapable . . . of producing depictions of personalities who rule over nations?”99 Contemporary art had not, one could argue then, become incapable of producing such depictions, nor had “the nation” become incapable of deriving sacral aura from these pictorial representations of rulers; instead, contemporary art history had become incapable of interpreting them because its analytical instruments stopped short of nothing, not even a portrait that was to be revered rather than analyzed.
