THE SPECIAL ISSUE of Pravda on 21 December 1929, Stalin’s fiftieth birthday and the beginning of his cult, featured a poem, “I am certain” (“Ya uveren”), by then-undisputed court poet Demian Bedny:
Suddenly from Pravda a loudly resonant
Telephone crackling:
—“Demian!”
—“I can’t hear you! I turned deaf!”
—“Stop joking!”
—“No, I won’t!”
—“There’s panic in the editorial office:
Heaps and piles of telegrams! . . .
On the occasion of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday!
Never mind that Stalin
Gets mad and thunders,
Pravda can no longer
Remain silent.
Write about Stalin without delay.
The Stalin issue will go to press
On the twentieth of December without fail. . . .1
Bedny’s poem is a striking cultural artifact. By describing the deadline of December 20 for the “Stalin issue (Stalinskii nomer)” of Pravda, its author gave away more about the production process of the cult’s foundation moment than any other publicly available information. The poem allows a glimpse into the constructed and concerted production of the birthday celebration. What is more, Bedny’s poem more explicitly than any other document to date articulated a key component of the cult, namely Stalin’s alleged opposition to (and grudging acquiescence in) his own cult; for the cult was the expression of democratic, popular will, and the Soviet Union the world’s first true popular-democratic state. “On the occasion of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday!,” Bedny composed, “Never mind that Stalin / Gets mad and thunders.” Bedny then proceeded to reiterate this thesis in a prose article beneath his poem, in case the lyrical did not make the point obvious to everyone: “I know: to write intimately about Stalin means to sacrifice oneself. Stalin will awfully scold you.”
The sovereign’s rejection of praise had been part and parcel of the glorification of Russian rulers since enlightened absolutism at the latest. Catherine the Great, for example, personally initiated and managed the Legislative Commission, yet in 1767 rejected the bestowal of the title “Catherine the Great, Mother of the Fatherland.” She reasoned that the verdict on her reign belonged to posterity, while she had been merely doing her duty out of love for her people and her country.2 Likewise, wordy professions of the inability to find words sufficient to extol the sovereign had been part of tsar panegyrics during the reign of Nicholas I in particular and of European sentimentalism in general.3 Bedny’s poem achieved more than that: it voiced an entire structure of Stalin eulogy that was to be used until Stalin’s end, and the very end of his cult. This structure was dialectical in nature and consisted of extolling Stalin, in particular his modesty, while including his resistance to the very act of extolling as a further sign of his modesty. This first chapter on the production of the Stalin cult scrutinizes this dialectics of the cult. It looks at the role of personal actors in the production of the cult, above all Stalin himself, but also the main patron of the visual arts, Kliment Voroshilov. The varieties of patronage, a supreme form of personalized power, will figure prominently here.
Official Soviet representations featured a whole array of superlatives for Stalin. Among them was the description of Stalin as the “most modest of men.” Thus Stalin appeared to be in outright opposition to his own cult or at most tolerated it grudgingly; for this cult was the expression of popular love, and Stalin was of the people and ruled for the people. “Comrade Stalin always combines the belief in the masses with great love for the people, for the creators of the new life, and with enormous modesty, which characterizes him as the greatest leader of the popular masses,” pronounced a jubilee album published on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday in 1939.4 Official rhetoric further depicted Lenin as having handed over power to Stalin. The leitmotif, “Stalin is the Lenin of today,” expressed the idea of Lenin as another source of Stalin’s legitimacy. By synechdochic extension, Lenin’s character traits—chief among them modesty—were ascribed to Stalin as well.5 The Soviet people, in turn, were to emulate Stalin: “His example teaches us great modesty and moral purity.”6
Memoirists and observers of the Soviet scene contributed much to this image of Stalin. According to the memoirs of Vladimir Alliluev (whose mother was Stalin’s sister-in-law) Stalin displayed his typical modesty when inspecting a model by sculptor Evgeny Vuchetich for the memorial in Berlin’s Treptow Park in honor of the Soviet victory in World War II. “Listen, Vuchetich, aren’t you tired of the guy with the moustache?” supposedly asked Stalin. He proceeded to replace a statue of himself in the center of the model with a statue of a Soviet soldier, carrying a little girl in his arms.7 Foreign observers perpetuated the official image of Stalin’s modesty and grudging acceptance of his cult. One of the foreigners to equate person with persona was Lion Feuchtwanger, the German communist writer in Californian exile, who wrote of Stalin: “He shrugs his shoulders at the vulgarity of the immoderate worship of his person. He excuses his peasants and workers on the grounds that they have had too much to do to be able to acquire good taste as well, and laughs a little at the hundreds of thousands of portraits of a man with a moustache which dance before his eyes at demonstrations.”8 Another was the Swiss journalist Emil Ludwig, who interviewed Stalin on 13 December 1931 and a decade later characterized him as “Stalin simplex” and “a healthy, moderate man who in twenty years of rule has never shown a sign of megalomania, even if he unfortunately gave in to his glorification.”9 A third was the Hungarian writer Ervin Sinkó, who recounted a story the writer Isaac Babel allegedly told him: “Babel and Gorky were visiting Stalin. Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, came in. Stalin said to her: ‘Tell the father of peoples, the leader of the world proletariat, what you learned in school today?’”10
At first glance, some archival sources confirm the image of modesty as one of Stalin’s character traits.11 In a 1933 reply to the playwright Aleksandr Afinogenov, Stalin wrote: “You talk about the ‘vozhd” in vain. This is not good and, I suppose, not proper. Things do not depend on the ‘vozhd’,’ but the collective leader—the Central Committee.”12 Also in 1933 the publishing house Stary Bolshevik sent a note to Poskryobyshev, asking for Stalin’s permission to publish a dedication to Stalin in a book by a certain Baron Bibineishvili. Reciting the dedication aloud would have required a deep breath:
To the man who first inspired Kamo to his selfless and heroic revolutionary struggle, who first called him by the name “Kamo,” who with his hand of steel forged the Bolshevik organizations of Georgia and the Transcaucasus, who, together with Lenin, the international proletariat’s leader of genius, led the liberation struggle of the proletariat and the victory of Great October, who after the death of the great Lenin continues and develops the teaching of Marx and Lenin, the theory and practice of the founders of Marxism-Leninism, the strategy and tactics of the revolutionary proletarian struggle, under whose direct guidance the Party is realizing the great task of building a classless socialist society on one-sixth of the globe. To the great leader of the Leninist Communist Party and the Comintern, to the ingenious organizer and strategist of the international proletarian revolution, to Comrade STALIN the author B. Bibineishvili dedicates this book.”13
Stalin answered: “I am against ‘dedications.’ I am generally against hymns as ‘dedications.’ I am all the more against the suggested text of the ‘dedication,’ since it twists the facts and is full of pseudoclassical eulogistic pathos (lozhnoklassicheskogo pafosa vospevaniia).”14 In 1934 the Politburo accepted Stalin’s proposal to rename “the Stalin Institute under construction in Tbilisi” into a mere branch of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute without carrying his name in its title.15 In 1935 Yemelian Yaroslavsky wrote asking Stalin’s personal intervention to release all required documents at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute through so that he could write Stalin’s biography. Stalin replied in handwriting diagonally across Yaroslavsky’s letter: “I am against the idea of my biography. Maxim Gorky has a plan analogous to yours . . . but he and I have given up this affair. I think the time for ‘Stalin’s biography’ has not come yet!!”16 In 1936 Stalin crossed out his own name in a proposal by Platon Kerzhentsev to organize a competition for the best theater play and movie script on the “role of Lenin and Stalin in the preparation and conduct of the October Revolution.”17 One year later, in 1937, Stalin remarked on a screenplay by Fridrikh Ermler for the movie The Great Citizen, “I agree that it is undoubtedly politically literate. Also, it undoubtedly has literary virtues. However, there are some errors. . . . The reference to Stalin must be excluded. Instead of Stalin the Central Committee of the Party must be mentioned.”18 Also in 1937 at a dinner following the Red Square demonstration on October Revolution Day, the Comintern chief Georgy Dimitrov proposed a toast to Stalin: “When I was imprisoned in Germany I saw the greatness of Lenin, and since Lenin’s death the name of Comrade Stalin is inseparably connected with Lenin; it is the fortune of the history of the human struggle that after the death of the great Lenin Stalin took his place. To the health of Comrade Stalin!” But Stalin would not let this pass: “Comrade Dimitrov is wrong even from the perspective of Marxist methodology. Personalities always appear when the cause that promoted them is good (ne gibloe).” Foreshadowing his famous 23 February 1942 dictum, “The Hitlers come and go, but the German people, the German state stays,” he went on: “Personalities come and go, the people stay (lichnosti poiavliaiutsia i ukhodiat, narod ostaetsia vsegda), and when the cause is good, a personality will appear.” Recapitulating the intra-Party struggles of the 1920s, he added: “They knew me, Stalin, but not like Trotsky, be brave and don’t invent things that aren’t true. . . . Don’t be afraid to face the facts. Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Tomsky, Bukharin, and Rykov were well-known. Who was on our side? Well, I did organizational work in the Central Committee. But who was I in comparison with Ilyich? A nobody (zamukhryshka). There were Comrades Molotov, Kalinin, Kaganovich, and Voroshilov—but all of them were unknown.”19
A few months later, on 16 February 1938, Stalin penned a letter to the Komsomol publishing house Detizdat about a children’s book by a certain Smirnova:
I am firmly against the publication of Stories of Stalin’s Childhood. The book is full of factual inaccuracies, distortions, exaggerations, and undeserved praise. Fairytale hunters, liars (perhaps “conscientious” liars), and sycophants led the author astray. It is a pity for the author, but the fact remains. But this is not the main thing. The main thing is that this book has a tendency of implanting in the consciousness of Soviet children (and people in general) a cult of personalities (kul’t lichnostei), of leaders, of infallible heroes. This is dangerous and harmful. The theory of “heroes” and “crowd” is not a Bolshevik but an SR [Socialist Revolutionary] theory. Heroes produce the people, they transform it from a crowd into a people—claim the SR’s. The people produces heroes—reply the Bolsheviks to the SR’s. This book plays into the hands of the SR’s. Any such book will play into the hands of the SR’s and will hurt our common Bolshevik cause. I recommend burning the book.20
The letter was limited to intra-Party circulation where it functioned as a signal: Do not exaggerate the cult!21 Finally, in 1940 Stalin deleted the following words at the very end of a film’s screenplay, The Oath of the Peoples, to be directed by Mikhail Chiaureli, the leading director of Stalin movies: “Against the back-drop of the flying airplanes stands the gigantic Palace of Soviets Like an endless stream, soldiers march past the foot of the Palace of Soviets. On the tribune we see the Politburo and government of the USSR, with Stalin at its head. With his outstretched arm Lenin adorns the top of the Palace of Soviets building.”22
One could go on and on with examples of Stalin censoring his own cult. They would confirm the thesis that Stalin in both his public and his hidden record was skeptical towards the cult, accepting it only because it sprang from genuine popular will, all the while excising some of the most egregious examples. This was not only the public representation, but it has been confirmed by documents that have surfaced since the opening of the Party archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. Fundamentally, and true to Marxism, Stalin despised his cult. Or did he?
Upon closer analysis one thing becomes clear: Stalin wanted his own cult. The modesty was affected in order to overcome the contradiction of a personality cult in a polity that claimed to be implementing a collectivist ideology, Marxism. This affected modesty amounted to a pattern of “flamboyant modesty” or “immodest modesty.” What is more, when one digs deeper, traces appear of Stalin’s jealous control and expansion of his own cult. This also goes to show that the archival documents readily available were part of a deliberate effort by Stalin to place at the easy-to-reach upper layers of his archive—the semipublic “reliquary section,” if you will—documents confirming his image of modesty. This too was a strategy of immodest modesty.
Why did Stalin censor his public presence, and create the semblance of a cult against his own will? First, there was the entire prehistory of disdain for personality cults in Marxism and Russian Marxism in particular. A Bolshevik personality cult was an oxymoron, and therefore its self-presentation somehow had to solve this paradox. The cult achieved this by taking recourse to the immodest modesty pattern. Connected with this was Bolshevik Party culture in which modesty was highly esteemed as a personal virtue, and belonged right at the top of the scale of Bolshevik virtues such as will-power and steadfastness. Any typical Bolshevik hagiography stressed the modesty of its subject. Second, and linked with the Bolshevik virtue of modesty, the cultural pattern of immodest modesty actually reached far back into history. This pattern had been part and parcel of left intelligentsia behavior at least since the late nineteenth century and was continued under Stalin by both the highest Soviet powers and by oppositional intellectuals like Anna Akhmatova. Ultimately it extended back to religion and the portrayal of saints as paragons of humbleness.23
The earliest clear-cut evidence of Stalin’s approval and regular orchestration of his own cult dates from the late 1920s, probably 1927 or 1928. Kaganovich received a letter from Ivan Tovstukha, Stalin’s secretary: “The publisher Proletary has published a Stalin portrait (lithograph) of the worst kind. This is the portrait about whose publication in Ogonek and other journals the boss [khoziain, i.e. Stalin] cursed a lot. Besides, it is awfully painted. Could this thing not be liquidated in some quiet manner? In general, we ought to force Proletary to pull itself together and to always ask for our permission when they want to publish something on Stalin (kogda oni khotiat chto libo Stalinskoe vypustist’). They used to do that, but now they published a volume of 1917 Lenin and Stalin articles with lots of misprints, and two days ago Stalin sent an angry letter on this issue.”24 In this letter to Kaganovich by Stalin’s secretary, we have the first incontrovertible proof of Stalin’s own interest in his representations before he had the absolute power to exert such influence without a paper trail. There is, I believe, even earlier evidence of this kind. In August 1924, exactly seven months after Lenin had died, Stalin received a letter from Kharkov thanking him for sending, as requested, his photograph:
Today we received from Moscow the photographs for which we thank you very much. We had doubts whether you would send them because we had been warned about your persistent unwillingness to be photographed at all. We think it would be possible that your picture become available to all of the country’s Party organizations. Comrade Stalin, we are also looking forward to your letter for the 7,000-strong Stalin [Komsomol] organization of the union. Please do meet our request as soon as you can. We would also like to inform you that the books you gave us have been placed in two clubs of the major mines.25
Lev Mekhlis, Stalin’s secretary, who is presented as having acted as the intermediary, received a similar letter—but with new details: “After all portraits of Comrade Stalin are so rare in our country. By the way, I don’t know how to explain such excessive modesty of the Party leader; in my opinion all Party organizations ought to be supplied with Stalin portraits, but maybe I’m wrong. Everything depends on the characteristics of a person, and Comrade Stalin is by nature unpretentious and modest (prost i skromen), as this is a trait you often notice among great people.”26 There is a slight chance this letter exchange actually took place and possibly Stalin had sent his photograph via Mekhlis. But the language of the letters is extremely formulaic and unusual for 1924, when the Lenin cult alone was in ascendance and Stalin was one of the least-known Party leaders. What is more, there are only typescripts and no originals of the letters in the file. I conjecture that these two letters are post factum fabrications strategically placed in the archive in order to bolster the image of Stalin’s modesty and project it back onto the entire 1920s.
This opens up more generally the question of sources and archives. What kinds of sources create the impression of Stalin’s modesty, of his resistance to the cult? The evidence that seems to confirm this image is from Stalin’s personal depository (fond 558) at the Central Party Archive (today called the Russian State Archive of Social-Political History, RGASPI). The holdings in this depository do not consist of documents produced by a regular bureaucracy, but rather they consist essentially of two parts, both assembled by archivists.27 The first part—inventories (opisi) 1–10—was collated at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute from documents from various archives for the preparation of Stalin’s biography during his lifetime (some materials, such as his library with his marginalia, were added after his death). The second part, opis’ 11, was transferred in the late 1990s from the so-called Presidential Archive (Archive of the President of the Russian Federation), an archive created to save documents from destruction by the putschists in August 1991 during the standoff between RSFSR President Yeltsin and the Politburo communist hardliners (the huge Politburo collection to this day is in the closed Presidential Archive). This is the so-called “personal archive” of Stalin. It was collected by the Central Committee’s Special Sector (Osobyi Sektor). Created in 1934 and headed by Aleksandr Poskryobyshev, the Special Sector was both a technical unit serving the Politburo and at the same time Stalin’s most personal chancellery. Stalin controlled his personal archive especially tightly. If opisi 1–10 were meant for Stalin’s biography and hence semipublic, opis’ 11 contains both materials somehow related to Stalin, among them pieces of evidence that showed his actual control of the workings of his cult (we will review them later), and materials that are mainly a showcase personally arranged by Stalin.28 “Stalin assembled his archive from those documents that showed the vozhd’ and his deeds in the best possible light and, conversely, presented his political opponents in the worst way,” as the historian Oleg Khlevniuk has written.29 On top of that, in the Soviet Union archives served different functions from those of archives in many twentieth-century Western countries, and Stalin in particular viewed archives not as sites where historians authenticate the past but rather as repositories of sacrally charged artifacts of leaders like Lenin, and as a storage place, harnessed to the secret service, of surveillance data on the citizenry.30 The Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, where opisi 1–10 of his personal archive were stored in his lifetime, was the world’s supreme shrine of sacred documents of communists from the founding fathers to Stalin. Clearly, it made sense to deposit there materials purportedly documenting the inner workings of the cult—such as the sources adduced above—and to bury whatever documentation did survive from the true creation of the cult in the deepest depths of the more highly secret opis’ 11.31 The cult was portrayed as the product of genuine popular veneration, therefore it was only logical that the creation of archival records that would allow posterity to study the cult’s construction was to be avoided, and where it could not be avoided, had to be hidden. Thus it is fair to conclude that those documents in Stalin’s archive that seem to confirm the public image of his modesty were produced and stored with an intent to bolster just that image.
Stalin’s Western biographers have long speculated that, given Stalin’s personality and the Soviet system of power from the late 1920s onward, a phenomenon as widespread and resource-intensive as the Stalin cult could only have been initiated and given license to persist by Stalin personally. “The man behind the mask of modesty,” wrote Robert Tucker, was “hungry for the devotion he professed to scorn.”32 Under Khrushchev, the Soviet writer Konstantin Simonov confirmed this view, recounting a story Marshal Konev told him. Stalin at first rejected a proposal made by Marshals Zhukov, Vasilevsky, Konev, and Rokossovsky at a Politburo meeting after the war to award him the title of Generalissimo. “In the end,” however, “he agreed. But this whole scene was very characteristic of Stalin’s contradictory nature: disdain for any glory, for any formal respect for rank, and at the same time an extreme arrogance, hiding behind modesty, which is more than pride.”33 Buttressed by newly declassified sources, Dmitry Volkogonov (in the Soviet Union during perestroika) echoed this sentiment: “It became standard practice for Stalin to condemn the leader cult and to strengthen it, . . . to speak of collective leadership and reduce it to [his own] undivided authority.”34 As will be shown, these observers of the Soviet scene—coming from vastly different angles, to be sure—were quite correct in speculating that the Stalin cult could never have started without a green light from the dictator and that he played some sort of role in it once it was in place. From archival sources less “public” than opisi 1–10 in the Stalin fond at the Central Party Archive, it becomes abundantly clear, first, that Stalin was the ultimate arbiter who could, whenever he pleased, remove a cult product from public circulation even after it had passed all filters, and, second, that he either approved or prohibited not every single, but still an impressive number of cult products.35
How, then, did Stalin sanction, control, censor, and correct his cult products? Two letters (one from 1929, the other from 1935) illustrate the shift from a more contested, decentralized cult organization in 1929 to an orchestration in 1935 that was still multiagency and often functioned autonomously, yet was always and deliberately oriented toward the center: Stalin. In the spring of 1929 a larger number of agencies played a role in the Stalin cult, including the Central Committee, Anatoly Lunacharsky and his People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment, the censorship board Glavlit, and the Agitprop Department of the Central Committee. Later this power was much more concentrated in Stalin and his secretariat. Take for instance a 1929 conflict about a poor-quality lubok (popular print) “showing a conversation of Comrade Stalin with national minority women (natsmenki).” On 17 May the Central Committee had discussed the publication of the “lubok Stalin Among The Female Delegates in issue no. 1 of the journal Iskusstvo” (with Platon Kerzhentsev acting as speaker) and decided to “(a) remind Glavlit of the inadmissibility of publishing a confiscated lubok in the journal, (b) issue a reprimand to the editorial board of the journal Iskusstvo (Comrades Lunacharsky and Svidersky) for publishing in the journal a confiscated lubok accompanied by a text of libelous character (paskvil’nogo kkaraktera).”36 Lunacharsky rejected the charges, arguing that he had been abroad in Geneva and could not have seen the first issue of Iskusstvo.37 Thus in this story of a broadsheet of Stalin and ethnic minority women we still have a variety of contesting actors including the Central Committee itself, the commissar of enlightenment, Aleksei Svidersky (at that time chairman of Glaviskusstvo), Platon Kerzhentsev (at that time deputy director of Agitprop at the Central Committee), the journal and its editorial board, Glavlit, and perhaps, if invisibly, Stalin himself.
A change can be seen in 1935, when the following incident took place. By this time Maria Osten, a German communist in Moscow exile and commonlaw wife of the celebrated journalist Mikhail Koltsov, knew exactly that when in doubt, there was only one central authority to write to—the vozhd’ in the Kremlin—in this case to ask for permission to republish the famous photograph of Stalin with his daughter Svetlana in her book Hubert in Wonderland (see Fig. 2. 9). Her topic was a working-class boy, Hubert, whom she had brought from the Saarland in Nazi Germany to the USSR, where he was now growing up as a happy Soviet child. “This would be such a pleasure for all little and grown-up readers of my book in the USSR and the entire world!” wrote Osten. A terse remark—“I agree. J. St.”—by the vozhd’ sufficed to permit the publication of a photograph that had been shown in Pravda just once, only to then disappear together with other depictions of Stalin with his biological family.38 The period between these two documents (1929 to 1935) is a mere six years, and yet the situation has changed entirely: the Central Committee and other organizations now have no say in sanctioning Stalin images to be released into public circulation. Stalin functions as the single center of approval or rejection.
Stalin impacted cult production alone and with the help of others. The influence of high Party functionaries like Lazar Kaganovich or Kliment Voroshilov (the most involved Soviet arts patron) on the production process of art (such as at the threshold of a portrait’s mass reproduction) is well documented. In 1930, Voroshilov received a note that suggests his nodal position as mastermind of the Stalin cult: “I am wondering if it is possible to launch a stamp with a Stalin portrait? How could I get an answer to this question? Granovsky.”39 On 14 March 1934 the artist Fedor Modorov wrote to Voroshilov’s secretary : “VseKoKhudozhnik [the All-Russian Cooperative Comradeship ‘Artist,’ founded in September 1929] is getting ready to print my picture Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. . . . Glavlit needs K. E. [Voroshilov’s] reaction (otzyv). Glavlit does not print such things without an approval. I hope that you will do everything.”40 In this context, on 4 May 1934, the publishing house IZOGIZ wrote to Voroshilov: “The State Publishing House of the Fine Arts has the intention of publishing a picture by the artist Modorov, Politburo of the Communist Party. Considering that you have seen this picture, IZOGIZ asks you to inform us if you think its publication in a mass print run is possible.”41 It is all too likely that Stalin influenced the production process in a similar way—perhaps even using Voroshilov as his mouthpiece—long before the first documents surface that show the approval of Stalin pictures by Stalin’s own secretariat.
Whatever the case, in 1937 the publisher Iskusstvo sent Stalin’s secretary, Aleksandr Poskryobyshev, a letter asking that he approve the mass printing of several Stalin portraits. In his letter, Osip Beskin, the art critic and head of Iskusstvo, apparently asked that Poskryobyshev approve Stalin portraits at different stages of the production process. For paintings by I. Malkov and Aleksandr Gerasimov, the prize-winning entries in a 1937 Stalin portrait competition, Beskin asked for a general approval to begin the process of mass reproduction. Two other portraits, it seems, had already passed this hurdle; here, Beskin asked that a trial print run be approved. On 5 September 1937 Poskryobyshev returned Beskin’s letter with the following remark written in pencil diagonally across the upper left top: “No objections. You only need to do additional retouching of Comrade Stalin’s portrait, especially in the left part of the face.”42 In March 1943, the editor of the Army newspaper wrote to Poskryobyshev asking for permission to “publish in Krasnaia Zvezda a new portrait of Comrade Stalin.” Written across the letter we see an underlined “no (nel’zia).”43 On 22 October 1947 the publishing house of the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences wrote directly to “the Kremlin, Secretariat of Comrade Stalin, Comrade Poskryobyshev A. N.” about “original woodcut portraits of Comrades Lenin and Stalin by the artist Neutolimov” to be published in “anniversary issues of the journals Sovetskaia Pedagogika and Nacbal’naia Skkola.”44
This initial letter triggered a chain of responses, involving various members of the Agitprop Department and two of the highest-ranking Soviet artists, who were informally consulted. Stalin’s secretariat—perhaps Poskryobyshev himself—sent the letter written by the publishing house of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to D. M. Shepilov, deputy chairman of the Agitprop Department, for an expert consultation.45 Shepilov in turn apparently delegated this case first to N. N. Yakovlev, another deputy chairman of the Agitprop Department, who wrote: “The portraits of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin are of poor quality. In V. I. Lenin’s portrait the right eye is depicted inaccurately. One has the impression as though the eyelids are sick. The moustache and beard is painted with too harsh brush strokes. The retouching of the face in the portrait of J. V. Stalin is harsh and dark, especially in the area of the nose, the left cheek, and the neck. The uniform is depicted incorrectly. The left shoulder strap hangs over the uniform collar. The uniform buttons are shown unclearly. I believe that artist Neutolimov’s portraits of Lenin and Stalin must not be published without the necessary corrections.”46 Unsatisfied by or in doubt about this expert opinion, Shepilov seems to have sought out a second opinion. What we know is that P. Lebedev, also a deputy chairman of the Agitprop Department, wrote to Shepilov: “I personally think Comrade Iakovlev’s appraisal of the portraits is wrong. The portrait of V. I. Lenin, which successfully conveys Lenin’s personal features, creates the impression of him as a brave, strong person and statesman. The portrait underscores traits of sternness in V. I. Lenin’s image and is entirely without the kitsch (slashchavost’) that spoils many portraits of Vladimir Ilyich. The portrait of J. V. Stalin is weaker yet overall suited for publication. The artist’s depiction of J. V. Stalin turned out appealing (obaiatel’nym) and at the same time strong and truthful. But the publisher should be urged to soften the shadows which were applied too harshly in different parts of the portrait.”47 Having enlisted the support of Aleksandr Gerasimov and Matvei Manizer (two of the most prominent artists at the time) to bolster his initial positive opinion about the portraits, Lebedev wrote about a month after his initial letter, referring to the artists as “academicians,” invoking their institutional membership to lend status to their given opinions. “The workers of the Agitprop Department have consulted the academicians A. M. Gerasimov and M. G. Manizer, who positively evaluated the artist’s work under discussion. It would be appropriate to allow the publishing house of the Russian Academy of Pedagogical Sciences to print in its journals artist Neutolimov’s portraits of V. I. Lenin and J. V. Stalin.” Lebedev’s opinion overrode that of his colleague Yakovlev and he emerged as the winner, for his letter ended: “The publishing house was informed about this verdict.”48
Were the portraits eventually published? All we know is that Stalin’s secretariat in this postwar case—at the height of Andrei Zhdanov’s meddling in cultural affairs—devolved its decision-making power to another agency, the Agitprop Department, which first used its internal resources at different ranks of its bureaucratic hierarchy, and when these conflicted, applied to an outside authority—Gerasimov and Manizer—to reach a verdict on the portraits. All of which goes to show that even in 1947, the decision over the publication of a new Stalin (or Lenin) portrait could turn into a contested matter if Stalin had left room for dispute by not voicing his opinion—by this time it was obvious to everyone that Stalin was the ultimate arbiter.
There were more persons and institutions through which Stalin’s secretariat fulfilled the function of final filter. Censorship, represented by the organizations Glavlit (responsible mostly for texts and visual products) and Glavrepertkom (responsible primarily, but not only, for theater, cinema, and concerts), was another vital institutional actor in the approval process of Stalin cult products. In November 1947 Glavrepertkom’s chief M. Dobrynin wrote to Poskryobyshev: “Glavrepertkom is sending you a photograph of a Stalin portrait by I. M. Toidze and requests that you inform us about your opinion as to the possibility of its mass circulation. Glavrepertkom considers the dissemination of this portrait appropriate.”49 The Toidze portrait in question was a famous painting of Stalin with pipe on a Kremlin balcony with the Spassky Tower in the background (Fig. 4.1). As in the case of Neutolimov’s Lenin and Stalin portraits, Stalin’s secretariat here also seems to have contacted the Agitprop Department for an opinion. Agitprop deputy chairman Lebedev then wrote to the Central Committee Special Sector, Stalin’s private chancellery since 1934: “Glavrepertkom (Comrade Dobrynin) is asking for permission to mass produce a portrait of Comrade Stalin executed by artist I. Toidze. We looked at the photograph of the portrait together with the artists A. Gerasimov and P. Sysoev (Committee for Arts Affairs). The portrait conveys Stalin’s outward appearance ably; it shows him against the backdrop of the Kremlin’s Spassky Tower. We consider the portrait acceptable. Glavrepertkom was informed about this decision.”50 Next we read that the publisher Iskusstvo asked whether it could go ahead printing fifty thousand copies of the portrait and learn that “Comrade Poskryobyshev is not against this.”51 But printing was one thing, circulating another, and both demanded approval by Stalin’s secretariat. Poskryobyshev therefore received word from the Agitprop deputy chairman Shepilov that Iskusstvo had printed fifty thousand copies of the portrait. “Please be so kind as to inform us about your decision as to its dissemination,” wrote Shepilov. Poskryobyshev noted across Shepilov’s letter: “No objections.”52 Furthermore, portraits that were already considered canonical had to be approved a second time by Stalin’s secretariat, as a 1948 letter by the publisher Iskusstvo to Poskryobyshev goes to show. It requested that Iskusstvo be allowed to republish eight drawings of Stalin on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the armed forces.53
Figure 4.1. Censorship agencies discussed the dissemination of this Stalin portrait by Irakly Toidze, here reproduced from Pravda, 1 May 1946, 1.
Some pieces of Stalin cult artwork were rejected outright,54 and some appraisals of concrete artwork were quite searching, as indicated by an August 1947 document, a link taken from the middle of a longer chain of correspondence whose other links are still missing. “The publishing house Iskusstvo (Comrade Kukharkov) asks for permission to publish a portrait of J. V. Stalin by the artist A. Stolygvo,” wrote the chairman of the Agitprop Department, Georgy Aleksandrov, and his specialist for literature, Aleksandr Yegolin, to Andrei Zhdanov.
The artist Stolygvo is a graduate of the All-Russian Academy of Fine Arts and has been working on the image (obraz) of the leader of the Soviet people, J. V. Stalin, for a long time. The work in question is a creative success of Comrade Stolygvo. A good command of form and chiaroscuro has allowed the artist to achieve an almost sculpture-like expressiveness of the portrait. The artist was especially successful in capturing the expression of the eyes, which are full of inspired thought (glaz, polnykh vdokhnovennoi mysli). The portraitist managed to convey the image (oblik) of the leader with great humanity and warmth. We also welcome the publisher’s plan to produce the portrait of J. V. Stalin in small format, intended for wide introduction into the everyday life of workers as a table or wall portrait and as an art postcard. The Propaganda Department considers it possible to allow the publication of artist A. Stolygvo’s work by the publishing house Iskusstvo.55
Publishers, then, sent a cult product at various stages of the reproduction process to the center of power; Stalin’s secretary would reject the product, recommend changes, or approve it. In a sample period, between April 1947 and March 1949, Stalin’s secretariat refused to approve five out of twenty-two proposed portraits.56 Interestingly, Stalin left no signature or any other evidence of his direct influence in the approval process. (From the late 1930s onward, this was also the case with other high Party members from Beria to Molotov, who were sent artwork for sanctioning that focused on their own cults; the publishing institutions uniformly referred to “the secretariat of Molotov,” never to “Molotov” personally.)57 It is very likely that some cult products indeed moved from Poskryobyshev’s desk to Stalin’s, but that Stalin took care not to show any of his influence in order to uphold the image of a modest leader who merely tolerated the cult that surrounded him.58 Clearly, because of the sheer volume of cult products that were sent to the Kremlin, it is impossible that Stalin personally approved all of them. In fact, given the tide of cult products sent for approval, it is questionable if Stalin’s secretary was able to deal with this work single-handedly. The method of approval was certainly streamlined as time progressed: a 29 November 1952 letter to Poskryobyshev lists the titles of eight pictures; Poskryobyshev then returns the letter with red “plus” or “minus” marks beside each title.59 Most certainly there was special staff at Stalin’s secretariat, trained to uphold the canon and to do the day-to-day work of vetting cult products. During the late 1940s, the letters granting permission to reproduce cult art often bear the signatures of several people other than Stalin’s secretary. Thus consider a list (in tabular form) of nine pictures, listing, for instance, “F. Reshetnikov” under “Author,” “portrait of J. V. Stalin” under “Name of work,” and “Comrade Koziiatko” under “Approved by.”60 When bureaucrats lower in the power hierarchy were involved in the approval process, it seems to have been particularly important that they sign their permission. Obviously, if Stalin approved a work of art, an off-hand (oral) comment would have been enough. But at the lower levels it was imperative to establish and fix on paper a clear chain of responsibility so that if an approved cult product later met with disapproval at higher levels, the person lower down the hierarchy could be taken to task.
As far as printed cult products went, Stalin’s own, direct influence is much more tangible than with visual ones. Stalin meticulously watched over the republication of his own writings, in effect demanding control over his texts, over their canonization and meaning. He left behind a paper trail of, among other things, letters and orders, usually hastily written in his own hand on a writing pad and then wired as ciphered telegrams from Sochi and other southern spas, where he vacationed habitually and, it seems, lacked a safe, scrambled telephone connection to Moscow until 1936.61 Thus during a 1935 summer vacation in Sochi, Stalin protested against Beria’s publication of his writings from the period 1905–1910 because “they are published carelessly, the quotes from Ilyich are misinterpreted and no one besides myself can correct these mistakes; I always declined Beria’s request to republish this without my control, and yet the Transcaucasians unceremoniously ignore my protests, which is why a categorical Central Committee ban on republication without my approval is the only solution.”62 Apart from that, Stalin of course filtered the texts of TASS news agency releases and quite often simply forbade the publication of panegyric articles in newspapers.63 Across an article by a certain Razumov about Stalin’s exile in Kureika and Turukhansk, Stalin wrote: “Nonsense St.”64 Stalin also controlled the translation of texts by or about himself into other languages; for instance, in 1940 he prohibited the publication of the Russian translation of a book by Konstantin Gamsakhurdia, The Leader’s Childhood, published in Georgian for his sixtieth birthday.65 Finally and almost needless to say, the making of Henri Barbusse’s Stalin biography was closely overseen by Stalin’s secretariat; thus in 1932 it was decided that Stalin’s then right hand, “Comrade Tovstukha take care of the preliminary examination of H. Barbusse’s work.” The German communist publishing mogul, Willi Münzenberg, who seems to have been enlisted as intermediary between the biographer and the secretariat, was supposed to “directly get in touch with Comrade Tovstukha. The latter should select the materials that can be given to H. Barbusse. Comrade Münzenberg must be made to enable the preliminary examination and editing of the complete work by Comrade Tovstukha. A meeting between H. Barbusse and Comrade Tovstukha would be welcome.”66 Later Stalin himself edited different versions of his biography.67
Stalin’s personal comments regarding movie screenplays have also survived.68 In the screenplay of Vsevolod Vishnevsky’s First Cavalry Stalin corrected the wording of his own quotes.69 He provided concrete suggestions for changes on Kapler’s Lenin in 1918, such as: “reshoot the scenes in the kitchen with Sverdlov’s participation” or “change the ending after the Lenin-Stalin conversation by direct line with an eye for more precision and clarity” or, more generally, “rewrite the music.” On the last page of the script he left the note: “This is a witty film.” His final verdict for the film was, “Turned out ok, it seems (comments in the text) (Vyshlo budto-by ne plokho [Zamechania v tekste]).”70
And all the while Stalin jealously followed the cult-building of those fellow Bolsheviks who were still alive. His aim must have been to let no one come within reach of his top place in the cult pyramid. He was, for example, extremely displeased with the glorification of Ordzhonikidze on the occasion of the latter’s birthday in 1936. In the margins of a eulogistic book on Ordzhonikidze Stalin commented on what the author had depicted as Ordzhonikidze’s heroic behavior during the July Days of 1917: “What about the Central Committee? The Party? Where’s the Central Committee?”71 Thus the extent to which cults besides his own were allowed was always defined by Stalin himself. He might apply the idea that collective leadership must take precedence over individual leadership to other high Bolsheviks as well.
There are well-known instances in which Party functionaries were purged because of the cults they built (or allowed to be built) around themselves.72 The most astute vozhdi below Stalin in the hierarchy limited any cult-building around their persons, and even left behind paper trails highly analogous to Stalin’s “immodest modesty” in fond 558. For instance, as early as 1932 Kaganovich wrote to Khrushchev, chairman of the Moscow Party Committee: “I found out that rumors about the renaming of Sokolniki district as Kaganovich district have become so widespread that even the factory newspaper Krasnyi Bogatyr’ writes about them. I urgently ask you to call in these district people, to scold them severely, and to tell them to stop this thing immediately. This entire affair is absolutely unnecessary, if not harmful.”73
Thus the pattern of immodest modesty belonged to the Stalin cult—and subsequently also to other Bolshevik leader cults—from its foundation moment, as evidenced in Demian Bedny’s 21 December 1929 poem. The immodest modesty pattern, with Bedny’s poem constituting one of the first insertions into the public script of the cult itself, in fact reconnected to a culturally virulent pattern that encompassed the entire intelligentsia, including intellectuals opposed to Stalin. This was a pattern of affecting either modest selflessness or the modesty that goes along with the guileless simple-mindedness of the jolly Russian fellow of peasant stock, rubakha-paren, while in truth being supremely conscious and controlling of one’s image, if not cult. This latent cultural pattern can be seen in Anna Akhmatova’s “self-serving selflessness,” as Alexander Zholkovsky called it, or in Maxim Gorky’s “affected simple-mindedness,” as Irene Masing-Delic wrote. The pattern is evident in the behavior of our painter Aleksandr Gerasimov, who habitually played the “simplistic country bumpkin,” slept in his Sokol villa in peasant fashion on the studio floor, and enjoyed dressing up in sheepskins when the Party bosses arrived. Akhmatova’s “self-serving selflessness,” Gorky’s “affected simple-mindedness,” and Gerasimov’s clownish antics were all intricately linked with Stalin’s immodest modesty.74 Finally and very importantly, the overriding causes for the immodest modesty pattern were Bolshevik Party culture and the internal logic of Marxist ideology. Modesty was one of the key virtues of a Bolshevik. And no matter how much more complex, a personality cult was irreconcilable with a polity that claimed to be Marxist and collec-tivist. The immodest modesty pattern was a sensible way out of this paradox.
Stalin’s, his secretariat’s, his cronies’, and others’ role as Archimedean point of cult products, as nodal center and final filter, is only part of the story. There were more ways in which Stalin impacted the production process of his cult. In the sphere of visual cult products, one kind of informal leverage consisted of visits by Stalin or, more commonly, one of his cronies to the studios where Stalin art was in the making. At least once, in 1928, Stalin himself visited the Kremlin studio of Pavel Radimov and Evgeny Katsman, two co-founders of the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (Assotsiatsiia Khudozhnikov Revoliutsionnoi Rossii [AKhRR], founded in 1922, renamed Assotsiatsiia Khudozhnikov Revoliutsii [AKhR] in 1928 to signify its widened pan-Soviet aspirations; this book uses “AKhR” to designate both).75 Radimov, a veteran of the prerevolutionary realist painters, the Peredvizhniki (Wanderers), seems to have obtained this studio through a relative of Vladimir Stasov, a critic.76 Katsman joined Radimov in this studio and stayed from 1923 to 1938.77 Moreover, Voroshilov, the influential patron of the visual arts, regularly made the rounds of Moscow art studios and commented on artwork depicting himself and presumably also Stalin.
The informal influence of Stalin and his subordinates on the cult also involved handing out privileges of special access to the Kremlin environment in which Stalin worked. The director of the film The Battle of Stalingrad, V. M. Petrov, related how Stalin’s secretary, Aleksandr Poskryobyshev, enabled him to enter Stalin’s sanctum, his office: “He summoned me to the Kremlin, when Comrade Stalin was not there. I was in Comrade Stalin’s office and saw the entire setting of his life and work. These were very moving minutes, I had to memorize everything in this room, all the details. I could not observe for a long time or bother with questions. But I strained my whole memory to preserve all separate details.”78
Figure 4.2. Photograph of Stalin’s visit to the 1928 “Ten Years of the Red Army” exhibition at the Central Telegraph Office on Gorky Street, Moscow. Stalin is on the right in a fur hat, Katsman in the back to his left, and Voroshilov on the far left. The cut-out face in the center is likely Bukharin’s, who was purged in 1938. Stalin wrote in the comment book: “I was here on 26 February 1928. Overall, I think, the exhibit is good.” © Family Estate Tatiana Khvostenko.
Another form of informal leverage were the statements Stalin allegedly made about certain works of art in different settings—at exhibitions, in privacy to another leader, or to a painter in a studio. This kind of influence belongs to oral culture, circulated between artists and critics in the form of rumors, and was recorded on paper only in rare cases. For example, if one artist wanted to raise his own symbolic capital and was sure enough of a statement Stalin had made about his own artwork, he could risk entering this statement into public discourse. Katsman, for instance, in 1949 wrote about a 1929 drawing of Stalin, published in Izvestia for Stalin’s fiftieth birthday: “I gave the original to Kliment Yefremovich [Voroshilov], who once told me: ‘Joseph Vissarionovich saw this sketch and praised it.’”79 Furthermore, Katsman minutely recorded Stalin’s reactions to various pieces of artwork at the 1933 exhibition “Fifteen Years of the Red Army,” one of two exhibitions Stalin is supposed to have visited during the thirty-six years between the end of the Revolution and his death (Fig. 4.2).80
In the Lenin room, I was told, Stalin said about Brodsky’s pictures: “Living people (zhivye liudi).” Next to Nikonov’s picture, Stalin said, when looking at Kolchak with a revolver in his hand: “he wants to shoot himself.” . . . When we got to Avilov, Stalin saw himself painted, laughed and immediately turned his eyes to other works. Then back to Avilov, and he examined himself longer. They all laughed over the paintings of the Kukryniksy. We showed them two Interrogations of Communists, one interrogation by Deineka, another by Ioganson. They all unanimously approved only of Ioganson. Stalin stopped next to Tikhy’s painting Red Army Soldiers Bathing: “a good painting,” said Stalin and turning to Voroshilov continued, “good because there is a living sky, living people, living water, that’s how pictures ought to be done.” Stalin carefully and silently examined his portrait by A. Gerasimov. Next to Aleshin’s sculpture there was a dialogue between Stalin and Voroshilov. Voroshilov said: “The Komsomol member is sitting on the Pioneer and crushing him,” but Stalin did not agree. “Of course the Pioneers are propping up the Komsomol members, so there is healthy support.” They praised Terpsikhorov and Kostianytsyn. Stalin said about Voroshilov on the horse: “A living man, and the horse is real.”81
Yet there were dangers inherent in quoting Stalin’s remarks on particular paintings and art in general. Aleksandr Gerasimov was well aware of these: “I will not quote what Joseph Vissarionovich said because when such a great man speaks, every word is valuable, and I am afraid of leaving something out.”82 The authority to canonize statements by Stalin through their publication belonged, after all, not to the artist, but to the Party and Stalin.
One of the most vexing questions for artists and Party leaders was the issue of posing live, of standing as a model, of allowing the leader to be painted “from life” (s natury).83 Some realist artists required thirty and more posing sessions, each lasting many hours, for a single portrait—a considerable sacrifice in time, especially considering that many Party leaders deemed painting frivolous or, in keeping with the imperative of modesty, were concerned that their posing might be interpreted as lacking in that Bolshevik virtue.84 No artist voiced this problem more directly than a certain Isaev, who, during the preparation for the 1939 Stalin anniversary exhibition “J. V. Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land in the Fine Arts,” complained about the difficulties of getting Stakhanovites and other Soviet heroes of the Second and Third Five-Year Plans to pose because they “believe that posing will lead others to accusing them of doing nothing, of wasting time on modeling, therefore they escape posing or pose at the desk.”85 Another painter in the early 1930s proposed to Kaganovich that he first watch Kaganovich at work, in order to photograph him “in the pose that will be most characteristic” and then do a sketch in color that was to eat up no more than an hour of Kaganovich’s time. The artist would then work by himself in the studio, and finally request that the leader sit for another “one or two hours in order to enliven my work from nature.” “I know,” he wrote very typically, “that you, Lazar Moiseevich, are extremely busy, that you don’t have a free minute, and that you need every second. But look at it like this: this is not a whim but my work, I do this not just for art but because of its great social significance: a good, truthful portrait of a leader is just as needed as his speech or live performance.”86
Few professions could match the intimacy of a Party boss’s sitting for a painter.87 For painters, working with their leaders s natury both posed a threat and offered immense opportunities. In the intimate working atmosphere of the studio, personal relations between painter and leader usually developed. In a highly personalized and patronage-oriented power system, painters could use their close access to a leader to ask for favors, such as a new apartment, the release of a loved one from prison, a larger studio. And given the notoriously ambiguous definition of socialist realism, they could ask a leader for his interpretation of the Party line at the given moment. On the other hand, a brush stroke that aroused the ire of the portrait’s subject, or the kind of visceral antipathy that sometimes arose between portrayer and portrayed, could hurl the painter’s life into an abyss.
Portraitists’ accounts of their sessions with members of the Party elite are extremely codified. Invariably, the painter feels anxious and nervous before the meeting but is soon put at complete ease by the “simplicity” and “warmth” of the vozhd’.88 Gerasimov kept recounting publicly how nervous he had been at the famous July 1933 meeting at Stalin’s dacha: “I had to pour the tea. There was a real Russian samovar. I was so nervous that I somehow poured milk from the milk jug into the teapot instead of my tea glass. We all laughed.”89 Kats-man described how, before the same 1933 dacha meeting, the three painters had been both nervous and ecstatic. Voroshilov calmed them down by saying “that he had been just as nervous when he first went to Lenin and walked up to his apartment.” But the effect of Stalin’s appearance was even more soothing: “Joseph Vissarionovich immediately made everything simple and clear. His calmness and cheerful hospitality delighted us.”90 In 1949 Katsman commented on the occasion of the opening of Stalin’s seventieth birthday exhibition: “And you always sense a special nervousness, when you meet, when you see and hear those great people, whom at first only your fantasy drew. I always wondered, ‘What is he like in real life?’”91
From the early 1930s until Stalin’s death, artists constantly pleaded, demanded, and conspired for him to pose for them. And yet there are competing stories as to how many times and for whom Stalin posed. The first known post-1917 artistic representation of Stalin is an infamous pencil and pastel drawing by Nikolai Andreev, dated 1 May 1922 and autographed by Stalin. This drawing, produced three weeks after Stalin had become General Secretary of the Bolshevik Party, is the only example to take realism to the extreme of including Stalin’s pockmarks. (Also, Stalin had a stiffened left arm from an improperly treated injury.) Despite the fact that Stalin signed this painting, it is known that he attempted to censor at least one version of it and wrote on one of the copies: “This ear shows that the artist doesn’t know anatomy. J. Stalin. The ear screams, is a gross offense against anatomy (krichit, vopiet protiv anatomii). J. St.” (Plate 9). Likely Stalin was irked not by the ear, but by the pockmarks. While parts of the story remain unknown, it is proven that Andreev’s drawing was exhibited throughout the Stalin period and called, in an introductory article to the catalogue of the 1939 Stalin anniversary exhibition, a “perfectly finished portrait. No details, everything is concentrated on the representation of the decisive and powerful movement of the head and the penetrating gaze. But most valuable in this work is the fact that the freshness and power of the direct impression has been preserved in it. The signature of Joseph Vissarionovich on this work suggests that he saw it positively.”92 To be sure, Stalin was never again portrayed with his physical imperfections, neither the pockmarks nor the stiffened arm.93
The first written account of depicting Stalin describes two sculpture sessions in 1926. Marina Ryndziunskaia, a sculptor from Moscow, who had already produced busts of several high-ranking Bolsheviks (including one of Aleksei Rykov, to be destroyed in 1938 when Rykov was denounced as an “enemy of the people” during the purges), was asked—probably by the Museum of the Revolution in the context of the sculpture series of prominent Party leaders—to fashion a sculpture of Stalin.94 She began with a Stalin photograph she had received from the Central Committee. “Then came a moment when I ran into difficulties in my search for the image. I want to and must see Comrade Stalin.” Having been told that she “would not, of course, succeed” in getting Stalin to pose, Ryndziunskaia appealed to Stalin’s wife, Nadezhda Allilueva, who facilitated a meeting with Stalin in his office at the Central Committee during the late summer of 1926. In keeping with Stalin’s canonical image of modesty, Ryndziunskaia emphasizes the “silent sparseness (molchalivaia skupost’)” of the office, an “unpretentiousness of the word, unpretentiousness of movements, nothing superfluous.”95 As for Stalin himself: “I was met by a man of medium height, with very broad shoulders, who firmly stood on his feet. . . . And exactly molded from one metal with his torso, a head and strongly developed neck, with a calm and resolute face. To use the language of us artists, I saw a strong composition from the top of his head to the heels of his feet, relating a single thought. A man of exceptional inner will, in an unbelievably calm pose, without the slightest movement. A force, amazing and thrilling, with a head that seemed to sit firmly, a head you cannot imagine moving to the right or to the left, only straight and only forward.”96 Here we have a dress rehearsal for most of the tropes of Stalin representations: the modesty, calmness, immobility, metal-like quality, Nietzschean willpower, and linear, progressive movement— “only straight, and only forward.” Clearly, this account was refracted through the prism of the Stalin iconography that developed during the 1930s.
“Without hope of seeing him again,” Ryndziunskaia then tried to “use the limited time to study his movements and the bearing of his head.” But Stalin agreed to sit for her during a second session at her own studio. Stalin arrived together with his wife, Nadezhda Allilueva:
I met a completely different person in comparison to our first encounter. He was unpretentious, cheerful, joked, criticized my works, and noted a shortcoming in terms of anatomy once in a while (“Please don’t laugh, I do know anatomy,” he said). . . . I felt at ease with him, chattered, told him everything that came to my mind, and did not think about what was permissible or not. I even told him that, had I known “that you can be this cheerful and simply talkative, I would not have asked Nadezhda Sergeevna to come with you, because I was so nervous about visiting you at the Central Committee that I was somewhat embarrassed.” Comrade Stalin laughed: “Don’t tell me you got cold feet, got scared?” “I didn’t get cold feet, I ran away worrying my head off, that’s how frightening it seemed at your office.” “I’m very, very glad, that’s the way it’s supposed to be,”—he said with a good-natured smile. [Ryndziunskaia:] “Is it true that you wouldn’t have come to me if it were not for Nadezhda Sergeevna?” Comrade Stalin burst out laughing: “Of course, she talked me around day and night, and only now, after finishing up with important affairs, I told her that I can go.”97
The following passage in Ryndziunskaia’s memoirs is crucial and projects back on the 1920s the 1930s socialist realist formula of showing the main character traits of the portrayed object (rather than trying to represent mimetically, all blemishes and details included): “In answer to Nadezhda Sergeevna’s wish to see a perfect likeness, I said that I was working not for the family, but for the people. If one part or the other will be a little bigger or smaller, by that I emphasize and strengthen the image, not a photograph. . . . ‘For example, your chin goes backward, but I will make you one going forward, and the same with everything else. After all it is no secret that you and I lived under the tsar—remember how the people, when they walked by the tsar’s portrait, were searching for, wanted to see and understand from the image why he was tsar. But then this was hereditary, now I want the public, when it walks by my depiction, to understand why you are one of our leaders.’ ‘You are absolutely right,’ said Stalin.”98
In other words, the common purpose of tsar and communist vozhd’ portraits was to demonstrate to the population that their ruler deservedly ruled. The portrait was supposed to express his legitimacy; legitimacy was inscribed in the way he was portrayed. The difference lay in the nature of this legitimacy: in the case of the communist leader he deserved to rule because of his personal qualities, because he represented the people, and because he embodied the Marxist march of history. The tsar, by contrast and in Ryndziunskaia’s reading, had done nothing to deserve his elevated position. His only merit was to have been born a tsar’s son. Ryndziunskaia may have had in mind the famous court portrait of Nicholas II by Ernest Lipgart (Plate 10). Dating from 1900, this painting shows the tsar in the White Hall of St. Petersburg’s Winter Palace, wearing the uniform of a colonel of the Horse Artillery Guards Brigade attached to the Imperial Escort. His decorations include some that identify him as a member of the Romanov dynasty with international dynastic ties: a commemorative medal of the coronation of Alexander III, his father; a commemorative medal of the reign of Alexander III; the badge of the Danish Order of the Danenbrog, since his mother, Empress Maria Fedorovna, had originally been Princess Dagmar of Denmark. Apart from that, people might have looked for dynastic continuity in Nicholas’s bodily features and would have noticed the same blue eyes as those of his grandfather, Alexander II. Thus portraits of the tsar indeed placed emphasis on symbols and bodily attributes that signified dynastic continuity.
Stalin’s portrait session with Ryndziunskaia concluded with a reminder that the sitter had intended to spend only twenty to thirty minutes but had ended up staying almost two hours. “Then I asked him to take off his hat once more, he looked at me with his head up, and I instantly became aware of his face with its bushy eyebrows, which were somehow reminiscent of a mountain bird. We said farewell simply and easily (prosto i legko)—how often have I repeated these words so befitting him!”99 Ryndziunskaia apparently attempted to get Stalin to come for another session, but in vain. “And so I stayed behind all by myself with my work. I left [the sculpture] as it was, having fixed reality, and nothing but that. A year or two later I already began to work differently and, with Stalin’s agreement, sometimes departed from the real model, added something, took away something, always trying to maintain the likeness. I tried and try to give the portrait of the leader with all of his inner will and force, to the utmost amazing and thrilling. But when I remember his warm good-naturedness, I feel like incorporating into the portrait of the great leader this rich part of his nature. A difficult task, a task that should be, rather, must be tackled.”100
Ryndziunskaia seems to have kept in contact with Nadezhda Allilueva while working on the Stalin sculpture. It appears, however, that the sculpture was never exhibited widely and was purchased by the Museum of the Revolution only in 1958, after the deaths of both the sculpted and the sculptor. Ryndziunskaia’s career never took off; until the end of her days she worked at the Museum of Ethnography and depicted the national minorities of the Soviet Union.101
It also appears that Stalin posed twice, in 1920 or 1922 and in 1926, for the star painter of the 1920s, Isaak Brodsky.102 There are various stories of Stalin posing after the 1920s, but these stories might be apocryphal. During the 1930s, Stalin supposedly sat as a model for the painter Dmitry Sharapov, who “came from Leningrad to Moscow to do Stalin’s portrait; he was arrested after two sessions because Stalin was displeased with the way he was portrayed.”103 After the war, Stalin allegedly attempted to get Vera Mukhina to make a sculpture of him. Mukhina, however, resisted by demanding that Stalin pose for her, “which request, she knew, Stalin would not submit to.”104
One solution was to engage someone else to pose as Stalin. Gerasimov’s heir and son-in-law, Vladilen Shabelnikov, claims to have shared Stalin’s height of 162 cm and to have sat as Stalin for Gerasimov in an authentic army greatcoat and with a pipe, both supplied as props by the Kremlin.105 The fact that painters engaged a Stalin model (naturshchik) remained secret. Clearly the Soviet state feared sacral doubling, that Stalin’s sacrality would inhabit more than one body.106 The other side of the restriction in general of Stalin to Stalin’s body and the taboo placed on Stalin models in particular was the countless stories of Stalin doubles (dvoiniki) in oral lore.
The only opportunity of painting Stalin in person, then, was at the public events at which he appeared. Only select artists were admitted to these, and the privilege of sitting, for example, in a front-row seat at the Bolshoi Theater during Party meetings was a clear mark of an painter’s high status in the artistic pecking order. At such meetings, artists hastily produced sketches that they later reworked into paintings. As early as 1927, Katsman recorded making a first “small sketch of Joseph Vissarionovich in my notebook . . . at the hippodrome, where Budyonny had brought me to watch horse races. . . . On the basis of these sketches from life, I did a profile portrait of Joseph Vissarionovich for his fiftieth birthday that was published in Izvestia.”107 Stalin’s 1933 visit to the exhibition “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” likewise offered artists an opportunity to study his physical appearance as closely as possible, as Katsman recounted: “The artists enthusiastically experienced this meeting and kept saying: ‘Now we saw enough of him, now we are going to depict him correctly. We give Stalin black eyes, but they are amber-colored.’ Everyone memorized the shape of his head, the body’s proportion, the color of the face, his posture.”108
Most famously, Stalin met with Voroshilov and the painters Isaak Brodsky, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Evgeny Katsman, at his dacha on 6 July 1933.109 This meeting materialized in the immediate aftermath of the “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” exhibition. The meeting must be seen against the backdrop of the battle of the realists with the avant-garde, Voroshilov’s patronage role, and the individual interests of the three painters involved. The meeting was mythologized in a key painting by Gerasimov and, as is less well-known, in verbal representations—memoirs by the painters, all of which stressed their closeness to the leader and some of which were presented to audiences such as the Central House of Art Workers, a club-like institution for painters and other artists. The meeting offered an opportunity for the painters to watch Stalin’s physical appearance closely and to register his pronouncements on art. One month after the meeting, Katsman reflected upon the meeting in a letter to Brodsky: “Well, what can we say—we won! But victory is not easy—we have to expand our offensive, we must work better and better.” After proclaiming the victory of the realists over the avant-garde, Katsman went on to discuss Stalin’s concept of art as he supposedly related it to the three painters at the meeting. Katsman began with the Bolshevik idea of a vanguard of realist painters, who would lead the entire field of art: “First of all, we must put together a group of masters and move on in a strong unit, pulling behind ourselves the entire visual arts front.” What kind of art should this vanguard of realist painters create and inspire? The new art should depict “the living person (zhivogo cheloveka), living water, living grass, sky, living Soviet everyday life, the living Soviet person. We must organize cheerful exhibitions, full of sun, joy, children, women, healthy bodies, and human emotions. Enough of perverts in art, of gloominess, distress, and depression, we do not need the poetry of decay and rot. . . . We ought to be the poets of living, sparkling life. Our country is full of life and the fighting spirit of communism, at its head is the man of genius Stalin—that is what our exhibitions are supposed to be like.”110 This letter can be read as Katsman’s attempt to repeat Stalin’s remarks on art. The adjective zhivoi, meaning lifelike, realistic, proliferates and conforms to Stalin’s highest praise, articulated with reference to specific paintings on a number of occasions in the late 1920s and early 1930s: “living people” (zhivye liudi).111 By repeating Stalin’s remarks, Katsman was trying to establish his closeness to Stalin and speak “with” Stalin. The danger was that this would be interpreted as speaking “for” Stalin, and after all, Stalin, not Katsman, held authority over Stalin’s words. Again, Gerasimov was more aware of the danger.
In the aftermath of the meeting, the three realist artists launched a major offensive to get Stalin to sit for them and seem to have almost succeeded. Brodsky wrote to Katsman on 27 April 1934: “What do you think, are we going to paint Stalin in the summer? We should already start talking about this with K. E. [Voroshilov]. Cheer up, you are still young and we will work.”112 Katsman wrote to Brodsky on 8 September 1934: “And finally. Isaak, we must paint Stalin. Gerasimov will return soon, we have to go to Voroshilov and start working. Sittings (seansy) with Stalin will enrich our thoughts and feelings for work at the Artists’ Convention, and will generally help the fate of Soviet art.”113 On 25 September 1934, he wrote again: “Voroshilov is gone, he is in Sochi with J. V. [Stalin]. When they return we will pose the question about sittings. Of course we could go there!? Especially since A. Gerasimov returned from abroad yesterday. So you decide! But I think you are right—if the sessions come true, then in wintertime.”114 In an account of how he painted First Cavalry, Gerasimov at the Central House of Art Workers on 13 November 1938 alluded to the difficulties of getting Stalin to sit: “Besides, First Cavalry is the first painting on our visual arts front that is completely painted from life, with the exception of one portrait, which so far no one has succeeded in painting from life.”115 A 19 August 1939 letter from Katsman to Brodsky reads as follows: “I just cannot understand why our sittings with Stalin are postponed? And we are reacting somehow apathetically to this. I will be in Moscow in two weeks and I will have to take care of this thing again and bring it to a victory. We must paint Stalin or we are scum (svolochi).”116 And in Katsman’s words to Voroshilov in 1939: “Joseph Vissarionovich will turn sixty in December. People from the arts are preparing for this. Let us begin with the main thing. There is no Stalin portrait from life. We need one! This has to be done all the more since Joseph Vissarionovich in life is so expressive and beautiful. We must depict J. V. the way he is. We owe this to history. We owe this to the peoples. We owe this to Soviet art and science. . . . My citizen’s and artist’s conscience are forcing me to write this letter. You decide how to accomplish this and who will work.” He then suggested that Stalin pose for several artists at the same time: “Decide yourself which artists should be given—well, say, 10 sittings for one and a half, two hours. Just imagine—the amazing gift of Comrade Stalin from life will enrich the world in ten days. Different masters will do the portrait of the best man on earth. That is exactly what we need. If we accomplish this I will also paint J. V. from life—that will be the high point of my life and the good fortune of an artist. Even though at the same time there is fear—what if it does not work out? I ask you, Kliment Yefremovich, to acquaint Joseph Vissarionovich with my letter.”117
Katsman returned to the subject time and again, for example, in a 1940 letter to Voroshilov: “I never forget the dream that we will paint Joseph Vissarionovich from life. I am waiting for those hours when we can do the kind of work that our contemporaries and descendants will be grateful for. We have an obligation to do this work. In me there is some belief that we will paint, and I want only one thing—to be healthy and to finish this work properly.”118 On the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday exhibition in 1949, Katsman wrote: “Today opened an exhibition dedicated to the seventieth birthday of our beloved Stalin. A lot of good paintings are there. . . . But I thought to myself, this is a good exhibition, but the main thing has yet to be done,. . . there is no finished portrait from life. Is it possible that there will never be such a portrait? I doubt we will be forgiven this omission.”119
From all we know, Katsman’s wish went unfulfilled and there never was another Stalin portrait from life. One reason for this surely was that Stalin had to remain true to the image of the quintessential Bolshevik, who was modest and who acted rather than sitting for painters. Another reason was, as Ryndziunskaia in 1926 explained to Stalin’s wife who asked for mimesis, for “perfect likeness,” that she “was working not for the family, but for the people. If one part or the other will be a little bigger or smaller, by that I emphasize and strengthen the image, not a photograph. . . .” Ryndziunskaia’s declaration not only foreshadowed socialist realism’s call for the realistic portrayal of a person while highlighting that person’s psychological characteristics, it also diminished the need for sitting. Her—and later, socialist realism’s—agenda could be carried out by using the existing depictions of Stalin or photographic and cinematic templates. After all Ryndziunskaia got her unique shot at fashioning a sculpture of Stalin in 1926 when there were hardly any Stalin images in circulation, and when the cult surrounding Stalin had yet to commence.
If any Party elite member besides Stalin has figured prominently so far, it is Kliment Voroshilov, the Old Bolshevik and commissar of war from 1925 to 1940. Whenever he celebrated a birthday or Soviet holiday, he received, just like the rest of the Party elite, large quantities of congratulatory letters. What made Voroshilov’s correspondents different was their profession: most were artists and other members of the artistic intelligentsia. Voroshilov, they all agreed, was their patron among the Bolshevik luminaries, even if others had kinship ties to painters (Ordzhonikidze’s daughter at one point was married to the artist Eduard Barklai and Maksim Litvinov’s daughter was married to the painter Ilia Slonim).120 Thus Evgeny Katsman, the painter, sent a typical letter to his patron on the occasion of the thirty-sixth anniversary of the October Revolution in the year of Stalin’s death: “In your speech you mentioned us artists—no one has ever done that! But artists need to be pampered, who will decorate communism without artists?! Communism without beauty is poor communism. But artists are like flowers, when you water them, they grow, when you don’t water them, they dry up and die. Pericles nurtured Phidias. The Medici nurtured Raphael, Leonardo and Michelangelo, Tretyakov and Stasov [nurtured] Repin. You nurtured and are nurturing Soviet artists. Remember, Stalin once told us about you—’Here’s your Pericles.’”121
Who was this modern-day Pericles and how did he become patron of the arts? What was the role of patronage in the production of Stalin cult art? Kliment Yefremovich Voroshilov (1881–1969) was born in a railroad worker’s family in the village of Verkhnee in Ekaterinoslav oblast in present-day Ukraine (Fig. 4.3).122 Voroshilov joined the Bolshevik Party in 1903 and engaged in underground Party work in the following years, especially in the Ukrainian town of Lugansk.123 He occupied important positions in the Red Army during the Civil War, particularly in the famed First Cavalry, and, in the words of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, was Stalin’s “closest aide” in the defense of Tsaritsyn, later Stalingrad.124 In fact, apart from the legitimacy that Stalin derived from the myth of having been handed power by the dying Lenin, the battle of Tsaritsyn matched the October Revolution as a founding narrative of Stalin’s reign. Voroshilov’s proximity to Stalin in this narrative accorded him (and the Red Army, which he embodied) a more prominent place in Soviet cultural representations—in the films, novels, and paintings of the 1930s and 1940s— than the power that he actually wielded in comparison to the likes of Molotov or Beria. Voroshilov was also a member of the Revolutionary War Council and in November 1925 became People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (renamed People’s Commissar for Defense of the USSR in 1934), a position he held until the 1939–1940 fiasco of the Soviet-Finnish Winter War. During World War II he was appointed commander in chief of the Northwestern Armies but was removed from that position when the Germans surrounded and besieged Leningrad. He held numerous other posts during and directly after the war, most importantly as director of the Allied Control Commission in Hungary from 1945 to 1947. From 1946 to 1953 he served as deputy chairman of the USSR Council of Ministers. It was only this portfolio that included cultural affairs.125 Katsman congratulated him on the appointment as deputy chairman but pointed out that it was merely the official recognition of Voroshilov’s de facto role over the course of more than a quarter-century.126 Voroshilov lived through Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization unscathed and died a peaceful death in 1969. He was buried with full honors on Red Square.
Figure 4.3. A postwar photograph of Voroshilov. Source: Bol’sbaia Sovetskaia Entsi-klopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 9 (Moscow: Gosu-darstvennoe nauchnoe izdatel’stvo “Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia,” 1951), pictorial insert between 128 and 129.
Voroshilov seems to have taken a liking to the arts, especially the visual arts, early on. His first remotely related activity was during his teens, when he worked at showing slides with a “magic lantern” for his admired village teacher Semyon Ryzhkov, as he wrote in his memoirs. The slides were projected onto the white wall of a barn; the local “farmers had never seen anything like it” he recalled.127 Recounting his teens and twenties in his memoirs, Voroshilov dedicated an entire section of a chapter to “Getting Familiar with the Arts” and one of the posthumous biographies, a composite of newspaper clippings, photographs, and reproductions of archival materials, seamlessly wove paintings by Igor Grabar and Mitrofan Grekov as “documentary material” into his life story.128 He was instrumental in the creation of the Museum of the Armed Forces of the USSR and the founding of the M. B. Grekov Studio of Military Artists in 1934.129 He amassed a private collection of realist art, both prerevolutionary and socialist.
His wife, Yekaterina Davydovna Voroshilova, wrote diaries and letters that give some clues about the scope of the Voroshilov family’s private collection. Voroshilova, herself from February 1947 a deputy director at the Central V. I. Lenin Museum and thus intimately connected to one of the main repositories of Lenin-Stalin artwork,130 wrote in a letter to her thirteen-year-old grandson Klimushka, who together with four ten-year-olds was responsible for a 7 January 1949 fire in the Voroshilov dacha in which much of the picture collection perished: “Pictures which I selected one by one and hung in the rooms for collection purposes and so that they might give us pleasure, burned. Gone are the wonderful paintings of A. M. Gerasimov, Comrade Stalin and Voroshilov on the Volga Steamship, The Apple Trees are Blossoming, Peonies, and the portrait of Timur Frunze. Gone are the paintings of I. I. Brodsky, Lenin at the Smolny, which hung in your grandfather’s study. . . . Klimushka, speaking only of artwork, about forty pieces perished: paintings, drawings, porcelain sculptures, vases with paintings from the biography of your grandfather.” Gone were these many paintings, most of which must have been artist copies, as the originals hung in public museums. Gone too was the Voroshilovs’ impressive collection of works by the prerevolutionary Wanderers, which Voroshilova did not mention. She wrote that she was doubly sad because “almost all letters that Kliment Yefremovich wrote to me burned.”131 Voroshilova’s diaries are full of encounters with artists, testifying to a perplexingly close intermingling of the professional and private lives of Soviet artists and their main patron. Even in Hungary (1945–1947), Voroshilov made friends with numerous artists and managed to sit many a time.132 His friendship with the Hungarian sculptor Zsigmond Kisfaludi Strobl (1884–1975) was publicly celebrated as an example of the friendship of fraternal socialist peoples.133
Voroshilov was a typical Bolshevik patronizing a sector of the arts outside his government and Party portfolio. This practice later became widespread.134 Kaganovich patronized architecture, Yenukidze the theater, Molotov—after Yenukidze’s death—the theater and opera. Stalin directly patronized literature and film. However, the artistic medium that a Party leader chose to patronize (or was drawn into patronizing) did depend on his personal inclinations. Voroshilov’s patronage relationship to realist artists goes back to the period of the Civil War, when he was in a position to distribute scarce resources such as painting materials, and also money, food, and living space. In return, artists painted battle scenes and portraits of army officers. The Civil War in general was a crucible for patronage relations that were to continue long afterward.135 The realist battle painter, Mitrofan Borisovich Grekov (1882–1934), seems to have been the first in a long series of Voroshilov’s clients. Starting in the late 1920s, realist artists created a lineage back to the “founders” (osnovopolozhniki) of realism: they enlisted the greatest of prerevolutionary realist artists, Ilya Yefimovich Repin, for the role of ur-realist and continued the line with Mitrofan Grekov. The realists were eager to “invent their tradition” and to present a story of uninterrupted Bolshevik fostering of realist art—a story that glossed over Bolshevik support of avant-garde art during the Revolution and much of the 1920s. In both cases, concrete resources were funneled to artists’ surviving relatives and to publicize their connection to the Soviet regime.
The next milestone in Voroshilov’s career that prepared him for the role of patron of the arts was his participation in the Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory.136 As a member, Voroshilov engaged in judging depictions of Lenin that prefigured Voroshilov’s later activities on behalf of Stalin art and Soviet art in general.137 In 1928, Voroshilov headed a new, Stalin-sponsored commission with the same name. Taken together, these experiences made it all the more natural for Voroshilov to become the patron of the arts and, it appears, the mastermind of the Stalin cult. In the long run, one could argue, this position saved his life, which was under threat not only during the Great Terror but also especially after the botched Soviet-Finnish Winter War of 1940.138 Voroshilov had been immortalized so many times in paintings with Stalin that the iconoclastic effort of purging his image would have been staggering. In this case, symbolic power, as manifested in the combined Stalin-Voroshilov cult, preserved a life.
Social historians have often explained the vitality of informal patronage networks in the Soviet Union by shortages in the economy or as a function of “neotraditionalism”—the “‘archaizing’ phenomena that were also a part of Stalinism: petitioning, patron-client networks, the ubiquity of other kinds of personalistic ties like blat.”139 This explanation hinges on time lag. The alternative explanation goes like this: the malfunctioning planned economy could not supply the needs of the population; therefore extra-institutional, personalized networks replaced formal, bureaucratic patterns of supply.140 I submit that time lag and shortages both played important but not mutually exclusive roles and that there was, indeed, a fundamental linkage between the kind of personalized authority expressed symbolically in the Stalin cult and patronage in the classical sense, that is an exchange relationship between a superordinate person in command of scarce material resources and a subordinate person in command of something else—art, in our case. The symbolic celebration of personalized relationships, especially between political leaders and writers (Bedny-Stalin, Gorky-Stalin) reinforced material patronage—and vice versa. Patronage was publicly celebrated; it was reconcilable with Bolshevik ideology (despite planning and the attempt to regularize and rationalize all economic relations) because of the embodiment, in the leader, of an institution. Since Voroshilov and the Red Army were linked metonymically, it was the institution, the Red Army, not Voroshilov himself, which disbursed patronage and favors.141
There was a further linkage between patronage and the Stalin cult: Stalin’s image as “father,” especially as “father of peoples,” entailed an understanding of paternal care for his children. Material and other goods given to a certain ethnic or other group in the Soviet “family of peoples” were often portrayed as warm solicitude by the stern but generous father Stalin for his family. The cultural celebration of the material, caregiving aspects of the father-child relationship in the Stalin cult added legitimacy to real patronage in Soviet society, including the arts. If paternal imagery extended to all levels of the Party hierarchy, and if local leaders in their regional cults were also portrayed as caring fathers, then genuine, material patronage also gained in acceptance.
In the end, however, the cross-pollination of artist and political leader becomes intelligible only when seen in the larger historical-aesthetic setting that was Soviet socialism. “The highest aspiration” of Soviet artists, Jochen Hellbeck has noted, “was to occupy a place near Stalin in order to share in his prophetic vision and transformative powers.”142 Socialism under construction was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk-in-progress in which Stalin, the Hegelian-Marxist world spirit personified, was creating a new world and artists, by aligning themselves with this spirit marching inexorably toward the goal of socialist utopia, partook in the creation process. Stalin and artists were thus indispensable to each other and in fact indivisible. This is why it is “irrelevant,” as Boris Groys has written, “that Voroshilov or Kaganovich or Stalin himself were not experts of literature or art, for they were in reality creating the only permitted work of art— socialism—and they were moreover the only critics of their own work. Because they were connoisseurs of the only necessary poetics and genre—the poetics of the demiurgic construction of the new world—they were as entitled to issue orders on the production of novels and sculptures as they were to direct the smelting of steel or the planting of beets.”143 And this is how the Stalin cult and the mundane facts of everyday patronage were linked most fundamentally.
Indeed, what were the coveted goods that the patrons were capable of meting out? One of the scarce resources patrons were asked to distribute was, of course, housing—an issue of great contention in the Soviet Union.144 Likewise, if an artist had been arrested, Voroshilov was the natural patron to whom his relatives appealed for intervention on his behalf.145 And of course, the patron could help in procuring the rare commodity of travel abroad.146
More specific to the artists’ profession, the vozhd’ could also distribute the coveted perk of authorization to be present at events of truly historical significance, where the artist could paint from life. Thus a day after the Kirov murder (1 December 1934) a group of Moscow artists sent a letter, on the stationery of the Moscow Section of the Union of Soviet Artists (MOSSKh), to Yenukidze, the “chairman of the governmental commission for the funeral of S. M. Kirov,” with a copy to Voroshilov (probably because he was their acknowledged patron) in which they wrote:
Shocked by the death of the TsK VKP/b/ Politburo member, the vozhd’ of the Leningrad proletariat and friend of artists Comrade S. M. Kirov, the Moscow Oblast Artists’ Union is asking for the governmental commission’s permission for a MOSSKh brigade selected according to the attached list, which includes major Moscow artists, to make sketches. The immortalization in the fine arts of S. M. Kirov’s memory is indispensable, just as it is absolutely necessary to organize sketches and the drawing of studies from the historical museum as well as from the buildings of former GUM and from other places where the funeral procession will take place and the body of the deceased will be present.147
Volter, the head of MOSSKh, signed the letter, and the list had a total of forty artists, including Brodsky, both Aleksandr and Sergei Gerasimov, Katsman, Grabar, Ioganson, Perelman, Pimenov, Deineka, and Svarog.148 Similarly, Kirov himself had once arranged for Brodsky to meet two participants in a historical event he was painting who were imprisoned in the basement of the Lubyanka. The painting was Brodsky’s The Shooting of the 26 Baku Commissars, and the incident took place in 1924 when the two organizers of the shooting, Funtikov and Rybalkin, were being held at the secret police headquarters.149
There were varying degrees of closeness to the patron, and an elite core group of clients often acted as intermediaries to more distant clients.150 Thus the painter Vasily Yakovlev sent an invitation to his exhibition not directly to Voroshilov, but rather through Katsman, a member of the core group. Katsman accompanied Yakovlev’s letter with the ambiguous words: “Brodsky has seen his pictures and praised them a lot. I have also seen his pictures but am so far withholding judgment since they are still in progress and the outcome is difficult to predict. But he is certainly an excellent craftsman.”151 Even Brodsky, who was extremely close to Voroshilov most of the time, at one point appealed to Voroshilov via Katsman, who was closer at that moment.152 Geography always played a big role, and Brodsky’s Leningrad location became a liability, as the patrons all resided in Moscow.
Voroshilov, to be sure, also acted as an intermediary patron and brokered access to Stalin himself.153 In 1930 Voroshilov wrote to Kalinin at the initiative of Aleksandr Gerasimov about the hard times Gerasimov’s family experienced in their village of Kozlov, because of their prerevolutionary kulak status and because of special taxes that had been exacted from them during collectivization: “In fall of 1929, in connection with our general new course, the artist Gerasimov’s family turn also came. A tax of at first 500 rubles, then another 150 rubles, and finally 720 rubles was imposed on them. According to the artist Gerasimov, he paid all this money, partially out of the family pocket, but mostly from his own income. But he thinks that . . . new taxes will follow. From this whole affair his father has become paralyzed and the artist Gerasimov is upset and has stopped working.” “In all of this,” wrote Voroshilov, “there is nothing unusual. The authorities in Kozlov are obviously acting correctly.” But the artist Gerasimov was too valuable to the Soviet state to be left inactive and deep in his family’s woes. Therefore the taxes should be postponed for two months and no new ones imposed. “I do not know if these requests are realistic, but I think that the artist Gerasimov definitely ought to receive help to preserve his ability to work.”154 The argument that an artist deserved help because he was useful to the state, not because his request was intrinsically justified, was quite typical. Sometimes efforts to enlist a high-placed figure as intermediary for access to Stalin failed. This was generally true for Stalin’s secretaries, who received patronage requests themselves and usually turned them down. The caricaturist Deni, for example, asked that Mekhlis give him personal instruction about political events so that he, Deni, could draw about them more appropriately. Deni wrote, “you would have to give me a chance to meet with you personally once in a while so that I could hear from you the leadership’s position on this or the other question. . . . They call me a leading artist, and I must justify this title. . . . I am asking you to spend very little time on me, since I understand right away (s poluslova).”155
The system of subpatronage, of patron intermediaries or patron brokers, whatever one wants to call it, also had an eminently practical function. An important element of patronage was a client’s access to the patron for personal communication. Stalin, however, who would have certainly received the bulk of patronage requests given the leader-centered political system, only had limited time. Hence the division of patronage among different patrons was a division of labor of sorts. In May 1946 Vera Mukhina, the sculptor of Worker and Female Kolkhoz Farmer (1937), opened her letter to Stalin by enumerating a number of sculptures that she had produced “since I have become ‘famous’ (since 1937).” But “not one of these” sculptures, she wrote, “has been put up, not because they were bad, but simply because the people who have the right to approve their implementation did not look at them.” By appealing to the vozhd’, she expected that pressure would be put on the right people. “I am already 57 years old,” she closed powerfully, “and I want to succeed in leaving something behind for the country.”156 Was Mukhina aware that her letter was most certainly never read by Stalin, but that it triggered a well-oiled machine of other officials who acted upon it? However that may be, Mukhina’s letter was forwarded to Andrei Zhdanov, the secretary of the Central Committee. He sent it to the head of the Committee for Arts Affairs, Mikhail Khrapchenko, and the head of the Agitprop Department at the Central Committee, Georgy Aleksandrov, with the request that they recommend what action he should take. Both Khrapchenko and Aleksandrov gave detailed comments on each of the sculptural projects mentioned by Mukhina, included photographs, and sent their recommendations back to Zhdanov.157 Here the chain ends, but it was likely Zhdanov who made a decision on which project to foster. Thus the scarcest of all goods was Stalin’s personal intervention. It was, of course, also the most valuable and had the greatest impact. Indeed, scarcity and value (in the sense of the ability to achieve intended results) were inextricably linked.
An artist or a writer could also actively initiate a client-like relationship with a patron-vozhd’ by sending him a cult product and asking him about some detail. In a prime example of how Voroshilov was integrated into the production process of a cult painting of himself, the artist Vasily Dubrovin in 1937 wrote to him:
This fall the Baku Museum of the Revolution is organizing an exhibition of pictures of the Stalin era. I took on the subject: Voroshilov as Boilerman on the ‘Oleum’ Fields in 1907 in Baku. I have nothing [to go by] except for one 1907 portrait of you. Considering that I have caught fire for this subject and cannot wait to start, but am lacking extensive material, I am earnestly asking you not to refuse answering three questions, which I will be grateful for all my life, Kliment Yefremovich! 1. Did you work as master, apprentice, or laborer at the boilerhouse? 2. What did you wear? What work clothes were there . . . ? 3. Your comrades from underground work, Comrades Shaumian and Alyosha Dzhaparidze, did they directly come by the boilerhouse?158
Half a year later Voroshilov’s secretary answered all of Dubrovin’s queries: “1. As far as I know from Comrade Voroshilov’s biography, he was in Baku for underground Party work, therefore he was not a master at the boilerhouse. 2. As far as the clothes of that time are concerned, at the Museum of the Revolution you will probably find a contemporary photograph. 3. Did Dzhaparidze and Shaumian stop by at Voroshilov’s and did they meet?—well, where can one find this out more easily than in Baku from the comrades of that period.”159
Time and again cultural producers tried to enlist a high Party patron along ethnic lines, invoking, for instance, Mikoian’s Armenian heritage.160 This was a sensitive issue and Party bosses were careful to stress their supra-ethnic identity as Bolsheviks and to leave behind a paper trail that turned down any such patronage along ethnic lines. This is not to say that such patronage never took place. In oral testimony of the period it certainly played a role. Gerasimov was considered by some an anti-Semitic Russian chauvinist and Gerasimov himself, according to his son-in-law, was convinced that he was surrounded by a Jewish conspiracy of Brodsky-Katsman-Perelman who worked through their ethnic patronage channels.161
It can be argued that the entire discourse around shefstvo, translated as “patronage” or “sponsorship” in dictionaries, was a formalized and culturally celebrated variant of patronage. Shefstvo was when a factory, for example, sponsored a soccer club in an organized, officially publicized fashion. Often shefstvo was couched in metaphoric kinship terms, of an older brother (rarely a sister) taking a younger sibling (of either gender) under his tutelage. There was collective shefstvo and individual shefstvo. In a reversal of the usual roles, the artistic intelligentsia—musicians, actors, and artists—was engaged in a shefstvo relationship with the Red Army since 1923, with artists taking on the role of older brother. Parts of this relationship seem to have been codified with a contract.162 It is unclear to what extent this was a give-and-take relationship and what artists gained from it. Nonetheless, the cultural newspaper, Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, duly celebrated this relationship. An article entitled “The Union of Warriors and Artists” prominently displayed a drawing of Voroshilov in the upper right-hand corner of the front-page and Voroshilov’s address to the artists, “the shefs of the Red Army.” “Dear Comrades! You are asking me, ‘how I assess the results of the shefstvo work of the Union of Art Workers over the Red Army.’ I always knew . . . that the shefstvo of RABIS over the Red Army is deeply meaningful, active, and highly useful. The Political Department of the Red Army gave me a report which shows that over the past year the Moscow, Leningrad, and Kharkov branches of RABIS through shefstvo sent 82 highly artistic brigades that gave 2,626 concerts in distant garrisons, at which more than four million listeners were present.”163 In a 1933 conflict over who had the right to publish certain portraits by Gerasimov, a representative of VseKoKhudozhnik wrote to Voroshilov as arbiter, apologizing for seeking to make use of his “shefstvo over the artists.”164
The principle of an institution’s embodiment through a patron, as in the case of Voroshilov and the Red Army, was not the only symbolic aspect of patronage relations that confounded the logic of maximum profit economic rationalism. For example, either patron or client might fall from favor, and yet their personal ties sometimes survived.165 Often patron-client relations extended to the kin of the client after the client’s death. In 1963 Voroshilov wrote, for example, to the head of the Party-state Control Committee, Aleksandr Shelepin, to access bank accounts that Gerasimov had lost track of, but that his wife and daughter needed. “One of the character traits of the deceased was his love for people,” wrote Voroshilov, “the absence of commercialism, and a sometimes excessive forgetfulness towards his debtors, a carelessness in record-keeping. All this is now hurting to some extent his legal heirs—his wife L. N. Gerasimova and his daughter G. A. Gerasimova.”166
The rhetoric that artists used in their correspondence with their patrons deserves to be examined in greater detail. In 1926, Brodsky flattered Voroshilov in a letter by telling him that “all artists see their savior in you, and they are not wrong, that is the way it is. You are the only one who takes the interests of artists seriously and sincerely wishes them well.”167 The artist, Fedor Bogorodsky, displayed both greater effusiveness and more self-interest in his letter to the patron of the arts: “I am using the opportunity to greet you sincerely and warmly! Actually allow me—a mere artist—to declare my love for you once more. Of course, like everyone, I am dreaming of a meeting . . . The artist F. Bogorodsky.”168
Two letters to Voroshilov, one by Brodsky, the other by Katsman, written six years apart, show striking similarities. Both begin by noting a change in Voroshilov’s relationship to the respective painter. “I always felt that you like me and I have appreciated that and have always been proud of it, but for a number of months already, it seems to me, your relationship towards me has noticeably changed,” wrote Brodsky in 1928.169 “In the ten years that we know each other I saw you this unsatisfied and strict for the first time. When we greeted each other, you were on a horse, and I already felt the harshness on your face,” wrote Katsman in 1934.170 Brodsky attributed Voroshilov’s mood change to the slanders of his foes in AKhR (this was at a time when he had been excluded from AKhR), whereas Katsman, following a conversation with Voroshilov, was convinced that serious problems with the state of socialist realist painting were at issue. Both Brodsky and Katsman claimed to suffer from what today might be called psychosomatic symptoms, caused by Voroshilov’s rejection: “This whole story cost me health problems and the loss of 50 percent of my vision because of bad nerves,” in Brodsky’s words, and, in Katsman’s words: “I returned from you completely sick, both physically and morally. I caught a cold with fever . . . I slept poorly during the night and constantly thought about you, about Stalin, and about the fate of Soviet art. I even thought I had fallen seriously ill, but in the morning I had thought everything through and am now in control of myself and healthy.”
Brodsky asked Voroshilov to grant him a meeting. He claimed to have desired such a meeting throughout the AKhR scandal, but had been afraid of Voroshilov’s wrath; only after a government commission’s inquiry and his acquittal did he feel “rehabilitated and all the rumors and dirt are taken from me and I can look you straight in the eyes.” He pleaded that Voroshilov set up an appointment, “at home or even on a holiday”: “I feel an urge to talk to you, to get your advice, to open my soul, and to return home with my soul assuaged.” He closed by emphasizing that he had stopped working on a large Lenin painting because of the AKhR scandal and desperately needed the meeting with Voroshilov: “I know that you will cheer me up and inspire me for work.” Voroshilov left a typically terse bureaucratic note on the letter: “Summon for Friday morning.”
Katsman, by contrast, had already had his meeting with Voroshilov, where Voroshilov had seemingly criticized either socialist realism in general or the realists’ failure to produce a Stalin portrait of high quality in particular. Whatever the case, Katsman proposed to make up for his sins by painting such a portrait: “The main thing is to understand one’s mistakes and to be able to correct them! . . . If we paint Joseph Vissarionovich, we will make up for half of our mistakes.”
Both letters exhibit a fascinating dimension that has not been treated so far: Brodsky and Katsman tie their personal growth as artists (and implicitly, as new men, as communists) to their patron, Voroshilov.171 If art progressed in linear fashion toward new and greater heights, the artists also understood themselves as being involved in a process of movement. “Meetings with you always give me so much, it is as if I grow more and more (svidaniia s Vami vsegda mne mnogo daiut, ia kak by eshche i eshche vyrostaiu),” wrote Katsman. This dimension is generally present in various forms of patronage, including shefstvo: the patron serves a spiritual father, who aids in the growth of his pupil.
But there is yet another facet. Both Brodsky and Katsman link their inspiration to their patron-vozhd’. It is Voroshilov who inspires them to great art. When Voroshilov is unhappy with his artist clients, they fall ill and lose their capacity for artistic work. Whether the passages in the letters in this regard are read as mere window-dressing for underlying pragmatic interests, or whether these utterances are seen as coextensive with a sphere of “belief” or “thinking,” plays no role for our purposes here. I am interested in the discursive continuities of these statements and, from another angle, in their contexts at the time that they were made. In my reading, they exhibit continuities with the ancient notion of inspiration (derived from the Latin, literally being “breathed upon”) through a Muse, and with the Christian notion of inspiration through the Holy Spirit. They mark a rupture with Romanticism which moved the godlike source of inspiration inside the creative person, designating this secular source “genius.” They also differ from many Marxist theories of inspiration, according to which art derives from tensions between base and superstructure or from class consciousness. “Your huge temperament of leader would inspire the collective, it would let it believe in its capacities and would give a feeling of its importance for the Revolution,” wrote the poet Ilya Selvinsky to Kaganovich in 1935, suggesting that the latter patronize a poem, jointly composed by a group of young poets, about a single Moscow house that was to serve as a metaphor for all of Soviet history and society.172 It is striking that this rhetoric of inspiration (voo-dushevlenie) is unthinkable of letters from social milieus other than the artistic intelligentsia. A worker on a site of socialist construction could hardly have written a similar letter, simply because he was so entangled in plans and other new methods of the socialist economy. There was no room for individually inspired work. In the case of the artistic intelligentsia, however, Greco-Roman and Christian notions carried over into the Soviet period. Paradoxically, this was despite the self-professed production of art according to plan and with new socialist methods. It is this fascinating hybrid of planning and ancient artistic rhetoric that we will meet time and again.
Let us examine an entirely different case. In 1934, Voroshilov received a letter from Raisa Azarkh, a writer who he had known since 1918.173 Azarkh, it seems, had been Voroshilov’s lover—whether before or during his marriage to Yekaterina Voroshilova is unclear. In Azarkh’s letter, she linked her writing about the Civil War to Voroshilov and Stalin, and her personal romantic love for Voroshilov to Stalin’s love for Voroshilov. “Dear Kliment Yefremovich,” she began. “By the way,” she continued, “today is the sixteenth anniversary of our acquaintance, if we want to talk about anniversaries. No, my letter will be strictly businesslike and not at all lyrical.” She wrote this simply to keep mingling hints at their former romantic relationship with business matters, in order to keep conflating history with personal romance: “When studying materials about the anti-Soviet Czechoslovak uprising—incidentally, I have wonderfully recuperated, am completely healthy now, have pulled myself together, have lost weight and instead of my 37 years I am now considered 27, and have finished the first part of the novel Fifth Army—so when studying these materials, I found out the following thing, which was entirely new and staggering to me.” She then related as fresh “historical facts” a story of how Trotsky, the traitor, had actually cooperated with the Czechoslovak Legion and how Stalin had saved the Red Army in the Civil War. “It’s time to tell the workers and peasants about this. Who knows that Stalin’s genius anticipated the Czech uprising and if this had been foreseen no rivers of blood would have flowed in the East! I talk about this in my book, but you, dear People’s Commissar of Defense, must know about this more than anyone else. Awfully dear, dearer than ever before in my entire life.” She asked that Voroshilov meet with her, “but then this misfortune happened”—the Kirov murder.
I wanted to fuse Comrade Stalin’s vigilant paternal gaze with my own, which came from the greatest depths of my heart, and went to you, as you stood shocked at the coffin. Dear Klim! One could read Stalin’s way of looking at you: don’t get killed, my young one, my closest and only one, I still need you so much! (Ne ubivaisia, moi mladshii, chto u menia samyi blizkii i edinstvennyi, a eshche tak mnogo nuzhno!) Following Stalin, I am telling you: you are the most wonderful, the most radiant, the most sparkling of everything that life has ever given! And my only one. I have now understood this forever. Take care, my dear beloved. . . . Goodbye, Raia.
On the back of her letter she continued: “See, I am no crybaby but crying nonetheless. . . . My letter ends strangely. From the lines . . . of an epic writer to the passionate outcry to a loved one. Call . . . 1–16–35, tell me your direct telephone. What do you think about the Czechs? And about everything in general. I shake your hand. Raisa Azarkh.” But the letter was still not finished: “I cannot finish this way, you have not seen me in four years, and I do not know when you will see me again. I was very sick after all and lived at the seaside and in the mountains for a long time. I want to send you my photograph. . . . Perhaps it is ridiculous that I am sending it to you. But I have your photographs on the wall . . . and I would be happy if you at least took a glance at mine. All right. Please call and comfort me. That way it will be easy and more joyful to work. Raia.” Voroshilov left a terse comment in blue pencil across the page of his former lover’s letter: “Idiot!”174
There are many possible readings of Azarkh’s letter to Voroshilov. One could emphasize Azarkh’s shrewd manipulation of official discourse—the Civil War novel in need of historical details, the fusing of her loving gaze with Stalin’s paternal gaze—in order to pursue what seems to be her main aim: to get back her old lover. Indeed, Voroshilov’s disparaging comment suggests such a reading. The comment, however, might also be read as his manipulation of his own archival record in line with the “immodest modesty” paradigm. In making sense of Azarkh’s intriguing letter I would like to pursue two other lines. First, the very conflation of a request of information for a historical novel from a participant, a romantic love letter, and a request for patronage, implies how closely related these genres were in epistolary rhetoric. This conflation hints at the difficulty of disentangling these distinct elements from one another; it also shows how difficult it was to measure, bureaucratize, and standardize patronage. Moreover, it shows how patronage was legitimized by the personality cult: if the writing of history had not depended on the leader, if history had not rested on the shouldes of Kirov, Voroshilov, and Stalin, a request for protection would have been out of place.
Second, the difficulty of disentangling genres is matched by the difficulty of keeping separate a Soviet woman’s love for a concrete man, Voroshilov, and for Voroshilov in capital letters, as it were—a model Soviet man, the personification of the Red Army, and the closest comrade-in-arms of Stalin, the embodiment of the Hegelian-Marxist spirit. The model personality of Voroshilov and the physical person of Voroshilov, whom she must have known intimately from their days as lovers, kept getting commingled and confused in the writer Raisa Azarkh’s rich imagination. She was not alone with this problem. It was shared, among others, by the female Russian-language folklore performers from Karelia, a region northwest of Leningrad on the Finnish border. They enthusiastically glorified Stalin as their “father” and thereby cemented the image of Stalin as “father of peoples,” presiding over a Soviet mythic family of nations connected by the “friendship of peoples.” Yet a competing strand of Stalin as man/sexual object always made for incestuous undertones in their folklore, endangering the myth of the harmonious family of Soviet peoples.175
If the dissolution of the artists’ and writers’ groups in 1932 and the foundation of monolithic unions simplified the logistics of the state in dealing with the artistic intelligentsia, then the creation of concentrated spaces, where artists would combine work and life, served a similar function. Patrons could inspect more work and visit more artists within their scarce time. Some of the sites of concentrated sociability that were created for visual artists in the 1930s included dacha villages in Ambramtsevo and Peski outside Moscow, the Central House of Art Workers, and rest homes on the outskirts of Moscow, specifically earmarked for visual artists.
Most importantly, however, a model housing complex was built on Upper Maslovka Street, in a district that was then still considered quite far from the center of Moscow. In the complex, sites of labor (studios) and living (apartments) were combined under a single roof. The complex was built at the behest of AKhR and finished in 1930, before the unification of artist groups. Once built, it might well have been a showcase for the feasibility of monolithic unification avant la lettre (Fig. 4.4).176
The newspaper Sovetskoe Iskusstvo and memoirs by a lifelong inhabitant, the artist and restorer Tatiana Khvostenko, a sixth-generation artist whose ancestry went back to icon painters from the Kursk oblast village Borisovka, serve as useful vehicles for studying the House on Maslovka (as the complex was often called). Khvostenko was the daughter of painter Vasily Khvostenko, whose mother had been godmother to Nikita Khrushchev. She moved into the Maslovka complex at age six in 1934.177 According to her, the initiative for a cooperative artists’ house went back to a general meeting of Moscow artists (of both the avant-gardist and the realist directions) in 1925. The case was taken up by the AKhR-ovtsy Katsman and Radimov, who shared a Kremlin studio with Stefania Unshlikht. Unshlikht advanced the cause through her Civil War–experienced Chekist husband Iosif Unshlikht and with the help of resolutions by People’s Commissar for Education Andrei Bubnov and Nikolai Bukharin at the Moscow City Soviet. After the initiative had failed in a first reading, the personal intervention of Lunacharsky and Voroshilov led to its subsequent approval, and one million rubles were designated for the complex. In 1930 the first building, House No. 15, opened, and more followed.178 The Sovetskoe Iskusstvo article summed up: “The house was finished during the winter of 1930. It has 90 studios and 24 separate apartments. The house also features a cafeteria, a kindergarten, a laundry, and a tailor shop.”179 The cafeteria was run by artists’ wives. In addition the complex had a club in House No. 15 and “At the very top of the house there is a library and reading room. The library . . . holds 25,000 reproductions and 4,000 books on art. . . . The collections of the collector D. I. Shchukin and the lawyer and art lover M. F. Khodasevich served as the basis for the collection of album and book treasures.”180
Figure 4.4. Upper Maslovka: an architectural rendering of the project. © Family Estate Tatiana Khvostenko, Moscow.
The House on Maslovka was home, at one point or another, to such radically different painters as Fedor Bogorodsky, Aleksandr Deineka, Sergei Gerasimov, Boris Ioganson, Evgeny Katsman, Yury Pimenov, Arkady Plastov, Pavel Radimov, Serafima Riangina, Grigory Shegal, David Shterenberg, Pavel Sokolov-Skalia, Vasily Svarog, and Vladimir Tatlin. Some of the most famous Stalin portraitists also lived on Maslovka, including Vasily Yefanov (An Unforgettable Meeting, 1936–1937), Fedor Reshetnikov (Stalin Reading Letters from Children, 1951), and Fedor Shurpin (Morning of Our Motherland, 1949) who stopped painting entirely and lived off the royalties of his masterpiece, according to Khvostenko.181 Isaak Brodsky’s daughter Lidia Brodskaia lived on Maslovka, as did the art critic Igor Grabar and Jim Patterson, the child actor who portrayed the black baby of white American circus acrobat Mary Dixon (played by Liubov Orlova) in Grigory Aleksandrov’s 1936 Soviet blockbuster movie Circus. Some artists’ apartments turned into veritable salons. The Svarog family’s apartment at one point regularly hosted children’s writer Kornei Chukovsky, film director Mikhail Romm, Maxim Gorky, and the Party bosses Voroshilov, Molotov, and Valerian Kuibyshev.182 Because of the concentration of artists in one place, sociability intensified manifold. Artists forged both friendships and enmities; denounced one another during the Great Terror; visited each other’s families, formed string quartets; shared sexual entanglements with female models; associated according to stylistic preference, geographic background, generation, and doorway (podiezd); and exchanged enormous amounts of gossip and rumors. They smoked and drank together outside the “official” space of the cafeteria, club, or library in an old, single-story wooden house located across from House No. 1—a smoke-filled beerhall artists called “Radimovka” after its heavy-drinking most frequent visitor, Pavel Radimov, the oldest AKhR-ovets. This wooden beerhall was a fragment of precisely the kind of city the new Moscow had tried to leave behind forever; here every visitor had a reserved place and the sales staff knew every painter by name and even gave credit when paydays for pictures were far away, running the equivalent of an informal artists’ bank. Radimov once organized a personal exhibition at “Radimovka” and allegedly rejoiced when several paintings were stolen, seeing this as proof of their true popularity.183
By contrast, the Sovetskoe Iskusstvo article portrayed the House on Maslovka as a successful transformation of a “former petty bourgeois, philistine Moscow street” into a modern, socialist, collectivist artist compound. It compared Maslovka to the living and working conditions of artists in the capitalist West:
Artists in Paris live in dark and empty alleys, on the quietest streets and boulevards in the Montparnasse quarter and in Old Montmartre, and in attics, which are romantically called mansardes. When an artist turns famous, he moves to a different quarter or moves down to the lower floors of the house. But the path from the attic to the bel-étage or the entresol is long. A whole life is needed for this. And not everyone succeeds. Jules Romains would probably be prepared to even call artists with warm-hearted irony good-for-nothings (obormoty). Fantasizers, idlers, funnymen, buffoons—artists are running from reality and are saving themselves in an idyllic niche, which has been preserved even in Paris. Going to the outskirts is a dream of every exhausted “bohemian.” . . . The provinces in Paris—such is the dream of the French artist of the 1930s.
The situation of Moscow artists was portrayed as entirely different: “Our artists do not long for the cozy old mansions, for the romanticism of deserted quarters and dilapidated streets. Had Utrillo worked in Moscow, he would not have succeeded in drawing one of the most antediluvian outskirts of the town— Upper Maslovka.”
The Maslovka complex had been such a success that plans for new artists’ housing were already being formulated—and were described by Sovetskoe Iskusstvo in the brightest colors:
The studios on Maslovka are now overcrowded. A project for an entire town of artists has been developed. Alongside the paths of Petrovsky Park spacious, seven-storied houses are spread out. A solemn, almost triumphant arch will lead into the interior courtyard. All 400 studios of the town will be located on the sunny side. In the cellars special carpenter’s shops are being set up for the creation of frames. . . . The roof itself will be turned into a magnificent terrace, into a studio under the sky, where one can paint on clear and sunny days. A majestic exhibition building is being raised in the center between the other buildings. The shows of the Maslovka studios will take place here. The works of artists from the national republics of the Soviet Union as well as of our foreign friends will find a home here. The tiny, old private residences on Upper Maslovka Street are gradually being torn down. There is nothing left to remind one of the old, wooden outskirts of Moscow. Green plantings surround the artists’ town. Petrovsky Path will turn into a gigantic boulevard. Not only the architectural project of the young masters Krinsky and Rukhliadev from Academician Shchusev’s office speaks to this, but also the work that is in full swing on the construction site. Artists are going to work in the 400 studios. Memorials, sculptural reliefs, statues, sketches of frescoes and murals of public buildings will go to the squares of Soviet towns from here. Great Soviet art will be created here.184
Characteristically, the article constantly switched between present and future tenses, as if, as in socialist realism, the future was so close and tangible that it could be described with the (realist) means of the present (Fig. 4.5).185
The patrons had much easier access to the artists once they all began living and working in the same place. Voroshilov could now pay visits to numerous clients, whereas before he had to make trips all around Moscow. Art soviet (khudsovet) commissions, responsible for the judging of art for sale and reproduction, began inspecting paintings on-site at the Maslovka studios.186 Conversely, distance from Moscow now became an increasing problem. The Leningrad artists acutely felt this distance, and any aspiring artist from the provinces had to move to Moscow to enter the loop of patronage and clientage.187 To be sure, the very greatest “court” painters resided not on Maslovka but in their own luxurious living quarters: Gerasimov in his villa and Nalbandian, who is often called the postwar “court” painter, in his apartment on Gorky Street (Fig. 4.6). This is how one observer described the visits of Gerasimov et al. to Maslovka: “Often our luminaries Vasily Yakovlev and Aleksandr Gerasimov entered the courtyard of the first house stylishly in their cars and with their glamorous wives with jewels, in long velvet dresses, and expensive fur coats.”188 Yet after Stalin’s death in the public perception all of these painters, court or run-of-the-mill, were lumped together and Maslovka became a symbol of the Stalin cult and socialist realism tout court. “Down with Maslovka” was the title a group of artists gave an evening at Moscow’s Central House of Art Workers in January 1955, at which satirical verses were read and mockery was heaped on Stalin’s painters.189
Figure 4.5. Photograph of Upper Maslovka. The artists’ complex is in the back. © Family Estate Tatiana Khvostenko, Moscow.
At the birth of the public Stalin cult on 21 December 1929 Demian Bedny thought it necessary to embellish his eulogistic Stalin poem “I am certain” with the stanzas, “Never mind that Stalin / Gets mad and thunders” and to add in prose, “I know: to write intimately about Stalin means to sacrifice oneself. Stalin will awfully scold you.” In the beginning, right after Lenin’s death, everything had been different. When the Stalin cult was nonexistent, when there were almost no Stalin portraits and when Stalin was still scheming for leadership in the Party, he happily agreed to have a young boy named after him. On 29 July 1924 the seventeen-year-old Komsomol member Mikhail Blokhin from a village near the Niandoma station on the Northern Railway wrote to Stalin: “After [Lenin]’s death I wanted to change my last name Blokhin to Lenin, but I thought it over and decided that I don’t deserve such an honor. And so I decided to change my name to yours, that is Stalin, and when they ask me, ‘why did you change your last name to Stalin,’ I will answer ‘in honor of Ilyich’s favorite pupil, Comrade Stalin.’ Now I’m writing to you, Comrade Stalin, because I wonder if you have anything against this.”190 A month later Stalin replied: “I have nothing against you taking on the last name Stalin, on the contrary, I will be very happy since this circumstance will give me a chance to get a smaller brother (I never had nor do I have any brothers).”191 Clearly at this early point in 1924 Stalin readily gave in to the smallest occurrence of cult-building around him. Later when the cult was everywhere, his posture toward this changed dramatically and his opposition to any cult-building efforts whatsoever became a permanent feature. In practice he personally masterminded, limited, and filtered a number of those efforts that were allowed to continue. Yet the volume of cult products exceeded the capacity of a single person to control. Therefore a great variety of other personal and institutional actors exerted the control—and many additional— functions in the production of the Stalin cult, which ended up looking like a multifocal matrix that worked autonomously. Autonomously is correct indeed, with one caveat: the autonomous everyday functioning of the cult was always directed toward the pinnacle of power, Stalin, who could interfere in customary decision-making processes and unhinge established mechanisms of cult production as he pleased. His fiat was decisive.
Figure 4.6. Caption: Aleksandr Gerasimov villa in Sokol. From Fototeka Gosudarstvennyi Nauchno-issledovatel’skii Muzei im. A. V. Shchuseva, Moscow, negative no. XI 472.9. N.d., no photographer (thanks to Monica Rüthers for supplying me with this picture).
There were many similarities in the way the Mussolini, Hitler, and Stalin cults functioned. The great difference lay in the modesty question: the Mussolini and Hitler cults did not need to solve the paradox of their existence, they were cults “without discontents,” while the Stalin cult—bound to the procrustean bed of Marxist collectivism—always remained a cult malgré soi. One of the strategies of overcoming this paradox was to enter the unabashed cults of Mussolini and Hitler into the public script of the Stalin cult and by contrast, to present Stalin’s cult as superior, because unwanted by him.
Patronage also characterized Stalin cult production. There was a mutually reinforcing nexus between the personality cult and patronage that ultimately rested on the entanglement of politician and artist in the demiurgic realization of the world-historical-cum-aesthetic project called socialism. In the early 1930s, patron-client relations coalesced into a semiformalized system, in which each artistic field had its own—more or less tacitly—acknowledged patron; even if this patron had no formal relation whatsoever to the art he mentored, and even if cultural producers never ceased trying to enlarge their base by enlisting other patrons across artistic fields.192 In this system Stalin was, of course, the overtowering patron. All other patrons were “subpatrons” who brokered the scarce resource of access to Stalin. If Stalin intervened in any artistic field, he did so most often in questions of literature and, increasingly, cinema. For both of these areas no Party luminary besides Stalin would have fit the description of patron. Music (excepting opera, which came under the rubric of theater) also seems to have been without an unofficially acknowledged patron. The visual arts were patronized by Voroshilov, architecture by Kaganovich, and the theater and opera at first by Yenukidze and later by Molotov.193 The question, however, of just how a Party boss became a patron is a difficult one. Factors such as personal taste, historical contingency, and the compatibility of the professional portfolio with the patronized artistic medium all seem to have played a role. Such is the tentative picture of semiformalized art patronage that emerged in Stalinist Russia.
