AN ASTONISHING VARIETY of persons and institutions interacted multi-directionally to produce the Stalin cult in painting. Together they constituted a field with multiple foci. This field was always oriented toward the Archimedean point of Stalin. One collective personal actor in this field has been missing so far: the audience. Who were the Stalin portraits intended for? Who actually “consumed” the cult products? And how? Was the audience an active participant in the production process of the portraits, or were they merely passive onlookers? These issues of reception are knotty ones. For one, reception is a problematic concept embedded in an outdated communication schema that presumes a sender of a message through a medium to a recipient. The ways, however, in which Stalin “messages” or images were made, the mechanisms of cult production, were vital in processes of meaning-making, as this book has tried to show. The classical communication schema is further confounded by Stalinist cosmology, which saw artists inspired by Stalin, the incarnation of Marxist historical development, producing an art that showed the Soviet world including its people as a work-in-progress moving toward a final historical stage, in which chronological time would be suspended just as differences between artists, the people, Stalin, and anyone else would cease to play a role.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union and the opening of the archives source genres have surfaced that, at first glance, seem to lend themselves to a straightforward study of reception in the classical sense. The comment book (kniga otzyvov) that was laid out at exhibitions and the anonymous notes passed forward to the stage at a celebrity evening (tvorcheskii vecher) with an actor who played Stalin are two such source genres. They are the centerpieces of this chapter. Yet these sources, we shall see, are best interpreted not as windows into “popular reception” of the Stalin cult, but as elaborate cultural artifacts in their own right that served numerous and varied functions. In this they resemble other sources that have become prominent since the opening of the Soviet archives, such as the “reports on popular moods” or svodki, which many historians at first were inclined to read as Gallup poll–like reflections of Soviet public opinion.1 Historians further saw this public opinion coalescing around binary poles of “affirmation” vs. “resistance.” In general it is helpful to approach the issue of reception not through the affirmation / resistance lens but instead by allowing for vastly different reactions—even in a single person, and even over very short periods of time. Rather than viewing these reactions as “conflicting” or “paradoxical,” we might best understand them as responses of a flexible, fractured, yet historically specific subject that can accommodate multiple utterances, actions, and thoughts over the course of hours or even minutes.2 More specifically, it is useful to watch out for the actual templates which informers followed in recording what they allegedly heard. Which categories, which rubrics were available in a given document? It helps, in other words, to look beyond the ocean of svodki we drown in at the archives and to search for the rare documents that allow us to reconstruct how they were produced, much as Jean-Jacques Becker uncovered the categories given to French school teachers, who were then expected to push “public opinion” during World War I into these state-supplied rubrics.3 Exactly the same applies to comment books at exhibitions and notes at celebrity evenings: the interesting and methodologically sound question is not how they reflect what the Soviet people thought about Stalin, but what purposes they were supposed to serve, what logic they followed, how this logic changed over time, and what this tells us about historically variable, “local” concepts of “reception” in Stalin’s time.
Comrades, I believe that our greatest kind of criticism is mass criticism, not the criticism of art historians.
—Culture functionary Zhukov at selection meeting for 1937 MOSSKh Sculpture Exhibition
As we saw in Chapter 1, World War I greatly accelerated the continual movement toward mass society, mass politics, and mass culture. The Great War forced states across Europe and North America to draw upon and engage their populations in new and expanding ways—aided by the technological advances of the mass media. When the war was over, the population as a collective actor—“the masses”—had to be reckoned with in one way or another most everywhere. Bolshevik Russia was part of these developments, and it is here that the beginnings of the Russian comment book lie.
In the sphere of culture the audience became both a target of cultural products and an active participant in the processes of cultural production. One study has shown how Soviet literature studied readers’ reactions and these reactions then began to partially prestructure the kinds of literature that emerged.4 Works on Soviet cinema document how the reactions of moviegoers were investigated in the mid-1920s by “scientific brigades” that had developed quite sophisticated sociological methods of studying viewer reactions.5 Due to its interactive potential, the new Soviet theater of the 1920s was a front-runner in terms of studying audience reactions to plays.
There were numerous attempts, especially during the heady days of scientific utopianism during NEP, to quantify spectator comments and turn their analysis into a “science.” For example, in 1927 a Commission for the Study of the Spectator (Komissia po izucheniiu zritelia) was formed to study from psychological and sociological perspectives the “reflexology” of Moscow theatergoers. “We consider it necessary to introduce at large theaters a kind of psychological service, i.e. a permanent psychologist, who conducts the work of studying the audience, the actor, and the forms of interaction between these sides.” After one theater had been chosen as the “central laboratory for methods of studying the spectator,” the commission really set to work.6 Besides the questionnaire method and the statistical analysis of questionnaires, the commission observed the audience during the play. The play was divided up into time segments,7 and a graph showed “laughter” in red, “fright” in brown, “intense silence” in continuous blue, just “silence” in dotted blue, and “inattention” in yellow (Plate 13).8 Such social science techniques derived from a number of national and international sources, including Soviet sociology and Soviet advertising (which during NEP conducted studies with focus groups and was influenced by German and U.S. “advertisement science”).9 In turn, these techniques shaped Western practices, as cross-fertilization still reigned supreme between the October and the Stalin revolutions.
Art, too, began to collect audience opinions through the institution of the comment book.10 It is unclear exactly when this institution was imported from the West, but it seems that no comment books existed before the Revolution, not even at the exhibitions of the Wanderers.11 The comment book became one of the most entrenched institutions of museum-going and lasted well past the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a genuine tool for measuring audience reactions during the 1920s, and became mere window-dressing, a kind of pseudo-participatory institution, in the early 1930s. The comment book, together with spectator sociology, was later reactivated as a sign of the democratic-consultative changes taking place under Khrushchev.
Comment books were usually notebooks that were laid out in particular exhibition rooms or were available for an entire exhibition (Plates 14, 15, 16). According to a curator at the Tretyakov Gallery who participated in the 1949 exhibition in honor of Stalin’s birthday, the general purpose of comment books was to study the viewer, to find out “what he likes, why he likes it, does he like it the right way and for the right reasons?”12 In the early days pages in a comment book were sometimes subdivided, with comments in the center and reactions to the comment by other visitors in the margins.13 Asked about this practice of commenting on comments, the Tretyakov curator said that this was rare and existed only at the beginning, when the viewer was “less educated, less enlightened.”14 Thus as a forum of interpersonal written communication, the comment book also served didactic purposes, with viewers educating each other. From the perspective of the museum, the comment book also furnished information on how to rearrange the exhibition. On every wall, the center was to be occupied by a single important painting (derzhashchaia veshch, in the curator’s words) and if too many comments referred to other paintings, the placement of these could be changed to redirect attention to the main painting. Visitor comments further prompted curators to change the guided tours that invariably accompanied exhibitions.
With the monumental exhibitions of the 1930s comment books became more formal and decorative. They were now often leather-bound and sported the gold-emblazoned name of the exhibition on the front cover (Plate 17). This change in outward appearance attests to the shifting functions of comment books. If they originally were intended as pragmatic, “scientific” statistical instruments to collect data on viewer reactions, or as forum-like educational tools, they later turned into a standardized, codified, eulogistic representation of power. The handling of comment books at exhibitions also changed. At the Georgian exhibition, for example, the guard of a specific room countersigned all visitor comments, supposedly to assure that no undesirable comments were recorded. Or, as Voroshilov’s wife, Yekaterina Voroshilova, the deputy director of the Lenin Museum, noted in her diary in 1949, “I checked the comment books on 30 April. Comrade Borynin’s attitude toward this new job was formalistic. He didn’t look at the comment books for an entire month and he poorly instructed the guard in the room, who was supposed to look after the comment book.”15 According to the Tretyakov curator, at many of the Stalin exhibitions there were no comment books but rather boxes into which visitors put pieces of paper with their comments. Thus negative comments—khuliganskie otzyvy, in her words—could be filtered out.16
The comment book differed from the questionnaire method (anketirovanie) in that the latter was an all-out effort to gather each and every visitor’s reaction, whereas the comment was a largely voluntary action on the part of the viewer. True, given the large number of visitors who came in a collective, from their factory committee, their union, their Komsomol cell or Red Army unit, the social pressure to leave comments was intense. Sovetskoe Iskusstvo was unabashed about what could be called the “organized voluntarism” of visitors at the 1933 “Fifteen Years of the Red Army” exhibition: “in conjunction with the exhibition, political propaganda as well as agitational and mass work will be widely organized. According to preliminary targets about 300,000 organized visitors are supposed to go through the exhibition—first and foremost shock workers, osoviakhimovtsy [members of The Society of Friends of Defense and Aviation-Chemical Construction, one of the largest Soviet voluntary organizations], Red Army soldiers, and Komsomol members.”17 And while the exhibition was in full swing, the newspaper noted, “for the popularization of the exhibition a cycle of current radio programs, ‘With the Microphone Through the Exhibition,’ was organized.” The medium of film was also mobilized: “Soiuzkinokhronika [the Soviet newsreel agency] filmed the exhibition and released a short sound film. Besides this film, all Moscow movie theaters are showing agitational movie advertisements for the exhibition.” Finally, “at the main factories informational talks are being organized.”18
The open reporting on the constructed nature of visitor habits did not hinder Sovetskoe Iskusstvo from celebrating the daily number of actual visitors. These numbers were meticulously displayed, as a sign of an exhibition’s popularity, in the newspaper’s most prominent place, the masthead next to the title.19 In 1933, the media made transparent the manipulation of visitors at exhibitions and at the same time celebrated these visitors as a statistical victory of the popularity of socialist realist art, as though the visitors at Soviet exhibitions were exclusively “voting with their feet.”
In spite of the uncertainty as to when and how comment books were first introduced in Soviet Russia, it is clear that as early as 1923 at the second Red Army exhibition a comment book was available.20 In 1925 a professional propaganda worker from the Urals mentioned comment books with entries about a painting by Isaak Brodsky:
Your painting attracted the general attention of all visitors in Sverdlovsk, the capital of the Urals. 325 comments are distributed as follows: very good—305; satisfactory—15, and unsatisfactory—5. The latter are primarily from our “artists,” who did not criticize but engaged in demagoguery, for which they were blamed by the workers, peasants, and proletarian intelligentsia. . . . A worker from the diamond-cutting factory was correct when he wrote the following: “Having seen several comments about Brodsky’s picture, I see that our local artists for some reason do not give Brodsky’s picture enough credit, or rather, that they are jealous of his talent. But I will tell you why: our artists cannot do a picture that is better done than this painting.” These simple and clear expressions of the proletariat of the Urals say almost everything regarding the undeserved criticisms of your painting. . . . It was particularly gratifying for me, a political education worker, to see your painting—full of life, truth, and genuine beauty. It depicts the leaders of the revolutionary proletariat and their characteristic features in such a way that one could not wish for anything better. I saw and listened to Comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Trotsky, Kalinin, Lunacharsky, Stalin, Tomsky, and others. Your painting renders them wonderfully and makes me recall the leaders precisely the way I saw them two or three years ago.21
During his 1928 exclusion proceedings from AKhR, Brodsky pointed out that his painting Meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council “at the last Red Army exhibition received the greatest number of positive comments from the visitors.” And yet, he complained, “this painting was passed over for the prize, and prizes were awarded to paintings that received a smaller number of good comments.”22 The union representative, I. E. Khvoinik, then inquired “why Brodsky was not awarded a prize at the tenth AKhR exhibition for his painting Meeting of the Revolutionary Military Council if it had received the greatest number of votes from 2,000 questionnaires.” According to the protocol, “the representatives of AKhR explain that RVSR [Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic] awarded the prizes and the jury was not made up of artists. In the ensuing dispute AKhR hastened to defend Brodsky.”23 In other words, during the mid-1920S, comments from questionnaires and possibly also comment books played a significant role in discussions within the artist community.
In 1929 GlavIskusstvo’s State Commission for the Purchase of Visual Art experimented with a new form of acquiring Soviet art for the Soviet state. At a special exhibition by several artist organizations (including AKhR and OSt) groups of viewers, selected from different social backgrounds that were meticulously listed in percentages and tabular form, received questionnaires for judging the paintings on the walls. Among other things, the commission concluded that “the distribution of positive and negative comments is about the same for the different social categories”; that “almost all grades given are not explained, but where they are, one can observe the following: in the category ‘white-collar workers,’ the criteria ‘reality,’ ‘naturalness’ are most frequent, in the category ‘workers’ the criteria ‘beauty’ or ‘ugliness of colors’ prevail.”24 The commission decided not to recommend this method of selecting paintings, because, if organized on a large scale, it would create enormous logistical problems. Masses of viewers, who were representative of the different social groups, would have to be channeled past a large number of paintings, all of which would have to be exhibited in one place at the same time.
The experiment with the new method of the acquisition of artwork was apparently a sign of the renewed radicalism of the First Five-Year Plan (1928–1932) and was forced upon the artist unions by GlavIskusstvo.25 At least, representatives of the artist organizations wrote a collective letter in which they defended themselves against an article attacking them in the newspaper Komsomol’skaia Pravda, and in so doing revealed further details of how they had surveyed viewer opinions. Among other things, they emphasized that the exhibition had been sufficiently publicized and that the opinions had been collected anonymously.26
The 1934 exhibition “Young Artists” featured a questionnaire sheet (oprosnyi listok). It read as follows: “Questionnaire. Write down your opinion about the exhibition and its artwork. Underline: worker, white-collar worker, student, peasant, officer, Red Army soldier. Put the completed questionnaire into the box.”27 V. G. Tsybulin, who classified himself as a “student” and “peasant,” commented on a picture entitled After Work by a certain Nevezhin: “This work is but a shadow of the French school in our socialist reality. This piece is artificial. Where is the horse’s behind? This work is bad in that it does not show the real life, and the technique is weak.”28
Later during the 1930s, artists used the comments to further their own standing or lessen that of their colleagues. During a 1937 discussion in the Committee for Arts Affairs regarding the selection of sculptures for the annual MOSSKh sculpture exhibition, one functionary argued that the negative comments at last year’s sculpture exhibition had not been taken seriously enough. “90–95 percent of the comments in the three visitor comment books,” he claimed, “were negative, clearly negative. . . . But at the discussion . . . they tried to downplay this by saying that the visitors to the exhibition were just a ‘strolling public’ (flaniruiushchaia publika). It seems to me that one must not say this kind of thing about Soviet citizens who come to an exhibition. This was possible before the Revolution, then there was a flaniruiushchaia publika.”29 The functionary, Zhukov, continued: “To demonstrate more clearly . . . how the spectator judges this exhibition, I translated all comments into the numerical idiom. . . . When the viewer says that ‘this is the best of all, I like this piece the most’ or if he says that this is the best work of the exhibition, or if he says that it is very good, I . . . gave a 5. When viewers said that something is simply good, I put down the number 4, and when it is satisfactory—3, and when they curse, I gave a 2 or 1. And so, 25 comments on Merkurov are almost all 4s or 5s.” “Comrades,” he concluded, “I believe that our greatest kind of criticism is mass criticism, not the criticism of art historians.”30 Thus at the very moment they were largely being turned into a Potemkin village, the comment books began to be represented as signs of truly democratic art production—as opposed to prerevolutionary art for the few, for the flaniruiushchaia publika?31
There were more, and there was more to, representations of Soviet democratic art production. Aleksandr Gerasimov, in a discussion of Katsman’s one-man exhibition at the Academy of Fine Arts on 26 June 1950, offered an excursus on Katsman’s Visitors with Kalinin (1927) (Plate 18). The picture itself depicts a pseudo-participatory practice—petitioners to the Soviet Union’s elderly grandfather, Old Bolshevik and President of the USSR Mikhail Kalinin. Gerasimov in his discussion mentions that the peasant petitioners so much identified with the painting that they traveled from far away and made actual gestures of reverence. Thus Katsman achieved a remarkable doubling of representation: the narod votes with its feet and overcomes obstacles on its way to a painting that depicts the narod voting with its feet and coming to the incarnation of Soviet power:
M. I. Kalinin, depicted by Katsman, is standing and reading a petition, which the farmers who have come to him have given him. Next to him stands a farm woman, with yet another paper that she wants to hand Kalinin. Then there stands a secretary and a group of farmers. No doubt this is no longer only a collective portrait but already a thematic composition with a certain theme, the theme of showing the relationship of the Soviet people with its new popular power—the All-Russian elder (starosta) . . ., to show a new type of statesman, who is unusually close to the people, whom these farmers consider entirely one of their own, who came to him with their needs. . . . I cannot forget the impression that this painting made on the farmers who came to look at it. They came into the room and looked at the painting for 3–5 minutes, then bowed deeply to E. A. [Katsman], said “thank you,” and left. At first the people came from 10 kilometers away to look at this picture, then from zo kilometers. So this picture received widespread popularity without any advertisements or posters.32
One leading artist, Boris Ioganson, in a similar vein said of Aleksandr Gerasimov’s own Hymn to October: “When I was at the Tretyakov Gallery and stood in front of the painting, I was very interested in the opinion of the people who were looking at this painting. The painting is much liked, it evokes interest. I think that the compositional aspect of the painting is very interestingly done, in the sense that the spectator seemingly is present in the room, seemingly takes part in a big meeting, where he can hear the words of his beloved leader, Comrade Stalin, where he can see the government, where he can see representatives of the sciences and the arts.”33 Both Gerasimov in his discussion of Katsman’s Visitors with Kalinin and Ioganson in his discussion of Gerasimov’s Hymn to October in effect are crediting the painter with creating a participatory effect himself: the painting now is as if life-giving and allows for the spectator to partake in sacral processes. This comes close to iconic perception, as in Russian Orthodox icon painting, where the image transmits sacral charge into the world.
Artists took the comments in comment books very seriously. At the 1939 exhibition “Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land” one artist wrote to the director of the Tretyakov Gallery: “Is the exhibition well-frequented? Do you have a visitor comment book and do they criticize me a lot there?”34 The comments were also used in the press for the public shaming of artists, at artists’ union and organization meetings, and in attacks on individual artists by colleagues. Artists themselves could retain the all-important image of modesty and still praise their very own pictures by mentioning positive comments about them.35
Artists also received letters from people who had visited a museum and gone on a guided tour. These people related what the tour guide had said about the artist’s work and the artist, in turn, at least in one case tried to protest to the director of the museum, demanding that the treatment of his painting by the tour guide change. Thus Isaak Brodsky wrote to the direction of the Tretyakov Gallery that he regularly received letters from his aficionados in which they complained that certain pictures of his had been treated unfairly by the tour guide. One letter claimed that a tour guide had commented on Brodsky’s classic, Lenin at the Smolny (Plate 1), as follows: “Brodsky was the first of the artists to side with the Revolution, but his art has turned bad (iskhalturi-los’). Look only at the portrait of Lenin at the Smolny. Everything is delineated scrupulously—the covers of the chairs, the floor—only Lenin does not look like himself. You cannot feel the restlessness of the time, Lenin is too calm, there is no sense that the blaze of the revolution is burning close by.” Brodsky was not amused: “I am astonished that tour guides are allowed to say such nonsense about a painting that has received general recognition here and abroad. As is well known, the second version of the painting is at the Lenin Museum and I doubt that the painting gets subjected to such ignorant attacks there.” As if to emphasize the seriousness and authenticity of his source, Brodsky cited the letter writer’s name and address.36
As far as the comments themselves are concerned, it is noteworthy that these were extremely codified and positive at exhibitions of Stalin cult art—and thus at the sacral center of the Soviet Union. The following comment on the 1949 exhibition on the occasion of Stalin’s seventieth birthday is typical: “The exhibition ‘The Image of Stalin in the Arts’ has touched us deeply. The guided tour of Comrade M. M. Epshtein managed to show graphically and clearly what the artists and sculptors of the Stalin epoch want to express in their works. We are grateful to Comrade Stalin that he created wonderful conditions for the blossoming of our art. [Signed] The 8th grade students of School 407, Pervomaisky Raion, 24 December 1949.”37 Other comments were more detailed: “By and large the exhibition creates a strong, radiant impression. The picture Hymn to October by Aleksandr Gerasimov is particularly uplifting. Shurpin’s Morning of Our Motherland [Plate 8] is excellent. In [this picture] there is so much light, so much air! You want to take a deep breath when you look at it. The huge fields on which the first tractors are already plowing, this light, blue-green spring sky—together they serve as a wonderful background for the most important figure on the canvas—the figure of Comrade Stalin. It was he, the leader of peoples, who defended the blossoming expanses of our motherland against the enemy, thanks to his wise leadership the sun will never be extinguished above our country.”38 Consider also a particularly lengthy comment by Moscow art students, which began by noting their enthusiasm:
We looked at the exhibition “Comrade Stalin in the Visual Arts” with great excitement. Among the many good pictures, we very much liked Oreshnikov’s picture, Lenin and Stalin in the Petrograd Defense Headquarters, to which the guides pay little attention, despite the fact that this picture is painted with great skill. Granted, it does not impress with bright colors, but the space and tense atmosphere of those years are well expressed in it. At the exhibition there is also a large painting by the artist Khmelko which bears the title To the Great Russian People. They say that there is a lot of light in it, but in truth there is no light in it and the illumination even seems weak, which lends a somewhat sad look to the Georgievsky Hall. Moreover, if you pay attention to Kaganovich’s face and the figure to the right of Kaganovich (apparently Zhdanov), one could imagine that the artist wanted to show a different content of the picture and not the content it is supposed to have. Brodsky’s portraits in oil and pencil are very good, and we all like Yar-Kravchenko’s pencil portraits of Stalin a lot. By the way, Brodsky’s Stalin is the one with the most verisimilitude at the entire exhibition. And we wish that these portraits and Oreshnikov’s picture Stalin and Lenin in Petrograd would stay at the Tretyakov Gallery, because we are afraid that they will be removed at the end of the exhibition. We also very much liked Shurpin’s picture The Morning of Our Motherland. The Students of MSKhSh [Moscow Secondary Art School].39
Critical comments at Stalin exhibitions were exceedingly rare. This was because of the sacral status of representations of Stalin, which were to be revered rather than examined, but also because a museum guard controlled the comment book and because some of the few-and-far-between critical comments that were entered were then removed. A critical comment (by a student) at the 1937–38 exhibition “Art of the Georgian SSR” ran as follows:
The general impression of the exhibition of Georgian art is overwhelming. It is a great pleasure to be able to follow the lives of our leaders—from many years ago to the Great Constitution that bears the beloved name of Stalin. For us, the youth of the land of socialism, this is a wonderful gift. Thanks to Comrade Beria, the initiator of these outstanding works of art! It is all the more saddening to see among these fantastic pictures the work Reception of the Georgian Delegation at the Kremlin by one Krotkov. The faces of Comrades Kaganovich and Yezhov are so distorted that they are hardly recognizable. The face of Comrade Voroshilov has a strange, untypical expression. It is annoying that the Commission which has organized this fantastic exhibition let in this painting—a painting that elicits unanimous displeasure and anger among the visitors.40
Many of these comments were hardly distinguishable from professional art criticism in Stalin’s time. Indeed, one of the totalizing ambitions of socialist realist art was to erase all boundaries, including those between lay art appreciation and professional art criticism, ultimately between art and criticism.41 Socialist realism was not quite successful in erasing these boundaries, as the self-referential logic of differentiating professional, specialized discourses proved overpowering. Stalinist art criticism did develop its own voice, but its borders remained porous. Professional art critics continually pillaged comment books for ideas expressed in “the voice of the people” to buttress their specialized, Hegel-saturated rhetoric. This was one of the abiding functions of the comment book, besides its role in furnishing ammunition for debates within the artist community.
During the 1920s the comment book also had the function of providing genuine sociological information on visitor reactions. It could change the art that was being produced, or readjust the ways in which it was presented in exhibitions and museums (the hanging and surroundings, including the guided tours, noise level, and lighting). It could teach museum-goers the expected repertoires of reception, and, quite simply, to teach them how to behave as cultured viewers. By contrast, during the 1930s—this is especially true for Stalin portraits— the comment book turned into a symbolic, pseudodemocratic practice. Its main purpose became to show to the Soviet Union and to the world that Soviet art was produced by the people and for the people, and hence was “popular” in both senses of the word. Reception turned into performance.
In the wake of the new Stalinist emphasis on heroes and the individual (lichnost’), Soviet screen and stage actors began to be revered no less than Hollywood stars. From Liubov Orlova during the 1930s to Andrei Mironov during the 1960s and 1970s, actors set beauty standards, were emulated by countless teenagers, and were consulted on questions entirely unrelated to their profession. In the absence of a commercialized fan culture, Soviet actors communicated with their audience through different channels. Famous actors received fan mail, to be sure, but in answering this mail they took care to point out that their relationship to their audience was a socialist one. Just as the painters emphasized how indebted they were to the popular masses, actors also stressed that they were “of the people” and produced art “for the people.”
Aleksei Denisovich Diky (1889–1955) was one of Moscow’s best-known stage actors during the 1930s (Fig. 6.1).42 His career took an abrupt turn when “he was arrested (on criminal charges, it seems) at the end of the 1930s and later set free.”43 During the 1940s Diky attained new fame as a movie actor, at first in the lead role of Marshal Kutuzov in Kutuzov (1944) and later as Stalin in three movies, Private Aleksandr Matrosov (1947), The Third Blow (1948), and The Battle of Stalingrad (1949).44 Diky’s performance as Stalin, in which the vozhd’ was stripped of his Georgian accent and at times wildly gesticulated with his hands, was widely perceived as incongruous with the established film iconography. After Semyon Goldshtab had played Stalin early on in the movies Lenin in October (1937) and Man With a Rifle (1938), Mikhail Gelovani, a Georgian actor, had done more than any other for the canonical film image of the leader: Gelovani’s Stalin spoke with a thick Georgian accent and moved hardly at all Plate 19). In the perception of Soviet moviegoers, Gelovani’s Stalin was the celluloid Stalin, and Diky’s version therefore was a shock to many. Diky’s Stalin was also perceived as contributing to the “russification” of Stalin during a time when the battle against “cosmopolitanism” was in full swing.45 While Diky’s tenure as Stalin was relatively short-lived, it still exhibited the characteristics of Soviet stardom: Diky not only received a Stalin Prize and was celebrated in the highest echelons of the world of culture, he also cultivated a special relationship with his audience, whose letters from home and questions on scrap paper, passed to the stage at the celebrity evening, he occasionally answered with round-robin letters.
Figure 6.1. Actor Aleksei Diky at a make-up session for his role as Stalin in the movie The Battle of Stalingrad (1949). Source: RGALI, f. 2376, op. 1, d. 82, l. 8. © RGALI.
In 1948 Diky thus introduced a radio address tellingly entitled “An Open Letter by A. D. Diky about His Work on the Image of J. V. Stalin in the Movie The Third Blow” as follows: “While looking through my papers, I found your request to recount how I worked on the making of Admiral Nakhimov’s image. It is only now that I found your letter to me. Time has gone by, but the anguish over this annoying misunderstanding has remained, and I hasten to get in touch with you and make up for my small fault. The movie The Third Blow, in which I participated in the role of Comrade Stalin, has just appeared. Many are writing to me with the request to tell how I worked on the making of the image of the man of genius who is our leader.” Diky closed by invoking the advantage of the medium of radio in reaching across large distances: “It is my pleasure to do this primarily for you, our faraway kin.”46 The modern mass media allowed Diky to answer letters and queries en masse and to create an impression of particular closeness to even the most remote of his fans.
A thoroughly typical fan letter was the one that young Yevgenia Bocharovaia sent to Aleksei Diky on Victory Day (May 9) 1949:
Dear Comrade Diky!
This little letter will be a surprising mystery for you. First, where is it from? Second, who wrote it? Yes, indeed, a girl you do not know by the name of Zhenia is writing this little letter. From the industrial town of Kramatorsk in the Donets Basin, a student learning to become a master craftsman. . . . Dear comrade, I cannot express my happiness, my enthusiasm about today, about the day of 9 May 1949. They showed the new movie The Battle of Stalingrad in Kramatorsk, in which you participated in the role of J. V. Stalin. Our entire group of students was absolutely delighted. And we want to wish you the greatest success for your further work. We wish you lots of good health for many years. Please forgive what might be a somewhat forward step on my part, but I am hoping to receive a tiny letter back from you. So write and we will be happy to receive a letter from you. Our address: Kramatorsk, Ordzhonikidze Factory OTO. Bocharovaia Ye. Iv. Stay well.47
A postcard from an elderly man, who was clearly more educated, addressed the famous actor as “Dear, esteemed Comrade Diky” and continued in a tone that suggested an equality between the actor and the writer in terms of age, education, and worldview: “Forgive an unknown person for writing to you, but I want to express my gratitude for the creation of the image of Comrade Stalin in the movie The Third Blow. You have depicted Joseph Vissarionovich the way everyone knows him, that is, as a politician, a military man, and a statesman of enormous talent. Therefore I felt great satisfaction when I saw your name in the list of the new Stalin Prize laureates. Please allow me to sincerely congratulate you and to wish you new, great successes. Respectfully yours, A. Gaidaryov.”48 Aleksei Grigorievich Shabanov, from a village in the Primorie region, began a letter by telling how difficult it had been to find out Diky’s address and by saying that he was his greatest fan. He continued: “For a while I knew that a new film, The Battle of Stalingrad, had come out, but I did not have a chance to watch it and I racked my brains over how to get to watch this movie [since] I knew that Diky played the role of Comrade Stalin there.” After returning from a trip to Voronezh oblast, Shabanov finally got a chance to watch the long-awaited movie: “And when I found out that they were going to show the movie The Battle of Stalingrad in the evening I grew sick with waiting for the evening. And here I am sitting with my old lady, my mother, and she sees the living Stalin for the first time. She sees how Comrade Stalin calmly works in his office on the making of a plan, she sees how Comrade Stalin calmly leads, without agitation and confusion gives orders to our generals for the defeat of the Hitlerites at Stalingrad. On the screen she sees for the first time what war means, she couldn’t remain seated on her bench and decided to leave, but I made her finish watching the first part after all. Dear Diky, many thanks for masterfully creating the image of Comrade Stalin.”49
After receiving a Stalin prize, Diky indeed became the veritable object of a small personality cult, albeit in the sphere of entertainment rather than politics, and thus outside the definition of personality cult in this book. Though he had been so recently a prisoner in Stalin’s labor camps, Diky, as a cult object, invariably received requests for patronage. The two social processes of personality cult and patronage were inextricably linked, as we saw in Chapter 4.50
The typical and more direct form of connection between the actor and his audience was, however, not the epistolary genre but the live celebrity evening, at which the audience jotted down—mostly anonymous—notes on pieces of scrap paper and passed them forward to the stage (Plates 20, Plate 21). One such note is strictly congratulatory: “To A. D. Diky, the performer of the role of Comrade Stalin. In the name of soldiers from Gorky allow me to express sincere affection to you for the beloved image of our leader, which you have performed in the movie The Third Blow. We are sending you and your colleagues wishes for good health and further productive work in the sphere of art. With greetings, L. A. Zaikov, private in Army Unit 41491.”51 But most simply wondered, “How was the image of Comrade Stalin created? What materials did you use for the creation of this image?”52 They also wanted to know if Diky had received personal instructions from Stalin, if he had met with Stalin, and if he had “met, then please tell about it.”53
Many spoke of the different Stalin images of the actors Gelovani and Diky with astonishing openness: “We just watched the movie and the deep shock that we felt over first seeing the true portrayal of our leader has yet to subside! We were used to seeing Comrade Stalin performed by M. G. Gelovani, and all acting possibilities were limited to likeness in appearance. Gelovani was good at that, and only that! In your performance the viewer for the first time saw the man and leader in the way in which he lives in the soul and consciousness of every one of us. Words are powerless, especially in this moment. It seems that this is the peak that cannot be topped by anything. But knowing your unlimited creative potential we believe that we will again see you on the screen, where you will further perfect the image of the beloved leader.” The writer signed anonymously as “a viewer” and requested “that comrade chairman,” the master of ceremonies at the celebrity evening, “publicize this letter.”54 Another writer asked “why Comrade Gelovani no longer stars in the role of Stalin?”55 Yet another even inquired: “Tell us why you speak without the characteristic accent, when you play J. V. Stalin” (Plate 21).56 And “because we want to know Comrade Stalin, we want to know him in detail down to his accent.”57 Presumably in reply to Diky’s statement that an actor need not portray the leader mimetically, but rather must represent his essential psychological traits, one person asked, “in that case, why did Shchukin, the best actor in the role of V. I. Lenin, take into consideration the peculiarities of Lenin’s manner of speaking,” probably referring to Lenin’s habit of burring.58 Yet other notes gave concrete advice on how the writers wanted Diky to change his portrayal of Stalin: “I love you very much as an actor and would like you very much to do a lot more as a revolutionary and stormy petrel (burevestnik) in the role of Stalin. Think about this. I think this is a shortcoming.”59 Finally, one person complained about Diky’s insincerity: “By not answering the questions about meeting Comrade Stalin you are being evasive, like Mikhail Illarionovich Kutuzov.”60
It is unclear whether this advice was heeded or whether, in general, the audience’s input had any consequences whatsoever in the artistic production of movies. The integrative effect, however, of creating a bond between artist and audience and the impression among the people that their opinion mattered, that they were truly involved in the creative process, should not be underestimated. In one of the last Stalin movies, The Fall of Berlin (1949), Mikhail Gelovani returned to his habitual role will of the people or the whim as the vozhd’ (Plate 19)—at the of Stalin?
This brings us back to the vexed question of reception. Let us begin by asking about the intended audience of the Stalin cult products, especially the Stalin portraits and Stalin films treated in this chapter. Clearly, the products were meant for the “masses”—for the entire population. There was no differentiation into elite and popular products, into products for women or men, into products for children or adults, into products for Caucasus mountaineers or Ivanovo textile workers, into products for Soviet citizens of Muslim background or those of Russian Orthodox heritage, and if some products—such as oil-painted copies of celebrated, publicly exhibited Stalin oil portraits—were restricted to the privileged few of the Stalinist elite, this did not change their expressive registry, which continued to be tailored to the totality of the population. True, this totality was still restricted to the Soviet populace, as the cult products were not targeted at a global audience. Even during the post-1945 expansion of the Soviet sphere of influence, first in Eastern Europe, then during the Cold War in the developing world, it is questionable if this ever became the case. In this respect Stalin cult production differed fundamentally from capitalist cultural production. The Hollywood film industry, from the 1920s onward, was directed at an international audience.61
The perceived taste of the Soviet totality was an important factor in dictating the ways in which the leader was portrayed. Cult producers deemed legibility to be of prime importance and strove to create uniform and uniformly legible cult products—which they then expected to be read uniformly by the audience. Because audience tastes seemed nebulous after the Revolution, during NEP questionnaires and comment books (as well as other forms of audience research in different sectors of the arts) played a significant role in trying to ascertain the Soviet population’s repertoires of reception. At the same time, during the first postrevolutionary decade, the comment book already served educational purposes—with the page as late as 1933 divided into two columns, one for comments, the other reserved for reactions to these comments. It is possible that the results of the NEP and First Five-Year Plan–era sociological audience research bolstered the general turn from abstractionism to realism. This turn was also a result of the dictator’s and his henchmen’s taste, and other factors.
Coeval with the onset of the full-blown Stalin cult in the early 1930s, the comment book mutated into a largely performative instrument. Its overriding purpose became to demonstrate to the Soviet populace (and perhaps to the West) that Soviet art—including that of the Stalin cult—was for the people and from the people.62 Was it successful in this representational effort? We cannot know, but we can know some of the ways in which the comment book was supposed to, and indeed did, “work” during the existence of the Stalin cult. One function of the comment book was to suggest to the population that it participated in a feedback cycle, in the making of art that was made for it. The population was presented to itself as both the object and the author of art. True, this function played hardly any role with Stalin portraits, where irreverent comments were considered out of place and were indeed physically censored. But through the publication of visitor comments in the newspapers and through the public shaming of some artists via these comments, the act of commenting in a comment book was generally endowed with the meaning of participation or even empowerment. It is likely that some of this aura was transferred to the act of leaving a comment on a Stalin portrait. At the celebrity evening, a similar act was writing comments on scrap paper, which were passed forward to the stage and received a reaction by the celebrity, say, a response spoken in the microphone. Such “participatory practices” proffered by the regime were likely perceived by many not as “pseudo,” but as genuinely effective participation in the arts. Pierre Bourdieu’s insights about opinion polls in democratic societies are pertinent here: “The opinion poll is, at the present time, an instrument of political action; its most important function is perhaps to impose the illusion that a public opinion exists.”63 What amplified the illusionary effect of participation in Stalin’s Russia was that the contemporaneous alternatives of participation were portrayed as utterly unattractive: on the one hand there was total dictatorship in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and other authoritarian states, on the other hand there was conflict-ridden, ineffective participation—“democracy” in quotation marks—in the United States, Britain, and France.
Further functions of comment books were to teach museum-goers to acquire “culture” (kulturnost’), and to let museum-goers help each other acquire “culture”—by creating a shared communicative space, in which one viewer read the comments of another. In this way comment books also created community and served integrative purposes, bringing together people from all walks of life in a single, and from the 1930s onward increasingly sacrally charged, space (signified by the shift toward expensive, colored leather-bound comment books). The final goal of comment books was the total mobilization of the population. As for the actual comments, they surely taught museum-goers to “speak Bolshevik” in the sphere of the visual arts, that is, to acquire the official discourse about the paintings they were seeing.64 For example, Pravda published similar reactions by moviegoers after the premiere of a new film, thus prestructuring its further reception.65 In fact, many of these comments were beamed to the larger population via the mass media, so that they had influence on people beyond the community of writers of entries in exhibition or museum comment books. Through reading in the press that certain comments had, in an extreme case, cut off an artist from the community of artists, writers of comments were given a sense of empowerment. Indeed, and unbeknownst to the writers, in nonpublic communication within the artists’ community comments were mobilized to raise or lower the standing of artists. Artists were very anxious about the comments they received.
After Stalin’s death the comment book resumed some of the genuinely consultative NEP-era functions it had lost during the 1930s. Thus in July 1954 Aleksandr Gerasimov wrote to Petr Pospelov at the Central Committee and complained that the recently closed exhibition of his artwork from trips to India and Egypt had garnered negative comments. Enthusiastic comments made by Indians or Egyptians might have been due to “diplomatic politeness,” as Gerasimov explained with ostentatious modesty—but there were also “evil ad hominem attacks and even terrorist threats, examples of which I am enclosing.” The cultural newspaper Sovetskaia Kul’tura, the successor to Sovetskoe Iskusstvo, had failed to follow Gerasimov’s demand to write critically about the attacks and threats.66 Clearly, a year and a half after Stalin’s death and in the midst of creeping, silent de-Stalinization, Gerasimov’s star was sinking. At the same time a new atmosphere of openness was gradually settling in, as can be seen from some of the negative comments Gerasimov attached. “We still know how to make bombs from tin cans,” one anonymous writer threatened.67 Another directly fought back: “Muscovites are embarrassed by the dirt and settling of personal scores, which these pages are full of. And we think it is a shame that those who write such things hide their last names,” wrote three women (with legible last names).68 A fellow artist likewise bemoaned the cowardice of the writers of “hooligan attacks” and surmised that the few legible last names were in fact pseudonyms.69
Under Khrushchev the comment book became but one of several consultative institutions, the new “complaint book” (kniga zhalob) in stores and government offices constituting another.70 The comment book indeed became considerably more democratic and the artist acquired more agency in deploying it. Thus the sculptor Stepan Erzia set out a comment book in his studio in order to collect comments testifying to the bad conditions there.71 By 1980, when a book on the artist Ilia Glazunov appeared, five-sixths of it were comments—positive and negative—from a 1979 exhibition in Leningrad’s Manezh. They ranged from “Thank you for your pure art. Encountering it, one gets spiritually cleaner and brighter” to “A triumph of tastelessness!” and “Comrade Glazunov! Not only are you a plagiarizer, you lack basic taste and humanity.”72