STALIN DIED ONE real and several symbolic deaths. Many people experienced his physical death on 5 March 1953 as a loss of truly existential proportions. With the passing of the leader, the force that held their lives together suddenly was no more. There was a logic to the fact that his demise brought about their own deaths—from heart attacks or as a result of being trampled in the crowds moving forward to see his lifeless body. For those who managed to catch a glimpse of his corpse as it lay in state in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions there would be no closure. His cult and its alchemy of power had made him seem larger than life, so that now embalming his dead remains, dressing them in the white generalissimo’s uniform, and placing them next to Lenin could not suffice. Not even removal from the Mausoleum and burial at the Kremlin wall brought an end to this story. Stalin’s corpse kept rising from the grave, like that of the fictitious dictator Varlam Aravidze in Tengiz Abuladze’s 1986 movie Repentance.1
Khrushchev’s secret speech of February 1956 was followed by a massive iconoclastic campaign that sought to remove every trace of Stalin’s image and name from Soviet public space. The state-sponsored iconoclasm of 1956 and 1961 (the year of the Twenty-Second Party Congress which made de-Stalinization official policy) was preceded by iconoclastic initiatives from below, for there had always been cases of people defiling the leader’s public image, writing anti-Stalin ditties, telling anti-Stalin jokes, and celebrating the day of Stalin’s death.2 These initiatives from below made sense, since Stalin had become a symbol—a concentrated site of meaning—and as a symbol he stood for more than Stalin the person: for Soviet-style communism, for Soviet nationality policy, for Soviet religious policy, and much more. Yet neither these popular responses nor the state’s iconoclastic efforts could bring a sense of closure.
Stalin had to die again and again—most recently in 1989/1991. Indeed, he is still alive, as a spate of post-Soviet Staliniana (books, movies) and public approval ratings of 50-plus percent at the beginning of the third millennium go to show. It seems that the Stalin-era slogan “Stalin will live eternally!” (Stalin— vechno zhiv!) has as much relevance today as it did in the past. Why this is the case will occupy scholars for a long time. Perhaps, as some have suggested, it has to do with the absence of regime change at the time of his death, a circumstance that contrasts markedly with “initial scenes of death and their sequencing with respect to regime end” in such cases as those of Italy’s Mussolini (“hanging and humiliation”), Germany’s Hitler (“suicide and silence”), Japan’s Hirohito (“desacralization and confident state funeral”), and Romania’s Nicolae and Elena Ceau§escu (“execution and ‘secretive’ public burial”).3
The sources of the Stalin cult was the first issue this book has tried to resolve. Rather than viewing the cult as the outgrowth of eternal Russian Byzantine authoritarianism, a simple product of Stalin’s psychopathology, an inescapable feature of totalitarian regimes, or a concession to the premodern mentality of the peasants who entered the Party during the Great Break, I have viewed the Stalin cult as an example of the modern personality cult more generally. Modern personality cults in the sphere of politics share five features that set them apart from their predecessors. They are secular, that is, they reject a metaphysical source of legitimacy (as with divine right) and instead are anchored in popular sovereignty; their cult objects are all male; they address the entire population, not merely an elite; they use mass media and uniform, mass-produced cult products; and they are limited to closed societies, in which the mass media are sufficiently controlled to prohibit the introduction of rival cults. The move to modern personality cults was of course nonlinear, yet the trend can easily be traced. Napoleon III was the first politician with a modern personality cult. Later stages included World War I, during which the mass base of personality cults expanded further and the cults themselves became entangled. If, for example, during Louis XIV’s reign monarchy was the undisputed form of political rule, the post-1918 leaders embodied radically different worldviews that vied for global hegemony—Mussolini stood for fascism, Stalin for communism, Churchill and Roosevelt for capitalism. The cult representations of these leaders also became entangled. Stalin’s calm oratorical style and body language, for example, were juxtaposed to Hitler’s wild gesturing and rhetoric. Despite many discomforting commonalities, a comparison of the symbolic politics of Stalin, Hitler, and the like with Roosevelt (or Charles de Gaulle or Ronald Reagan) shows that the differences are more important.
We have noted there were at least three more influences on the complex path to the Stalin cult. There was the “tsarist carryover,” the tradition of the cult of the tsar which weighed heavily upon the Bolsheviks, no matter how much they tried to distance themselves from it after the October Revolution. There was the tradition of personality cults on the Left, no matter how impossible to reconcile with the collectivist ideology of Marxism. And there was the tradition of the radical intelligentsia circles, whose members glorified circle leaders with cult products. All the leading Bolsheviks were socialized in these circles, and once they usurped power in 1917 the formative experience of the circle began to shine through, no matter the disdain they heaped on personality cults.
Just how the symbolic dimension of Stalin became all-important—how his cult was made—and how the resulting cult products circulated and how people made sense of them, has been the main subject of this book. The newspaper Pravda was an important instrument that Stalin portraitists used to navigate through the rugged terrain of Party politics. It was the country’s premier news medium, and also a microcosm of the Stalin cult. It is an ideal case with which to study the way the cult’s visual registry developed over time. After the cult’s take-off in mid-1933, Pravda was preoccupied with establishing Stalin as number one in the collective imaginary—distinguishing him visually from his comrades-in-arms. After this task had been achieved (by 1939, Stalin’s sixtieth birthday), Stalin’s appearances were restricted to Soviet holidays. The war brought a hiatus in depictions, and then a major shift in the way Stalin was portrayed: as of late 1943 he was shown as a military commander and elder statesman. Toward the end of his life, Stalin began to appear in “absent” representations—for example, the faces of listeners gathered around a radio receiver. These absent representations were a kind of preparation for his death, a foreshadowing of his absence. When he finally did die, his piecemeal disappearance from Pravda propelled and at the same time indexed the slow (and initially silent) process of de-Stalinization.
If Pravda is a window on the pictorial evolution of the cult, Aleksandr Cerasi -mov’s 1938 painting, Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, arguably the most famous Stalin portrait, lends itself to a hermeneutics of a (indeed, the) socialist realist leader portrait. A mirror of Soviet power, this painting is organized around Stalin in concentric circles. These concentric circles became the dominant form of spatial organization in portraits of Stalin. Depictions of Lenin differed markedly: they were organized in linear fashion, with Lenin’s body or arm directed toward a focal point in the picture. They expressed the dynamic forward movement of the Revolution, whereas depictions of Stalin were meant to convey a sense of arrival after the building of socialism during the First Five-Year Plan.
In the fabrication of his visual image Stalin’s role was crucial. He masterminded his own cult, often acting as the ultimate filter of its products before they were released for social circulation. Because Marxism was fundamentally incompatible with the very idea of a personality cult, his role was kept secret. Stalin bridged the gap between what was (his cult) and what ought to have been (collective leadership) by resuscitating a culturally virulent pattern that I have called “immodest modesty”—feigning public disapproval and grudging tolerance of the cult out of democratic conviction while all along clandestinely controlling it. Other Party bosses were instrumental in managing the cult in the different spheres of artistic production. Kliment Voroshilov was responsible for the case most prominently discussed in this book—oil portraiture. He became a patron of socialist painters; in fact, an entire system of informal patronage developed in which high-ranking Party figures oversaw one or other sector of the arts. For example, Yenukidze and, after his death, Molotov were patrons of the theater, Kaganovich of architecture. Within the Soviets’ highly planned system of art production, it may at first seem paradoxical that personal patronage became so influential. When one considers that the ultimate aim was to manufacture a patricentric cult of the leader—a supremely personalized form of power—this seems less perplexing. Specifically, Voroshilov visited painters in their studios and corrected their portraits of Stalin, but also engendered a sizable cult of his own by sitting for his own portrait. Voroshilov’s cult standing probably saved his life during the Great Terror and after he bungled the Winter War in 1940. The effort to disentangle him from Stalin in public symbolic politics would have been mind-boggling indeed. Symbolic power in Stalinist Russia became a question of life and death.
Every Stalin portrait has a biography enmeshed in a complex set of events. Its life began with a competition, followed by an exhibit. Announced in the cultural newspaper, or in letters to selected artists, the competition set the parameters of the portrait: its subject matter, its painterly technique and size, and the technical strictures that attendant mechanical reproduction imposed on the original. The organizing institution of the Stalin portrait competition then provided (original or retouched) photographic or cinematic templates. It was an open secret that many painters then engaged a model to sit as Stalin—after all, Stalin himself was not available! As the artists began painting, colleagues or art patrons from the upper ranks of the Party who made the rounds of the studios gave informal critiques. Official, but not public criticism came from the competition’s jury (or the khudsovet if the portrait emerged outside the context of a competition). Just before an exhibition’s opening a Party boss walked through the rooms and removed one or two portraits, made changes in the order of hanging, or demanded that, at the eleventh hour, specific corrections be made to a given painting—retouch a cigarette here, correct Stalin’s nose there. Once opened, the exhibition garnered reviews and, after a time lag, became an object of art critical discussion in published form. Painters took much of this criticism to heart as they began their next Stalin portrait.
The next stage in the portrait’s biography was reproduction. The most individualized and elite form of reproduction was copying in oil.4 Sometimes even star painters produced copies of their successful pictures, but most copying artists were painters further down the hierarchy. Mechanical reproduction involved a multitude of media—from postcards to posters. In the process, most portraits were retouched. A painting passed through many filters of inspection before it was released into mass circulation. These ranged from the official censor at a press to Stalin’s secretariat—and, most likely, Stalin personally. Sometimes these filters, especially Stalin himself, went into action only after the portrait had been released into circulation. As a result, it sometimes occurred that all unsold copies of, for example, a book with Stalin portraits as illustrations were taken off bookstore shelves. While the Stalin cult had no all-controlling agency—a “Stalin cult commission” or a “ministry of propaganda”—it did refer to Stalin’s secretariat and Stalin himself as an Archimedean point.
It is difficult to say much about the ways in which the cult products were received, for this is an issue that raises numerous methodological problems. This book, however, has offered a way out of the conceptual cul-de-sac of reception by retracing the mechanisms whereby reactions to cult products were gathered, and by identifying the various kinds of logic that governed these mechanisms. After the Civil War, theater and other sectors of the arts began “measuring” cultural consumption. These efforts were expanded to include the visual arts and they accelerated during the Great Break, when some suggested that all state art acquisition should be based on the study of viewer opinions. After the Great Break and in concert with the expansion of the Stalin cult, these utopian, scientific approaches gave way to more symbolic approaches. The visitor comment book placed at art exhibits became a kind of performance. Its primary function was to demonstrate, both to those who entered comments and to the outside world, that Soviet art was intended for the masses—that it was unlike Western, “bourgeois” art, which was meant only for a few. For some who entered comments (and for some who passed comments on scrap paper to Stalin actor Aleksei Diky on stage at a celebrity evening), the act of performing these participatory rituals provided a real sense of participation.
Just how many resources the Stalin cult mobilized and how it captivated the bodies, feelings, and dreams of people in the Soviet Union and sympathizers abroad remains puzzling to this day. The poet Joseph Brodsky was named after Stalin and slept under a photograph of Stalin in his childhood Leningrad communal apartment room of sixteen square meters, which he shared with his parents. The founder of the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Yuri Lotman, supplemented his student stipend by painting Stalin portraits for factory wall newspapers. The peasant Andrei Arzhilovsky recorded a dream in his diary less than a year before he was executed during the Great Terror in August 1937:
Someone told me I could see Stalin. A historic figure, it would be interesting to get to see him. And so . . . A small room, simple and ordinary. Stalin is drunk as a skunk, as they say. There are only men in the room, and just two of us peasants, me and one other guy with a black beard. Without a word, Vissarionovich knocks the guy with the black beard down, covers him with a sheet and rapes him brutally. “I’m next,” I think in despair, recalling the way he used to carry on in Tbilisi, and I’m thinking, how can I escape, but after his session Stalin seems to come to his senses somewhat, and he starts up a conversation, “Why were you so eager to see me personally?” “Well, why wouldn’t I be? Portraits are just portraits, but a living man, and a great one at that, is something else altogether,” said I. Overall, things worked out fairly well for me and they even gave me some dinner . . .
After Stalin’s death the mother of the future dissident émigré Aleksandr Zinoviev cut a portrait of Stalin from the newspaper and placed it in the Bible, explaining to her son that “Stalin took on his soul everybody else’s sins, that everyone is going to criticize him now and that someone has to pray for him.” And Molotov, asked in the mid-1970s if he ever dreamed of Stalin, confessed, “Sometimes. In extraordinary situations. . . . In a destroyed city . . . I can’t find a way out, and I meet him. In a word, very strange, confusing dreams.”5
Why do many authors throw up their hands and describe the effects of the Stalin cult as “hysteria,” “mass psychosis,” and other terms indicating that they understand that they do not understand? Why did Anna Akhmatova speak of the tears people shed over Stalin as an “anesthetic” that “is wearing off?”6 How did the human person, the creature whom Ernst Cassirer once termed a zoon symbolikon, a “symbolic being,” frame the person at the top of that pyramid of power?7
A study in the alchemy of power, this book has offered an analysis of how the Stalin cult was made. It has reconstructed the processes through which the various elements of the cult were chosen, combined, and interacted. Key to the alchemical process is the assumption that the end result is a sum that amounts to more than its parts. In other words, a surplus. Stalin’s elevation, his larger-than-life presence, is precisely this kind of surplus. And yet this surplus is of a different order. Ultimately we end up with a surplus of the unknowable. It, too, belongs inextricably to the alchemy of power; it is a surplus that remains beyond books.