The Stalin Cult Read online

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Plamper, Jan, 1970–

  The Stalin cult : a study in the alchemy of power / Jan Plamper.

  p. cm. — (The Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-300-16952-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—Influence. 2. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—Public opinion. 3. Stalin, Joseph, 1879–1953—In mass media. 4. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936. 5. Soviet Union— Politics and government—1936–1953. 6. Cults—Political aspects—Soviet Union—History. 7. Political culture—Soviet Union—History. 8. Public opinion—Soviet Union—History. 9. Mass media—Political aspects—Soviet Union—History. I. Title.

  DK268.s8p535 2011

  947.084'2—dc23

  2011019576

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  THE

  STALIN

  CULT

  A STUDY IN THE

  ALCHEMY OF POWER

  JAN PLAMPER

  Hoover Institution

  Stanford University

  Stanford, California

  Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS

  New Haven and London

  THE YALE-HOOVER SERIES ON STALIN, STALINISM, AND THE COLD WAR

  In memory of

  Veniamin Iofe (1938–2002)

  and

  Reginald Zelnik (1936–2004)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Paths to the Stalin Cult

  Part One. Cult Products

  2. Stalin’s Image in Time

  3. Stalin’s Image in Space

  Part Two. Cult Production

  4. The Political Is Personal, Art Is Political: Stalin, the Cult, and Patronage

  5. How to Paint the Leader? Institutions of Cult Production

  6. The Audience as Cult Producer: Exhibition Comment Books and Notes at Celebrity Evenings

  Conclusion

  Appendix. The Statistics of Visual Representations of Stalin in Pravda

  Abbreviations and Glossary of Frequently Used Terms

  Notes

  Index

  Plates follow page 74

  Acknowledgments

  This book has been in the making for years, and the list of debts to acknowledge has become quite long. It all started at Brandeis, where my undergraduate teacher, Gregory Freeze, assigned Michael Cherniavsky’s Tsar and People. Cherniavsky’s classic opened my eyes to the symbolic dimensions of power, Greg Freeze to the wonders of Russian history. Without Greg’s example and mentorship I would have never become a historian of Russia. In 1992 I read Ian Kershaw’s pioneering The “Hitler Myth” and began asking myself if there was something comparable on the Stalin cult. There wasn’t. A year later, during eighteen months of social work (in lieu of my German military service) for the anti-Stalinist grassroots organization Memorial, St. Petersburg, I began looking for documentation on the Stalin cult and made first forays into the Party archives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, which had just opened. Ever since this first extended stay in Petersburg, the Scientific and Information Center Memorial has been my logistical, intellectual, and emotional base in Russia. I am very grateful to its current director, Irina Flige. The first dedication of this book is to the memory of its founding director, the late Veniamin Iofe, from whom I learned so much hands-on history.

  In 1995 I entered graduate school at Berkeley and embarked on a dissertation on the Stalin cult under the guidance of a committee of unique scholars and human beings. Yuri Slezkine, my main adviser, was an astute and erudite reader, who offered excellent suggestions. He saved me from my own megalomania by convincing me early on to focus on selected aspects, saying that a histoire totale of the Stalin cult was about as realistic as a single-volume history of the cult of Jesus Christ. The late Reginald Zelnik was my second reader. Reggie’s all-round qualities as teacher, scholar, mentor, homo politicus, and person were legendary long before I arrived at Berkeley; I feel extremely privileged to have experienced them all first-hand and the book’s second dedication is to his memory. Victoria Bonnell, one of my outside readers, gave crucial support at an early stage, and her book on Soviet political iconography has been an inspiration. A very special thanks must go to Irina Paperno, my other outside reader, who went beyond any call of duty in reading drafts and offering thorough, sharply intelligent criticism. When I got stuck in the process of revising the dissertation for publication, she gently prodded the book to completion. It is hard to put in words how much I value her intellectual and personal support over the years.

  Thanks also to my other teachers at Berkeley, especially Carla Hesse, whose way of practicing history has left a deep imprint. And to my cohort of Berkeley graduate students, of whom I would like to single out Peter Blitstein, Chad Bryant, Victoria Frede, Brian Kassof, Ben Lazier, Zhenya Polissky, David Shneer, and Ilya Vinkovetsky. It was only after we all stopped being in one place that I realized how important informal communication with this group of people on a daily basis had been to me.

  When I filed the Berkeley Ph.D. thesis in 2001 I was sure I would more likely end up teaching in Kamchatka than where I had gone to Gymnasium, Tübingen. But that was where I ended up. And for the better, it turned out. Dietrich Beyrau, the incomparable director of the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte and Landeskunde at the time, gave me all the freedom I needed. He was also very accommodating to my special challenge of trying to bridge two academic cultures, working on a Habilitation and teaching in Germany while at the same time publishing a first book in America. My wonderful colleagues and friends Klaus Gestwa, Katharina Kucher, and Ingrid Schierle deserve huge thanks. They had to witness at close distance the ups and downs of both the project and of a repatriate struggling to adapt to the German university system. I would further like to thank various Tübingen colleagues, some of them visiting professors or scholars, who helped in numerous ways: Michael Hochgeschwender, Oleg Khlevniuk, Yulia Khmelevskaia, Boris Kolonitskii, Anna Krylova, Alek-sandr Kupriianov, Svetlana Malysheva, Christoph Mick, Oksana Nagornaia, Igor Narsky, Olga Nikonova, Natali Stegmann, Yelena Vishlenkova, and Elena Zubkova. Our Slavic librarian Zuzana Křížovâ was exceptionally forthcoming. What is more, at Tübingen I was blessed with stunningly capable research assistants, several of whom have gone on to careers as professional historians: Marc Elie, Luminiţa Gătejel, Mark Keck-Szajbel, Regine Kramer, Ulrike Lunow, Jens-Peter Müller, and Katharina Uhl. Jannis Panagiotidis and Alexa von Winning deserve to be singled out: they helped in the frantic final stages of manuscript preparation and proofreading.

  Several people read portions of the manuscript
and made very useful suggestions for improvement: Dmitrij Belkin, Michael David-Fox, Jacqueline Friedlander, Igal Halfin, Oleg Khlevniuk, Katharina Kucher, Sonja Luehrmann, Susan Reid, Ilya Vinkovetsky, and Barbara Walker. Four people took it upon themselves to read an overlong version of the manuscript in its entirety and forced me to make cuts, to revise its structure, and to reframe some of its arguments: Olaf Bernau, Benno Ennker, Jochen Hellbeck, and Yuri Slezkine. I am enormously grateful to them.

  A few extra words about Jochen Hellbeck are in order. Jochen took shefstvo over me at an early point and has been an exceptionally warm and good friend ever since. The dialogue with him has been essential to me, and I admire the boldness and sheer beauty of his own scholarship. Thank you, Jochen!

  Jörg Baberowski, Oksana Bulgakowa, Laura Engelstein, Manfred Hildermeier, Peter Holquist, Catriona Kelly, Stephen Kotkin, and Karl Schlögel supported my work in various ways at one point or another. I received specific help from Ljudmilla Belkin and Sergiusz Michalski with art history; from Malte Rolf with Soviet holidays; from Julia Safronova with tsarist uniforms and decorations; from Irina Kremenetskaia with the graphs; from Nell Lundy with style editing; and from Irina Lukka of the Slavonic Division at Helsinki University Library with queries at the eleventh hour. I am grateful to them all.

  The archivists at Moscow’s Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (RGALI), Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), and Otdel Rukopisei Gosudarstvennaia Tret’iakovskaia Gallereia (OR GTG) as well as at St. Petersburg’s Muzei-kvartira I. I. Brodskogo (MBr) have been of considerable assistance. Galina Gorskaia and Larissa Rogovaia of RGASPI as well as the Tretyakov’s Lidia Iovleva, Tamara Kaftanova, and Irina Pronina must to be singled out for personal thanks.

  I also wish to gratefully acknowledge the funding of research and writing by Berkeley’s History Department, Institute for International Studies (through Bendix, Sharlin, and Simpson grants), and Center for German and European Studies; by the Mellon Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Center for Comparative History of Europe at the Free University, Berlin.

  My art historian friends kept telling me that obtaining illustrations and the attendant copyrights was tantamount to writing another book. I didn’t believe them. They were right. Thanks to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Universitätsbund Tübingen e.V. for offsetting the cost of reproductions. Thyssen also generously funded a two-month stay at Clare College, University of Cambridge, in 2004, where my friends Hubertus Jahn and Susan Morrissey took marvelous care of me.

  I am very happy the book has found its home in the Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War. Amir Weiner was pivotal in making this happen, and his sponsorship of my work first across San Francisco Bay, and later across the Atlantic, has been heartwarming. Thanks to series co-editor Paul Gregory for his support and comments, to co-editor Jonathan Brent, and to Vadim Staklo, to Margaret Otzel for expertly shepherding the book through the acquisition and production process, and to Gavin Lewis for superb copy-editing. The final revisions were done at Ute Frevert’s Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, where I received first-class help from my research assistants Stefanie Gert and Eva Sperschneider. Karola Rockmann did a heroic job in preparing the index.

  A few sentences of Chapters 2 and Chapter 4 appeared in “Georgian Koba or Soviet ‘Father of Peoples’? The Stalin Cult and Ethnicity,” in The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, ed. Balázs Apor et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 123–140. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in “The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult: Circles Around Stalin,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 19–50. I thank the publishers for permission to use this material here.

  My mother Gudrun, my father Harald and his wife Evelyn, my brother Paul, my in-laws Victor and Yelena Mushkatin, and especially my mother-in-law Oxana Strizhevskaya jumped in at critical moments with childcare, money, and much more, for which I am very grateful. Finally, I should note that the writing of this book involved precious hours of pleasure, but also occasional suffering. The former I enjoyed in solitude, the latter I shared generously with my own family: Irina Kremenetskaia and our daughters Olga and Lisa. They deserve a public apology and my most heartfelt thanks.

  Introduction

  Sergei Kavtaradze, an Old Bolshevik who had known Stalin long before the Revolution, was fond of telling the following story. On his 1940 release after almost a decade in the Gulag, Beria and Stalin, to whom he owed his release, accompanied him to his Moscow apartment. As it turned out, parts of the Kavtaradze family’s apartment were now occupied by a woman (also an Old Bolshevik) who had lost her own residence. The bell rang and the new tenant opened the door. When she saw Stalin, the woman staggered backward and fainted. Beria managed to catch her before she hit the floor. He shook her and asked what had scared her and why she was backing off from the “father of peoples.” The woman replied: “I thought that a portrait of Stalin was moving towards me.”1

  Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s adopted son, was also fond of telling a story. He recalled a fight between Stalin and his biological son Vasily. After he found out that Vasily had used his famous last name to escape punishment for one of his drunken debauches, Stalin screamed at him. “‘But I’m a Stalin too,’ retorted Vasily. ‘No, you’re not,’ said Stalin. ‘You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!’”2

  Kavtaradze’s and Sergeev’s stories are emblematic of the immense sway of the Stalin cult: in the collective imagination Stalin had become indistinguishable from his portrait. Stalin’s portraits had saturated Soviet space, and through portraits Soviet citizens formed an image of their omnipresent leader. These portraits—and the many other manifestations of the cult—stirred the bodies and minds, the thoughts and feelings, of people from all walks of life in the Soviet Union (and leftists abroad) in ways difficult to fathom from today’s perspective. Fearing the spiritual presence of the leader, a group of Moscow students, including six World War II veterans, turned the Stalin poster on their dormitory wall around in order to feel free enough to talk openly about their experiences at the front; after the Mexican painter and former Trotskyist Frida Kahlo committed suicide in 1954, a Stalin portrait was found on her easel; the writer Boris Pasternak was “ecstatically” carried away when he saw his leader in vivo at a Komsomol Congress in 1936; in his youth, the future dissident Vladimir Bukovsky was haunted by dreams in which he failed to save Stalin from drinking a poisoned glass of water; ordinary people shed tears when Stalin died, and were trampled to death at his funeral; and others, among them victims of Stalin’s terror, reacted so intensely to Stalin’s death that they suffered heart attacks.3

  A woman fainting when she saw Stalin, a writer working himself into a state of ecstasy when in physical proximity to Stalin, a future dissident suffering from nightmares about Stalin getting poisoned, victims of Stalin’s violent policies dying of heart attacks when hearing about Stalin’s death—these testimonies seem the stuff of mystery, magic, and transcendence. This book takes the transcendental effects of the Stalin cult very seriously, but it also claims that a story is hidden behind Stalin’s portrait, the story of how the cult was actually made. The Stalin portraits, posters, drawings, statues, busts, films, plays, poems, and songs, which I collectively call “cult products,” did not arise ex nihilo. They were created by specific people and institutions through concrete practices: as Clifford Geertz put it, “majesty is made, not born.”4 These practices—or the “cult production”—can be reconstructed. This book, then, is a history of the practices of Stalin portraiture. It ventures into the studios and peers over the shoulders of the painters, their Bolshevik patrons, the
cultural functionaries, the censors, and many others, who produced the Stalin cult.5

  What was the Stalin cult? The cult began on 21 December 1929, when on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday Stalin was glorified on a broad scale in various media—first and foremost in central newspapers like Pravda. This powerful beginning was followed by three and a half years of absence from the public stage, which is usually explained as Stalin’s attempt to avoid any association with the catastrophic results of forced collectivization or as a result of his as yet unconsolidated power position in the Party.6 In mid-1933 the cult took off in earnest and by the end of the 1930s his depiction in the various media had coalesced into a coherent system of signs—a canon—that was maintained from then on, even though it still evolved. The celebration of Stalin’s sixtieth birthday in 1939 was one of the cult’s high points, whereas the Second World War marked a hiatus. The cult picked up speed in early 1945, and Stalin’s seventieth birthday in 1949 (also celebrated in the Eastern European “people’s democracies”) served as another apex. After Stalin’s death on 5 March 1953 the cult was quietly yet noticeably phased out in the Soviet Union (but not in the satellite states). The real end of the state-sponsored Stalin cult came with Nikita Khrushchev’s de- Stalinization initiative in 1956, when the entire Soviet bloc embarked on an unprecedented iconoclastic campaign.

  This book focuses on 1929–1953, the active period of the cult during Stalin’s lifetime.7 It also focuses on a specific place: Soviet Russia.8 And while this study takes into account film, folklore, and poetry, its center of gravity is Stalin portraiture, specifically oil painting. All media were engaged in a continual competition for the status of the master medium. In the master medium the key images of Stalin—for example, as statesman, military commander, or coryphaeus of science—were first formulated and later canonized. Other media copied the master medium. Oil painting and photography were at the top of the hierarchy until they ceded this position to film in the second half of the 1930s. Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October, released in 1937, was the first movie starring an actor as Stalin, and from then on cinema became the master medium.