Socialist realism: from Stalin to Sots. (Joseph Stalin)

Scientific socialism is the most religious of all religions.

Anatoli Lunacharsky, 1907

The proletariat keeps away from those gloomy and tedious personalities who fear laughter, joking, gaiety, and joie de vivre. For the beauty of Socialist art is the beauty of the fight which millions and again millions are waging under the leadership of the genius Stalin. It is a strong and heroic beauty which pictures the stormy course of events, yet does not sweep the artist away, but uplifts his ideas and brings strength to his arm and courage to his heart.

Sergei Dinamov, 1937

The beauty (or is it the horror?) of Socialist Realism was that it offered a complete world--an unambiguous totality that identified regression with progress, rationalized the inchoate yearnings of mass culture, and orchestrated a cacophonous multimedia system with a singleminded coherence beyond the capacity of any isolated individual. A true vanguard, Socialist Realism began to crumble well in advance of the Soviet Union, its imperfect simulation. Albeit a scandalous digression in the narrative of Modern art, it was an organic development in Russian culture--where it even now continues to mutate.

If Russian painters have historically shown greater concern for the world's spiritual transformation than for its naturalistic representation, then Socialist Realism--typically described as "utopia in lifelike forms"--was a deeply rooted flowering. Long before 1937 or even 1917, Russia had resisted the secular art of the West. It was the veneration of the holy icon that distinguished the Russian esthetic, although "esthetic" (Sergei Dinamov might tell you|1~) isn't the precise word: as the collector Ilya Ostroukhov wrote in 1913, "the icon takes us into an absolutely special world, one which has nothing in common with the world of painting . . . a world created by faith and filled with representations of the spirit."|2~ More than the stylized image of a saint, the icon was a "prayer in material form"; yet not simply "a door to heaven," it was the authority sanctioning the social order.|3~

For Russia's early-20th-century avant-garde, the icon was both a symbol of an ideal national past and an inspiration for a transfigured future. Later, under the rule of Stalin, who had spent his adolescence at a Georgian theological seminary, the icon was recast: portraits of Soviet leaders greeting workers, planning industrial victories, inspecting harvests, and otherwise engaging in the construction of socialism were rendered with a pomp so extreme that, as Gyorgy Szucs notes, their perfection "enchants and disarms the viewer."|4~ The saint is axiomatic in Socialist Realism; the figure of the so-called positive hero or heroine is the brave, steadfast, selfless, and allegorical personification of Bolshevik ideals, the embodiment of history's "forward" trajectory. One sort of living positive hero was the Stakhanovite, named for the miner Alexei Stakhanov, who presaged the New Soviet Man on August 31, 1935, when he cut some 102 tons of coal, exceeding the quota by 1,400 percent. The other, of course, was Stalin.

Leader, Teacher, Friend, painted by Grigori Shegal in 1937 (the year of the slogan "Dreams become reality"), shows an apparent meeting of the Communist Central Committee. An avuncular Stalin stands left center at the podium. He has heard the question of the earnest peasant woman sitting beside him, and is affably poised to answer. Around them, people in various national garbs cup their ears, tilt their heads, and pretzel about to catch his imminent words. A diagonal vector leads from the strenuous attention of the woman turning in the foreground, through Stalin, to the outsized stone Lenin hovering behind, harmonizing the space while bestowing the blessing of history. "Obviously, Lenin's presence can be no more than an abstraction," writes Szucs. "The present time is filled by Stalin."|5~

The artist who did most to dramatize this icon on celluloid was Mikhail Chiaureli. As a youth, Chiaureli had painted frescoes in Georgian churches. At the post-World War II height of his career he was a deputy to the Supreme Soviet. Chiaureli's first films showed the influence of the European avant-garde, but he soon corrected himself--or, rather, he chose another vanguard. It was in 1938, in The Great Dawn, that Chiaureli introduced an infallible Stalin as a historical character. The following year he began The Vow, to confirm Stalin as Lenin's heir.

Completed in 1946, its production delayed by war, The Vow is named for the oath of fealty that Stalin took at Lenin's tomb--a declaration suggesting, for Isaac Deutscher, the …