Stalin, Myth and Monster

The subject of our May show "Stalin!" is not the man, but the myth he created for himself, using the superb propaganda tool of photography. The word most closely associated with the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union is ‘terror’, yet only one of these images is a frank portrait of the realities of this era of purges, assassination and mass murder by the State. This photograph of a committee meeting of workers criticizing their fellows is frightening. The faces are hungry, desperate and truly evil.

The show reveals Stalinist reality in the smudged and blacked out faces of those people who were once blessed by proximity to the Great Leader, but who have fallen out of favor, and been, quite literally erased from history. Soviet citizens were forced to mutilate their own copies of books and photographs. A collage photographic creation in the show, by the artist Max Penson, celebrates Stalin’s role in the women’s movement in Uzbekistan. It is marred by the defaced head of a formerly prominent communist woman, who has become a non-person. The photograph is from the collection of the Penson family; the artist defaced his own work.

Throughout the 20^th century Modernism and the Modern Art movement has been counterbalanced by Fascist Art and Socialist Realism, an artist style in which monumentality is its most obvious character. In Socialist Realist art, the leader embodies the state. It is an hierarchal style, found in Hitler’s Germany and modern day North Korea as well as in Stalinist Russia, a kind of history painting in which the future, as well as the past, is rendered in idealized colors. The monstrous scale of Soviet art under Stalin is best shown in a 1934 photograph of a highlighted plan for a 1250 foot tower with a 300 ft high sculpture of Lenin, a monument designed by the artist Boris Yofan, but never constructed. The historic Church of Christ the Savior in Central Moscow was destroyed to make way for it.

Only a few photographs of Stalin exist from his youth and the early revolutionary period. A past was created for Stalin through works of art. He was often cut and pasted into photographs to create an artificial history which placed him at the forefront of events.

The scale of Socialist Realism is superhuman, but with the exception of Stalin and Lenin, we see stock characters rather than individuals rendered in sculpture, painting, and even photography. Idealized figures represent Courage, Fatherhood, or Industry. Only Stalin could – and did - play all these roles for his people.

A series of photographs in the show deal with the assassination and subsequent canonization of Sergei Kirov. Kirov was Leningrad party boss, and an ally pf Stalin, but also a possible competitor with him for rank and power in the Party. He was assassinated on December 1, 1934 by a student, but mystery still shrouds the real reason for his death. Certainly, Stalin feared Kirov's popularity and considered him a threat to his leadership. Kirov's speech at the Seventeenth Party Congress had called for reconciliation after the terrible upheavals associated with collectivization. The speech was received with great acclaim from the party delegates, but no reconciliation followed his death. In a purge labeled "the assassins of Kirov," thousands of Trotskyites, Zinovievists, and even Stalinists were rounded up and sent to the camps. Kirov the martyr received posthumous adulation and acclaim, yet he seems to grow younger and more submissive to Stalin in the contrived images which appeared after his death. In a number of our photographs, the faces of mourners have been excised or drawn over on the original prints.

Socialist Realism and the Stalinist style did not end with the death of Stalin. It is still found in public art within modern Russia and in her former satellite states. We have included a photograph by the artist Anatoly Rahimbaev, a photographer from Uzbekistan. Rahimbaev’s image is of a monumental sculpture of the great emperor Timur, the West’s Tamerlane, that rises today from the ruined walls of a 15^th century building in Timur’s hometown of Shahrisabs. The State of Uzbekistan has replaced one historic Great Leader with another, better fitted to exemplify the historic glory of the newly independent State

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