Stalin: A Biography

by Robert Service

  50. EMPEROR WORSHIP

  Stalin sometimes claimed to be disconcerted by the extravagance of his cultic rituals. He asked for limits to the praise and muttered to his propagandists that they were overstepping them. In 1945, discussing plans for the first volume of his collected works, he proposed to restrict the print run to thirty thousand copies because of the paper shortage. Other participants in the meeting got him to agree to three hundred thousand copies, arguing that the public demand would be enormous.1 Stalin also displayed caution a year later at a similar meeting to discuss the draft second edition of his biography. The flatteries irritated him:2

  What should the reader do after reading this book? Get down on his knees and pray to me!… We don’t need idolaters… We already have the teaching of Marx and Lenin. No additional teachings are required… Nowhere is it said clearly that I am Lenin’s pupil… In fact I considered and still consider myself the pupil of Lenin.

  The future of the Revolution, Marxism and the USSR had to be considered. ‘And what,’ Stalin exclaimed, ‘if I’m no longer around?… You won’t be inculcating love for the party [through this draft]… What’s going to happen when I’m not here?’3

  Yet Stalin did not seriously impede the fanfares: either he was playing psychological games or he could no longer be bothered to keep tight control in the area of propaganda. In 1946 his collected works appeared in a first print run of half a million copies. A million copies of the revised biography had been published by the end of 1947 alone — and ten million copies of the Short Course in party history were put into press at the same time.4 The worship of Stalin had become a state industry (and Stalin himself had dropped his half-hearted attempt to restrict the print run).

  There was harsh iconographic control. An episode from 1946 illustrates the punitive care taken with the image of the Leader. The artist V. Livanova had painted a poster of ‘9 May — A Worldwide Victory Holiday’ for the Moscow publishing house Art. In line with normal procedure, the editors checked it for visual merit and political reliability before submitting it to the censor I. N. Kleiner in Glavlit, the central censorship body. But things then went wrong. The editors did not wait for a decision but sent the poster to be printed in the Soviet-occupied zone of Germany. By the time copies of the poster were shipped back for distribution in the USSR, two errors had been discovered. One was that there were only fifteen banners representing the Soviet republics of the USSR instead of sixteen. The other related to Stalin: his marshal’s star had six points instead of five. Investigation proved that the errors had been made by Livanova herself and not by miscreants in Germany (as had been suspected). Glavlit itself got into trouble for having failed to exercise due care. Kleiner was sacked and the terrified leadership of Glavlit, trying to prove its loyalty, asked to be subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs.5

  Pernicious significance was attributed to these slight errors. Enemies of the Soviet order might be calling for the USSR’s dismemberment by reducing the number of official banners. Perhaps there was an implied call here for Ukraine to break away from the USSR into independence. As for the depiction of Stalin’s marshal’s star with six points, this might suggest a plot to represent him as a friend of international Jewry since the Star of David also had six points.6

  The cult was the centre of the belief system of Marxism–Leninism–Stalinism. While it had no creed, its devotees had to stick rigorously to formulaic terminology and imagery. Texts such as Marx’s Capital and Lenin’s The State and Revolution functioned like the Gospels, and the Short Course and Stalin’s official biography were equivalent to the Acts of the Apostles. The punctiliousness about words and pictures was reminiscent of Christian ecclesiastical traditions in the former Russian Empire — and Stalin, who had attended the Tiflis Spiritual Seminary till his twenty-first year, may well have been influenced, consciously or not, by his memory of the Orthodox Church’s unbending adherence to fixed rites, liturgy and images.7 Icon-painters represented sacred figures according to tightly prescribed rules. Perhaps this was the source for the extraordinarily detailed control over publicly available material on Stalin. If this indeed was the case, it must have reinforced the predisposition of the Marxist–Leninist doctrinaires to secure fidelity to the texts of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin to root out any trace of heterodoxy. Medieval Christianity and vulgar Marxism were a potent mixture.

  The established impersonality of Stalin’s imagery was trundled down a narrow-gauge track. No Politburo member was allowed a public profile that might deflect people from adoring the Leader. Veteran comrades-in-arms such as Molotov, Kaganovich and Mikoyan came to notice only when they discharged particular duties: none of them was even mentioned in Nikolai Voznesenski’s The War Economy of the USSR; and there was no reference to them in the chapters added to the post-war editions of the Short Course and Stalin’s official biography.8

  The Leader kept an aquiline watch over the products of Soviet propaganda. Even the Stalin Prize-winning novel The Young Guard by Alexander Fadeev incurred his displeasure. This was a best-seller depicting adolescent partisans working behind German lines in the war. Their bravery, determination and patriotism sounded a deep chord with readers and the book was especially popular with youth in the USSR. But Stalin had second thoughts. Unusually he had not read the text before the award of the prize. Ilya Ehrenburg recalled the Leader’s fury when he saw the rushes of the film made of the novel: ‘Here were youngsters left to their fate in a town seized by the Nazis. Where was the Komsomol organisation? Where was the party leadership?’9 The point for Stalin was that everyone should understand that victory in the war had been secured by the institutional framework and direction supplied by the hierarchies of state. Neither individuals nor even large social groups could be portrayed as operating autonomously. A codified version of historical reality was imposed. Anathema was pronounced upon any work showing Soviet citizens fighting effectively against the Wehrmacht without direct supervision by an administrative hierarchy stretching downwards from the Kremlin.

  The war itself became something of an embarrassment to him. The Victory Day anniversary celebration was suspended after 1946 and not restored until after his death. Memoirs by generals, soldiers and civilians were banned. Stalin wanted to control, manipulate and canalise popular memory. The wartime reality could unsettle his plans for the post-war regime. Thoughts about how people coped and fought without reference to Stalin’s authority were dangerous.

  The second edition of his official biography, presented to deafening fanfares in the media in 1947, added material on the Great Patriotic War and Stalin’s part in it. Amendments were also made to the existing chapters. Although the authors generally inflated the claims made about him, there was one exception. Whereas the first edition asserted that he had been arrested eight times and exiled seven times before 1914, the second reduced the numbers to seven and six respectively. But otherwise the new edition was an even more extravagant eulogy than before. The section on the Second World War hardly mentioned anyone but Stalin, and his one brief trip to the vicinity of the front was treated as crucial to the Red Army’s success. The narrative was little more than a list of battles. Government and army were mentioned. But drama, in so far as it existed in the chapters, was focused on decisions and inspiration provided by Stalin. The book entirely lacked an account of the difficulties of deliberation at Stavka or the contribution of other leaders and the people as a whole. The details of Stalin’s career in the war were overlooked; he was treated as the embodiment of the state and society in victory. Even more than before the Second World War he was an icon without personality. Stalin, the party, the Red Army and the USSR were represented as indistinguishable from each other.10

  Stalin came ever closer to evicting Lenin from his primary status in the Soviet Union. There were indications of this in his preface to the first volume of his collected works. He expressed surprise that Lenin, who had developed the components of his telescoped Marxist theory of socialist revolution in
1905, had not fully divulged the fact until 1917.11 Previously it had been incumbent on official propagandists to insist that Leninist policy had evolved in an unbroken line of positive change. Stalin by 1946 was suggesting that Lenin had missed a trick or two.

  His rise in prestige at Lenin’s expense also took other forms. Officially commissioned paintings made the visual suggestion that the greater of the two communist leaders had been Stalin. This was done quite subtly. Typically Stalin stands confidently, pipe in hand, as he explains a matter of political strategy to an avidly listening Lenin: it is as if the roles of teacher and pupil have been reversed. Apart from the improbability of Lenin’s subordination, there was his known aversion to anyone smoking in his presence. Another unrealistic touch was the increasing tendency of artists to portray Stalin as taller than Lenin. In fact they were about the same size. It goes without saying that Stalin’s physical blemishes were carefully overlooked. Each year after the Second World War he appeared more and more like a tough, mature athlete in historical representations. The same line was pursued in films. In Mikhail Chiaureli’s Unforgettable 1919 Stalin is seen dispensing decisions imperturbably. The depiction shows him as exceptional in his refusal to panic. Always he appears to advocate the ‘correct’ decision, to universal acclaim. The survival of the Soviet state is made to seem mainly Stalin’s achievement.

  This was done with deliberation. The policies of the leadership were deeply oppressive; elections and consultations with society at large were non-existent. Popular aspirations for a different kind of state and society were strong, and Soviet leaders regarded them as a menace. A scheme of indoctrination was put in hand to strengthen the carapace of the old regime. Force by itself would not work. Stalin was already the embodiment of the Soviet order and his appeal to citizens of the USSR was deep and extensive even among millions of people who hated his policies. The phenomenon is impossible to quantify: security police reports are impressionistic and marred by gross prejudices, and independent open surveys of mass opinion were not undertaken. But the reaction to Stalin’s death in March 1953, when popular grief took a widely hysterical form, indicates that respect and even affection for him was substantial. He incarnated pride in military victory. He stood for industrial might and cultural progress. Even if he had not wanted a cult to his greatness, such a cult would have had to be invented.

  Public life functioned on the premise that all good things in the USSR flowed from the talents and beneficence of Joseph Stalin.12 Among the expressions of the cult was The Book of Delicious and Healthy Food, whose prefatory epigraph consisted of the following quotation from him: ‘The defining peculiarity of our Revolution consists in its having given the people not only freedom but also material goods and the opportunity for a comfortable and cultured life.’13 No work of non-fiction could appear without mention of his genius. History, politics, economics, geography, linguistics and even chemistry, physics and genetics were said to be inadequately studied unless they incorporated his guiding ideas.

  Yet this despot lacked, in the recesses of his mind, authentic confidence in his appearance. His gammy left arm, smallpox-pitted face and shortness of stature appear to have inhibited him from enjoying his cult as much as he might otherwise have done. He both loved and detested excesses of flattery. He also understood that the rarity of fresh images of him served to maintain public interest. Familiarity could have bred apathy or contempt. For such reasons he chose to place technical limits on his iconography to a greater extent than did most contemporary foreign rulers. He preferred to be painted rather than photographed. Even so, he did not like to sit for court painters; and when being painted, he expected to be aesthetically idealised and politically whitewashed. As the years rolled on, the number of images accorded the imprimatur of his approval dwindled. Declining to have new photos taken, he went on releasing the ones approved before the Second World War: this was true even of the second edition of his official biography (which had heavily airbrushed versions of photographs that had been published ever since the 1920s).14

  A couple of exceptions existed. The biography included a photograph of him waving from the Kremlin Wall and a painting of him in his generalissimus’s uniform; but although both of them showed him as older than in earlier pictures, the effects of age were fudged. In the painting his moustache appeared dark and even the hair on his head had only a suggestion of grey. The face had no smallpox-pitted skin. His tunic hung on him with unnatural fineness and the medals on his chest, including his marshal’s five-pointed star, looked as if they were stuck to a flat board. This painting by the artist B. Karpov was used in posters, busts and books.15 There was also a photograph of him sitting with his fellow marshals; but his image was so small in relation to the page that his face and body were barely discernible — and anyway the airbrushers had again been at work: his shoulders were implausibly wide and he seemed larger than the other figures in the photo.16

  Sporadic attempts to ‘humanise’ his image occurred. The most notable were the memoirs produced by the surviving Alliluevs. Anna Allilueva and her father Sergei, proud of their family’s past, recorded their impressions of Stalin before the October Revolution. These were published in 1946.17 Sergei’s book appeared posthumously: he had died, worn out by years of toil and worry and family tragedy, the previous July. Anna was alert to the risks of writing about Stalin and made a formal approach to Malenkov to assure herself that the book would have Stalin’s blessing.18 The texts were eulogistic and had gone through the censorship.19 But Sergei let slip that he had known Stalin as Soso Dzhughashvili. He also mentioned that Stalin’s first attempt to escape administrative exile in Novaya Uda in the winter of 1903–4 was marred by an elementary error: Stalin forgot to take warm clothing with him and his face and ears were severely frozen.20 Anna’s memoir gave still more details about the private life of Stalin. She described how his damaged arm precluded him from being called up in the First World War. She related that he looked thinner and older after the February 1917 Revolution and that, when he came to live with the Alliluevs, he liked to tease the family maid. The memoir reported that Stalin slept in the same room as Sergei in late summer. It also described his approval of Nadya Allilueva’s zeal in tidying up the apartment. And it gave a comical account of Stalin’s fondness for his pipe: Anna recalled that he had fallen asleep with it lit and burned the sheets.21

  Stalin soon regretted having sanctioned the Alliluev books. Anna was arrested in 1948 and sentenced to the camps for ten years for defaming him. He ignored her letter to him that she had cleared the project before publication and that she had done nothing wrong.22 She could hardly believe what was happening. She wrote to him defending her family and its record. Implicitly she accused ‘dear Joseph’ of ingratitude: ‘But there are people who our family simply saved from death. And this isn’t overpraise but the very truth, which it is very easy to prove.’23 That she could send such a message to the Leader is a sign of her courage or stupidity. Enough of Stalin’s in-laws had perished before the Second World War for her to have known the kind of person she was addressing.

  Although the widowed Olga Allilueva, to whom Stalin had expressed fond gratitude in 1915, was not persecuted, she became severely depressed. Nadya had killed herself in 1932, Pavel had died in 1938 and Fëdor had never recovered from the mental trauma of the trick played upon him by Kamo at the end of the Civil War. None of Olga’s children or children-in-law remained at liberty in the post-war years. Pavel’s widow Yevgenia did not save herself by marrying again and leaving the vicinity of Stalin: she had been arrested a year earlier than Anna and received the same punishment. Olga was inconsolable: she died a broken old woman in 1951. This was how Stalin rewarded the Alliluevs for the favours they had rendered him before the October Revolution. His Svanidze in-laws had already received his special expression of thanks. Alexander Svanidze had been arrested in the Great Terror and shot in 1942; his wife Maria had had a heart attack on receiving the news. Not only they but also the two sisters of Stalin
’s first wife Ketevan — Maria and Alexandra — had perished before the end of the Second World War. The only close relatives who lived without fear of arrest were his children Svetlana and Vasili. They were the exceptions: the pattern was that a family connection with Stalin brought about repression.

  The problem presented by the Alliluevs was that they knew him so well. He wished to float free of his personal history. Increasingly he opted for the status of state icon at the expense of a realistic image of himself. He became ever more detached and mysterious. It is true that he sometimes appeared on the Lenin Mausoleum to review the October Revolution or the May Day parades. But few spectators got more than a fleeting glimpse of him. Usually the police and the parade marshals hurried everyone across Red Square as fast as possible.24

  What people lacked in direct experience of Stalin, they often made up for in expressions of devotion to him. The universal genius of the father of all the peoples had to be acknowledged on every solemn occasion in schools, enterprises and offices. Gratitude for his life and career had to be manifested. Pravda quoted daily from his works. His photographs, old ones retouched for the current day, were regularly published — and sometimes paintings were brought out of store and turned into images looking like photographs. None of this damaged his standing since so few individuals actually met him: he had become a distant deity. Meetings started always with a paean to the Leader. Memory of a past when he had not been ruler was confined to a small minority of Soviet society. There was nothing in the USSR or in the other countries where communism was established which was deemed untouched by his genius. Images of him were hung on walls at work and in the home. His biography was conventionally given to youngsters on important occasions. Short of being called God on earth, Stalin had deified himself.