‘The glorious beauty of young people’
The American ambassador, Joseph Davies, a close observer of events, did not deny the magic spell cast on him by this parade. On 14 July 1937 he noted in his diary:
It was quite wonderful and impressive in its way.
It was a bright sunny day. Both ends and the opposite façade were decorated profusely with flags and red bunting and various large emblems emblazoned with athletic medal designs, tributes to Stalin, etc.
Massed around three sides of the Square were companies of three or four hundred each of men and women, leaving the Square about half filled for the marching and the various athletic tableaux and performances.
There were almost as many women as men in the parade and in the exhibitions. It was ‘flaming youth’. And a very beautiful youth it was – all bareheaded and tanned to a deep brown, for the most part wearing only white shorts and coloured jerseys. Each company had a different uniform. Some were in Jansen suits and others were in regular gymnasium attire. The combinations of blues and whites, reds and whites, oranges and whites, crimsons and yellows, maroons and tans – all conceivable combinations – with white sneaker shoes, with colours in the hair of the women or carried in the hands of the marchers. It made a beautiful display. Added to this were thousands of tanned soldiers with shaved heads, in blue shorts and white ‘sneakers’. Again there were two or three thousand athletes from various sections of the Soviet Union who were particularly colourful, especially those from the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and the Oriental section of the country. The latter brought reed, horn, and drum bands, which made weird music for their sword dances and all manner of native Oriental religious, athletic, swaying dances and marches. The coloured gowns and robes of the performers as well as the beauty of the dances were unique and strange.
The parade lasted about four hours. It was estimated that there were forty or fifty thousand young people participating. There were all kinds of floral displays, extraordinarily well done; with bluebells and poppies and all manner of flowers in profusion. You know how beautifully they make pictures out of the massing of growing flowers over here.
The floats were designed for the most part to display various types of club activities. There were skiers actually skiing in companies of 1500 young men. They apparently had ball bearings on their skis to enable them to get over the asphalt.
On some floats were the horizontal bars with the gymnasts actually performing; and springboards with acrobats doing double high somersaults on the float. Others were skating or tobogganing on the floats as the floats moved along in the parade. One athletic exhibition consisted of forty or fifty young men and women, all performing on the floats as they went moving by.
All in all, it was one of the most beautiful and extraordinary exhibitions I have ever seen. Of course the day was beautiful; and the wonderfully fine-looking youth and perfect physiques and healthful appearance all contributed to make the whole spectacle most unusual.2
Elena Bulgakova had a similar experience. She had drawn closer to the parade and could see the faces more clearly: ‘Day of Sport. Went to the dentist whom I had discovered by chance and who cheated us brazenly once she had elicited our names. Stopped on Arbat Square and gazed at the sportsmen marching past. A glorious sight from a distance – brown bodies, gaily coloured shorts. But looked at from close to – scarcely an attractive face or a beautiful body.’3
The events on Red Square were recorded by camera crews. The material served as a basis for the film Stalin’s Tribe (Plemia Stalina), almost an hour long, which reached the cinemas as early as the autumn of 1937 and in that way projected the images of Red Square a hundred thousand times throughout the USSR. So it was not simply a matter of a mass parade in the centre of Moscow.
Fizkul'turnik, fizkul'turnitsa: icons of the new age
The parade of 40,000 sportsmen and sportswomen from all the republics of the Union was not the first instance of such public ‘orchestrated spontaneity’,4 but it was probably its apogee. Over the years the form of the sports parade had evolved into a genre of its own. Athletes first marched through Red Square past Lenin and Trotsky on 25 May 1919, as part of a recruitment drive, since they continued on from Red Square straight into the Civil War. A further milestone was the First Workers’ Spartakiad, on 12 August 1928 – a rival to the Olympic Games – when around 30,000 athletes, both men and women, paraded across Red Square to the sound of the Internationale. This parade did not become an annual event until 1931.5 From that point on, the programme became increasingly professional and was more meticulously planned, with simply thousands of participants under the direction of the Moscow Institute for Physical Culture. There were parades consisting of synchronized performances in a sea of flags, with choreographies worked out down to the very last detail. The sportsmen and sportswomen formed ‘living sculptures’, representing symbols or aeroplanes or spelling out slogans. They acted out their sport in miniature boxing rings and on miniature running tracks driven through the parade on floats. ‘From this moment on, the fizkul'tura parade truly entered into the spirit of the Hollywood musical.’6 This development reached a climax with the parade in July 1937, when a giant green carpet was rolled out on Red Square, a full-sized pitch on which a proper game of football was scheduled to be played; in the end it was more of a symbolic piece of choreographed football – perhaps because the popular Spartak Club might have beaten the NKVD Dynamo team.7 The transformation of Red Square into a football pitch, the transformation of the rostrum on the Lenin Mausoleum into a spectator stand!8 Football was a game whose popularity and fascination for the masses in the 1930s, including the Soviet masses, derived from the fact that it was open-ended – stadiums were the only places in which you could shout ‘Down with the NKVD!’ with impunity, because such battle cries had only a general meaning, not a political one. And such events could be held in a square which was normally reserved for military or paramilitary activities.
The sportsmen’s parade was merely the most visible and spectacular manifestation of a phenomenon that was to be encountered everywhere in the city. Sculptures of sportsmen and sportswomen embellished the newly built underground metro stations. The 70,000 mainly young workers of both sexes involved in the construction of the Metro had their own sporting and cultural organizations, and 2,500 delegates joined the ranks of those on parade in Red Square. Sporting figures created by prominent sculptors and painters filled the metro stations: footballers, boxers, tennis players, hurdlers and ice skaters. Painters, photographers and designers became involved in sport. Aleksandr Rodchenko, Gustav Klutsis and Boris Ignatovich were all fascinated by bodies, motion and configurations and used them to create their most impressive, photos, pictures and posters.9 In his sports montages Gustav Klutsis combined gymnasts on the bars with geometric forms. El Lissitzky drew football montages. The fashion designer Nadezhda Lamanova had turned her attention to sports clothing as early as the 1920s. There were not only sports journals with high circulation figures; sport was in general a fixed component of the large daily newspapers such as Izvestiia or Pravda. Sculptures of athletes of both sexes adorned the entrances of stadiums, swimming pools, houses of culture and leisure parks. Sportsmen were turned into porcelain figurines or portrayed in pictures which not only became icons but in fact took up from where Russian icon painting left off. This was especially true of Aleksandr Samokhvalov’s Girl Wearing a Football Jersey of 1932 and his Girl with a Shot Put of 1933. Both pictures received national coverage in millions of reproductions. Furthermore, athletes were displayed in strength in the final room of the Soviet Pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition. Three pictures – Samokhvalov’s Soviet Fizkul'tura, Deineka’s The Noble People of the Land of the Soviets and Aleksei Pakhomov’s Children of the Soviet Union – were acts of homage not simply to Moscow but to the new, beautiful people of Moscow.10 In line with this, extensions of sports facilities were assigned a central place in the General Plan for the Reconstruction of Moscow. In addition to the
Dynamo Stadium in the north of the city, which had been inaugurated as early as 1928, a further large stadium was planned for the centre.11 Sport was also a major focus of factory managements, since it was they who were responsible for organizing sport clubs, leisure-time activities, and activities during breaks and before the early morning shifts.
There were two interconnected factors underlying the visible role of sport and hence its attractiveness: its popularity among those lower down the social scale and its evident usefulness to the ruling powers in shaping the climate of public opinion. Together they turned sport into a potent force – comparable in many respects to the function of sport in the mass cultures of other societies.12
This celebration of the human body had much that pointed to the classical tradition. Where the neoclassical school had gained the upper hand, it emphasized not just classical styles of building, Palladio’s Renaissance villas and classical pillars, but also the sculpture of the human body. Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Kolkhoz Woman undoubtedly echoes the dynamic movement of the Nike of Samothrace. The figures of Antaeus and Gaia are omnipresent – and even make their appearance in Stalin’s speeches. On his visit to Moscow in 1935, Romain Rolland felt himself reminded of Roman triumphal processions as he gazed at the festivities of the Young Workers’ sports competitions.13 But the intention was not simply to return to classical or early modern forms or to revert to nature and naturalness following a period of abstraction. Fizkul'turnik and fizkul'turnitsa were expressions of modern man; they were an integral part of a society forced along the path of industrialization and urbanization. They were entirely the products of the growth of towns, the natural pendant of factory work. Fizkul'tura was to be found in towns and far less commonly in the countryside. Fizkul'tura, or culture of the body, implied working away at oneself; it belonged to the reproductive side of human life in which nothing could be left to chance any longer. Health and well-being could be planned as readily as work, especially industrial work. Whereas sport might be regarded as an unpolitical leisure-time pursuit, fizkul'tura served a social purpose, the maintenance and improvement of health for the benefit of the labour process, and the fact that it was a collective activity was an added bonus. Fizkul'tura was a central element of education. There you could learn the proper way to move, to become kul'turny and how to acquire kul'turnost. It was evidently more than sport. Fizkul'tura was the first fitness movement in history and therefore a characteristic phenomenon of the emerging mass society.14 Before the Revolution sport was a private matter, a question of individual preference, competitiveness. Even in its early phase, workers’ sport attempted to oppose a different ideal to this – a proletarian, comradely form of sporting rivalry: the Spartakiads were the Soviet version of this. What the parades on Red Square had in common with gymnastic displays on the Reich sports field or the Maifeld in Berlin was the authoritarian standard that converted the movements of thousands of gymnasts and sportsmen and women into unprecedented performances of a biosocial body.15 Such impressive collective celebrations of physical culture could also manifest themselves in democratic societies, as we can see from the Sokol gymnastic festivals of Czechoslovakia during the interwar years, where they constituted a central plank of a spirited national democracy.
But however much a physical culture movement purported to educate and civilize, its subjects, its agents, were human beings in all their physicality. No greater contrast was conceivable than the distinction between the sheer movement of the human body and a regime in which everyone and everything had become political or was to become so. But a state that has discovered how to take control of the body, its beauty and its strength, has learned how to exercise a frightening power over mankind.
The social mobilization unleashed by the Russian Revolution had liberated an inexhaustible reservoir of gifts and talents, both physical and mental. An authoritarian organization could draw on infinite resources from the ‘human material’ at its disposal and could make of it what it wished. It was therefore able to undertake the large-scale production of musicians, violinists, pianists, singers, actors, engineers, technicians – and also sportsmen and sportswomen. Sport was the concern of the young, and, in particular, the parade of fizkul'turniki was a youth parade. It was not by chance that eyewitnesses spoke interchangeably of ‘Day of Youth’ and ‘Sports Parade’. In this context it is tempting to vary Lenin’s saying: Stalinism is youth plus Soviet power, authoritarian power plus beauty of the athletic body. Youth was thought of here as the age of strength and health, but it meant something more. It meant having been born or having grown up after the Revolution; it meant being a child of the new order, beyond the world of ‘former people’, unburdened by the past but also innocent. Youth was a habit of mind: it meant you had unshakeable trust in the new power, a naïve credulity even; you might well be inexperienced, but you were courageous and ready to accept risk, make sacrifices and feel limitless loyalty; you might well be militant and unforgiving towards everything non-Soviet – to the point where you were prepared to use violence. The pride taken by Soviet youth, mixed as it was with unbounded naïvety – ‘The Moscow Metro is the most beautiful in the whole world’ – was what astounded and even shocked observers such as André Gide and Lion Feuchtwanger.
Figure 16.1 Workers from the Stalin automobile plant on a fizkul'turniki parade in Red Square in 1937
‘Stalinism is youth plus Soviet power, authoritarian power plus beauty of the athletic body.’
In the 1930s youth developed something close to a characteristic body type: muscular, sporty, always pressing forward, clean-shaven, a white shirt with an open collar, a briefcase for his books, and perhaps a Mao cap. How far these prototypes of the new age had travelled beyond those of the revolutionary period! They were the very antithesis of the shortsighted, bearded faces complete with nickel-rimmed glasses, the ‘neurasthenic types’ and the women students with their black skirts and white, buttoned-up collars! A new generation had in fact been born and the regime had given it a final polish.16
‘Stalin’s tribe’: tableaux vivants in Red Square
The fizkul'turniki parade of 1937 also supplied the raw material for the film Stalin’s Tribe, which appeared in the cinemas in the late summer.17 The film provides an insight into the events in Red Square, but more importantly it teaches us about the images that were supposed to be transmitted throughout the Union. The main impression that might well be conveyed to an observer is perhaps not so much that of a youth festival as of a festival of the Soviet peoples, and what was fascinating was not so much the beauty of the bodies displayed as the ethnographic exoticism and the variety of the peoples on show in Red Square. It was indeed a ‘show’ in full accord with the rules of art. The film follows a chronological narrative. It shows people converging on Red Square from every direction to the sounds of celebratory music. We are even shown the exact time – 1 o’clock – as given on the clock face on Saviour Gate in the Kremlin. We see the political leadership standing in a particularly informal arrangement on the tribune above the Lenin Mausoleum: Stalin, Molotov and Kaganovich, all in white and in the best of spirits. We see Stalin poking Molotov’s arm; Khrushchev looks youthful, almost boyish. The camera picks up objects as they enter the square: a locomotive, a giant Soviet star, skiers on scooters (since it is mid-summer), the year ‘1937’ in giant letters, cars, the Soviet Pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris, tanks made of flowers, models of tanks operated by people, the territory of the USSR on a giant globe, an aeroplane made of human beings, an armada of cyclists. This is followed by a second section focused on the eleven republics and the Soviet peoples, with women bearing amphorae filled with wine, falconers from Central Asia and the Caucasus carrying their eagles and falcons. Mountain eagles on Red Square! Between St Basil’s Cathedral and the Historical Museum, the walls of the Kremlin and the GUM building, a multinational folklore show unfolds. Sabre-dancing Georgians, dancing Uzbek girls with coloured ribbons; the Belorussians too show off their folk dances on Red
Square but also appear accompanied by dancing and waving trees. Leningrad together with the Lesgaft Institute – the source of Russian and Soviet physical culture and sport education – produce especially ambitious offerings. The Spanish Republic is represented by flamenco dancers but also by pictures of Spanish and Basque audiences. The camera turns towards the spectator stands. There you can see the Stakhanovite workers who have been given a privileged view of the proceedings, the diplomats from bourgeois nations in suits and hats, and intellectuals. The foreigners try to record everything on camera. The film evidently makes no attempt to follow the actual events; it aspires to be cinematic art rather than newsreel. It records the planes flying over Red Square and their reflections in the polished granite of Lenin’s mausoleum. Further objects are transported over Red Square: models of the locks of the Moscow–Volga Canal, giant photos of Yezhov. The Red Army makes its appearance in a ballet of soldiers with bayonets. Women dressed as sunflowers pass through Red Square, men as ears of corn. These are followed by gymnastics equipment on which athletes perform reckless manoeuvres on horizontal and parallel bars, risking life and limb. Even very young children march past: the pioneers, girls and boys in white shorts and gym shoes. In between come further contingents from the different peoples of the Soviet Union: Armenians with Armenian music, national dress, choirs and amphorae. The Turkmen can be recognized by their turbans and swordplay. Even classical ballet is on show, along with weight-lifters playfully juggling heavy weights, pole-vaulters, and circus gymnasts on ropes and horizontal bars, motorcycle artistes and a kind of collective group of gymnasts on horizontal bars with several gymnasts performing simultaneously, creating the impression of a human clock whose wheels interlock with precision. The parade ends with the Internationale. The banner ‘1917–1937’ brings out the special importance of this year’s parade. The Terror has exacted victims from among sportsmen and young sports enthusiasts too – the Starostin brothers, the popular trainers of the popular football club Spartak Moscow, fell victim to intrigues in 1937. They were convicted and spent years in camps, where they set up football teams and trained them.18 But there was a sense in which the fizkul'turniki parade was in fact the parade of those born after 1917, post-revolutionary youth, the members of ‘Stalin’s tribe’.
Moscow, 1937 Page 37
