The Artist-Dictator: Stalin as Auteur in the Battle of Utopian Aesthetics

 

Jake Zawlacki^*

 

 

Summary

 

“A statesman is also an artist. For him, the people is merely what stone is for a sculptor.” – Joseph Goebbels, Michael: A Novel. This essay posits Josef Stalin as the most influential Modern Artist of the 20th century. In a revolutionary landscape of battling aesthetic visions, this essay navigates how various utopian philosophies were represented in different artistic forms and how Socialist Realism was ultimately the prevailing aesthetic. Using analysis from Boris Groys, Katerina Clark, and Michael David-Fox, the essay uses primary sources to illustrate the long-lasting changes instituted by Stalin, The Artist-Dictator.

 

Key Words: Artist, Dictator, Stalin, Utopian Aesthetics.

 

Introduction

 

The Russian revolution provided a ground zero for endless possibilities. Varying utopian groups fought for power through aesthetic control but lost out to Socialist Realism as Stalin’s one and only utopian aesthetic. The purification of Russian/Soviet space of the 1920s and the contradictory international yet xenophobic administration of the 1930s situated an artistic movement at the center of a Socialist reality. The aesthetic was commandeered, not invented, by powerful actors, and Stalin, the artist-dictator, shaped a visionary Socialist aesthetic.

 

The Frame

 

Eric Michaud begins his book, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, with, “the history of the metaphor of the artist-prince has yet to be written.”^[1] He follows by taking the artist-prince to its single logical conclusion: the artist-dictator, and ends his opening paragraph with a wise inversion of traditional power. “The legitimation of power through divine right was replaced by legitimation through artistic genius.”^[2] Michaud goes on to outline the “cult of art in Nazi Germany,” but it is within this opening page that we can frame a radical argument about a different dictator: Josef Stalin, the ruler of the Soviet Union and one of the most influential modern artists of the twentieth century.

This paper won’t transform Stalin into a fedora-wearing hipster struggling to sell his paintings at local cafés, but rather into an aesthetic giant responsible for the deaths of millions in pursuit of his aesthetic goals. Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s infamous right-hand man, stated in his novel, Michael, “A statesman is also an artist. For him, the people is [sic] merely what stone is for a sculptor.”^[3] If Stalin was a sculptor of the masses, then he was not only more prolific than Michelangelo, but emptied entire quarries pursuing his vision.

In 1992, Boris Groys ruffled a considerable number of feathers when he published The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond.^[4] In it, he outlines the power struggles between groups fixated on the aesthetics of the post-revolutionary spaces of the newly formed Soviet Union. If Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square represents the end of pre-Soviet aesthetics and the beginning of something completely new, Groys posits the completely new to be something struggled over by competing interests in order to establish aesthetic dominance.^[5]

 

Power

 

All forms of art concern power. Whether works of art suggest affluence in still life paintings, or the patron’s immortality through portraiture, or responds to the consumptive practices of an art market, all art is in dialectical relation to power. In a pre-revolutionary environment, Katerina Clark describes “Romantic Anticapitalism” as a movement in dialectical opposition to market forces.^[6] Romantic Anticapitalists envisioned the future of artistic discourse as no longer focused on the wealthy individual and the artist, but rather the artist as the patron of society, who dictated the aesthetics of a supranational aesthetic project.

Groys’ argument is particularly cutting in that it leaves little room for the victimization of the avant-garde brutalized under Stalin’s reign. This explains the mixed critical response to his work, but the dichotomy he provides is ultimately ineffective. The avant-garde can be composed of both power-hungry aesthetes and victims. The various forms of the intelligentsia were not solely vying for power over a well of infinite opportunity, nor were they solely the oppressed victims in a system devised to clear out all other groups or individuals who could threaten the power of the leadership. They were both.

Utopian visions however, were not all unified in aesthetic pursuits; many had different objectives entirely. Richard Stites’ book, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution, lays the groundwork for the various, competing utopian visions of the Russian people. Some of these competing forms included popular, administrative, and socialist utopias.^[7] Stites illustrates the multiplicity of utopian visions and how Stalin ultimately limited these visions to a single, unified concept.^[8] Plurality was erased, thus Socialist Realism became the chosen aesthetic, as posited by Groys. The disparate branches of the revolution were trimmed for a unitary utopian vision.

Katerina Clark elaborates on this narrowing in her Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941. Her account pushes against the ahistorical vision of Stalinism and communism as a “post-apocalyptic” society. Clark explains that Stalin claimed existence in a post-historical space, outside of a global context and outside of time itself, but he and his regime supported international cosmopolitanism, in its limited sense. This created a contradictory international yet conservative centralized government.^[9] The pan-European communist vision waned as the prophesied Marxist revolutions either failed to populate, or failed outright. The curtain began to draw tighter with Stalin at the chords.

Stalin was not a singular actor, nor did he act in a vacuum when instituting the Socialist Realist aesthetic. In reference to Stalin’s articles on linguistics in 1950, Clark illustrates an environment “where pronouncements from the highest levels, often from Stalin himself, appear to set a new direction for Soviet culture, thereby exclude from it other vital trends advocated by leading intellectuals.”^[10] If the various aesthetic models were anthropomorphized into individuals applying for a job, Groys tells us the story of an internecine competition and struggle for power. Stalin the Manager had to employ the right aesthetic, and then trained that aesthetic to serve his purposes. The aesthetic was Socialist Realism.

 

The Abyss

 

As Gustave Flaubert stated, “one mustn't look at the abyss, because there is at the bottom an inexpressible charm which attracts us.”^[11] Malevich’s Black Square embodies the inexpressible charm of the abyss that attracted so many competing aesthetic groups in the tumultuous period leading to the October Revolution.^[12] The empty black square consumes the viewer’s gaze by what it has removed. The physicality of the viewer confronted by the two-dimensional painting, the lack of narrative, and the emptiness of content combine into what has often been regarded as the beginning of Modern Art. More than that, Black Square reveals the state of the Russian socio-political atmosphere on the brink of total collapse in 1915. The void was primed to be filled.

Remembering Flaubert, many were deeply attracted to the abyss intent on filling it with their own aesthetic. Futurists, constructivists, suprematists, and others vied for control during the collapse of the Romanov dynasty, but the Bolsheviks reigned victorious. In 1915, Malevich created a second work, Red Square, that is similar in composition, but with two striking differences.^[13] The rectangle is quadrilateral, its corners not at ninety-degree angles but rather slanted to suggest forward movement. This reading illustrates the dynamic nature of the Reds, the Bolsheviks, and their active stance in relation to the Black Square, the abyss. Dynamism was integral to filling the void, to constructing a new reality, to building a novel future. It wasn’t until 1918, in the thick of revolution, that Malevich completed his trifecta: Suprematist Composition: White on White.^[14] Here the composition contains a white canvas with an off-kilter, off-white square in the upper right corner of the canvas. The void had been filled; the vision could be enacted; the slate was wiped clean.

 

Sanctification

 

Clark’s Petersburg asks the ultimate question of “How did the Soviet 20s become the Stalinist 30s?”^[15] Clark outlines the Petersburg intelligentsia as integral to the creation of a revolutionary culture. Despite the many differences in utopian visions, as Stites’ argues, they were held together by a severe repulsion to market forces. Thus, Romantic Anticapitalism held sway as one of the only things the fragmented intelligentsia could agree upon. The revolutionary culture, as established in Saint Petersburg, was first and foremost interested in overthrowing the market. Market-driven culture was viewed as grotesque, and intellectuals hailed the Greek ideal of a state-funded culture project.^[16]

In this strive for a pre-capitalist society, the Russian intelligentsia had to purify, or as Clark so ineloquently writes, “resacerdotalize” (resanctify), the space upon which a new culture would be built. With the Greeks as the supreme unification of all culture, the Russian intelligentsia saw an opportunity to once more unite all facets of life under a singular utopian aesthetic. White on White represented the beginning of something new.^[17]

While the Romantic Anticapitalists were foremost interested in revolution for the sake of iconoclasm, they were not united in a futuristic utopian vision. Composed of varying groups and thinking aesthetically, they were divided specifically into groups conforming to different artistic movements, such as futurists or suprematists, but more broadly defined as the avantgarde. Each individual movement had its unique aesthetic vision, but they all fell under the title of avantgarde for one reason: they all opposed history.

 

To History or Not

 

According to Groys, the fundamental difference between Socialist Realism and the avantgarde in the purification and “resacerdotalization” of space of the 1920s was the dialectic opposition to history.^[18] The avantgarde wanted to pummel the past market driven culture of the bourgeoisie into complete submission to ensure its demise. Socialist Realism, alternatively, supported the larger vision of an ahistorical aesthetic that existed outside of linear time. While this was certainly not true, as Groys and Clark make clear, it was the primary ambition of the aesthetic project. Because the avantgarde was so determined to obliterate the past, the movement was thus defined by the past. Socialist Realists however, existed in a supra-plane of historical existence with the ability to pick and choose any aspect of bourgeois cultural history and use it for whatever means they needed to.

Groys’ distinction between the historically-defined avantgarde and the ahistorical Socialist Realists is paramount to understanding the struggle for aesthetic power. Socialist Realism stood out from these groups because of this distinction, which made it the most viable option for Stalin in the late 20s and 30s.

Purification wasn’t envisioned equally by the competing avant-garde groups, however. It was for this reason Groys makes the philosophical argument that these movements struggled for power. Whether individual artists harbored ill feelings towards each other, as many surely did, is irrelevant in the battle for supremacy; winning equaled power, luxury, and success. The ability to enact an individual’s sensibility upon another is one example of such power. The position to enact an individual aesthetic on a civilization would be the most influential position an artist could hold.

 

Inspiration and Mimesis

 

As Clark outlines in Moscow: The Fourth Rome, a seemingly contradictory notion of internationalism and centralism existed in the 1930s. Clark traces the influx of new translations as a sign of increased cosmopolitanism and Western influence on the Soviet intelligentsia.^[19] Exposure to new materials affected all aspects of Soviet art, and yet led to the centralization of the Soviet aesthetic.^[20] During this period of international discourse, Stalin, despite his claim to have created an ahistorical society, operated well within history in that Stalin responded to international trends. Stalin allowed artists to travel abroad in an exchange of ideas integral to the formation of intellectual Soviet thought.

Once Stalin had claimed the Soviet State had achieved socialism, a paradox arose. Michael David-Fox best illustrates this in his book Showcasing the Great Experiment. David-Fox follows the massive influx of the “friends of the Soviet Union” during the initial decades of the nation’s establishment. Pre-war Stalinism of the 1930s engaged in what David-Fox calls a “superiority-inferiority complex” where Soviets would claim superiority over the West in many facets of life, but also strangely valued Western engagement and achievements.^[21] Many organizations set up to initiate international travel for incomers and Soviet tourists, often intellectuals and artists, didn’t survive the purges of the late 1930s because of the increasing ideological xenophobia of the West.^[22] International cosmopolitanism took a sharp turn as Stalin locked the doors leading out and narrowed the walkways in.

In the chaos of the 1930s, Stalinism moved away from international exchange towards paranoia and xenophobia. It was as if Stalin cultivated the intelligentsia and artistic community to explore foreign lands and bring back what they could. After Socialist Realism became the reflective yet projective aesthetic chosen by Stalin, the positions of artistic mediums shifted dramatically. Considering how the majority of foreign intellectuals who visited the USSR in the 1920s and 1930s were writers, the rise of the Socialist Realist novel should be no surprise. Combined with increasing literacy rates across the Union, this led to the paradigmatic shift of literature as the highest form of art and marked a pivotal aesthetic choice by Stalin, the artist-dictator.

 

Narrative in Socialist Realism

 

Following the wholesale purification of culture, a new culture had to be created that fit within Party ideology and communistic aims. While painting, sculpture, and architecture all held vaunted positions in Soviet culture, none compared to the position of the novel. Clark’s analysis of the Soviet novel in her aptly named book, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, reveals the primary question Soviet aesthetes were grappling with. The division of consciousness and spontaneity plagued revolutionaries as it represented the wide schism within their society.^[23]

The Soviet novel, as posited by Clark, represents the bridge from spontaneity to consciousness. Spontaneity was indicative of the “wild” peasantry, steeped in superstition and conservative behavior. Consciousness represented the intelligentsia pushing forward to create a new culture and society of communism. In a country where pre-revolutionary literacy rates were dismal, the language of the Party became integral to all facets of culture. The Russian language, as well as the countless ethnic minority languages, became tools to perpetuate ideology.^[24] Once the language of the party had been established, it could be enacted through the form of the Socialist Realist novel.

This language was often directly influenced by Stalin as seen in Alexei Yurchak’s Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More. Yurchak argues that Stalin was positioned as the “master” external to authoritative discourse.^[25] His position as “master” allowed him direct involvement with language of the party. His editing skills were held in high regard as Maxim Gorky is quoted by Yurchak stating Stalin’s writing represented “a model of proper writing.”^[26] The artist-dictator as external editor had direct influences on not only language within the party, but language within all spheres of Soviet life in which the party was omnipresent.

Clark also theorizes that most Socialist Realist novels fit within a master narrative. Adaptations of this master narrative reveal subtle changes in policy and aesthetics of the period, but the narrative itself ultimately followed “a sort of parable for the working-out of Marxism-Leninism in history.”^[27] The protagonist rises from the peasantry (spontaneity) and ultimately prevails into the collective (consciousness). The master narrative served to move the newly literate populous from ignorance to Marxist enlightenment. The novel proved to be the ultimate standard for guiding the masses into higher reaches of collective consciousness. The previous king of Russian arts - the theater - was dethroned by a new king for a new purpose.

 

Control

 

As Socialist Realism became the preeminent aesthetic vision of the USSR in the early 1930s, with Stalin at the helm, odd contradictions surfaced in the post-war era of literature. In Harold Swayze’s Political Control of Literature in the USSR, 1946-1959, he refers to Lenin’s early writings and sentiments as justifying the Socialist Realist vision long after his life. “Every artist … has the right to create freely, according to his ideal and independently of anything else. But we are Communists, of course. We must not stand with folded arms and let chaos develop as it will. We must guide this process according to a systematic plan and mold its results.”^[28] In this bizarre contradiction, freedom of artistic expression exists only in that it is freely expressed through the Party. Swayze sums the entirety of Soviet literature in that “all literature must be party literature and serve party purposes.”^[29] Literature was not purely instrumental for the Party, as Clark reminds us, but it was certainly used as an instrument.

While Swayze did not have the luxury of seeing the conclusion of the Soviet Union, he correctly analyzed the shift in policy following World War Two. The days of internationalism were long over, and Stalin and his regime had now emerged as the second most powerful country in the world. David-Fox’s superiority-inferiority complex had finally been resolved: The Soviets were superior to Europe. This reification held numerous implications as Stalin no longer felt the need to look outside for intellectual inspiration. If he was the commander of one of the two superpowers, then all the answers could be found at home.

 

After Stalin

 

Thus far, the historical progression of Stalinism has been outlined not as an ahistorical, post-apocalyptic cataclysm, but as a movement involving the gradual narrowing of competing aesthetic visions. The repercussions of the ahistorical vision, however, left the country in an unexpected state once Stalin died and was succeeded by Nikita Khrushchev.

The rupture in post-Stalin Soviet society is best seen in Erik Bulatov’s Horizon.^[30] While the painting was made decades after Stalin’s death, its premise responds to the “aesthetico-political vision,” as per Groys, of Stalin’s Socialist Realism. Once they had been fully unified under Stalin, art and politics could never again be separated in the Soviet Union. Bulatov’s Horizon depicts a group of five people facing the oceanic horizon in the distance. The horizon has been replaced by a red rectangle with two red lines above and beneath it that extend to both edges of the painting. The wide stripe not only erases the horizon, but also confronts the viewer of the painting with a sense of unease in placing two-dimensional pictorials over an otherwise three-dimensional realist painting. Groys posits this representation as the replacement of the Western, endless horizon of technology and “progress” with the Soviet’s ahistorical, self-constructed endpoint.^[31] Once Stalin stated that socialism had been reached, the horizon was forever erased, there was nothing else to strive for, except what they themselves had to invent.

To look at this painting more intently however, reveals the horizon has been erased, or covered, by the very same Red Square as painted by Malevich in 1915. The red quadrilateral was dynamic in that it effectively erased the horizon from view. The revolution was the beginning, and Stalin was its end. Once Khrushchev returned to competition with the West, he yanked the Soviet Union from its ahistorical, non-temporal floating existence into history. Similar to the avant-garde movements at the turn of the century, Khrushchev redefined the Soviet Union in dialectical opposition to the West. If the USSR was in an ahistorical free fall under Stalin, Khrushchev was the unforeseen ground it splattered onto.

 

The Artist-Dictator

 

Stalin was not an artist in the traditional sense: a painter, sculptor, architect, or writer, but he was indeed a modern artist. The main distinction being that modern artists aim to enact individual sensibilities on the world around them. They intend to change the viewers’ perception of the world through aesthetic means. Whether or not Stalin was a good artist is for another essay, but he was an artist, nonetheless.

The Russian revolution provided a ground zero for a brand-new aesthetic movement. Different groups struggled for power but were ultimately edited out of existence as Stalin chose Socialist Realism as the one and only utopian aesthetic. Clark connects the sanctification of space of the 1920s to the paradoxical international yet xenophobic 1930s followed by a narrowing of utopian visions. Schisms were not cataclysmic, and Stalin did not operate outside of linear time.

The Socialist Realist novel held the highest position of the arts as it embodied the unification of politics and aesthetics. As Clark and Swayze outline, paintings, films, and sculptures allowed for interpretation, but the novel was the exact language of the party for the party. In Wagner’s Art and Revolution, he states, “If a Greek work of art contained the spirit of a fine nation, the artwork of the future would surely contain the spirit of a human race free from all limitations of a national nature.”^[32] Stalin’s aesthetico-political vision was exactly this.

Stalin did not create a new aesthetic vision, but every ship needs a captain. He was deeply involved with the editing of texts, films, and other aspects of culture most leaders wouldn’t have the time or interest for. This is what defined Stalin the dictator as Stalin the artist. He had complete and total control over almost everything that took place in the Soviet Union. He was able to select an aesthetic from the competing groups of the 1920s, and commandeered it as his own into a perfect amalgamation of politics and art.

Art is, after all, artificial. Stalin’s primary goal was to create a completely ahistorical, artificial, Marxist, socialist sphere where the environment shaped the individuals, not vice versa. This should be a warning to aesthetes and artists alike, and to anyone else envisioning a “better world” based on a single, unified, utopian vision or aesthetic. Artistic and aesthetic integrity shouldn’t have been able to justify the deaths of millions under Josef Stalin, but thinking of Nietzsche, existence is justified as an aesthetic phenomenon.^[33] Stalin the artist-dictator would have certainly agreed with this sentiment and might have added an inversion: aesthetic phenomenon can be justified by any means necessary.

 

 

 

 

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