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
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
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 Fedor 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.
