The Magical Chorus

then of the Moscow Soviet. Of the “magnificent six,” she and Sholokhov were the only card-carrying Party members at the time of the award.

Rumor had the beautiful Barsova as Stalin’s mistress, but even if we discount that, we can see why her picture graced Pravda’s page one. Barsova was the personification of the new type of music theater artist—a sphere Stalin loved and considered important and where there had been superstars before the revolution, too: the bass Chaliapin, the tenor Leonid Sobinov, the sopranos Antonina Nezhdanova and Nadezhda Obukhova, and ballet dancer Anna Pavlova.

The ruler wanted to show that the new generation of stars of opera and ballet were as good as the prerevolutionary masters, so that is why the early winners of the Stalin Prize included the great performers of the Soviet era—basses Maxim Mikhailov and Mark Reizen, tenors Ivan Kozlovsky and Sergei Lemeshev, and the ballet dancer Galina Ulanova (the only one in this list to become a legendary figure in the West, as well).

Although the name of sculptor Vera Mukhina, the second woman among the first round of Stalin Prize winners, is not well known outside Russia, her most famous work, The Laborer and the Farm Worker, a twenty-five-meter composition of stainless steel, weighing seventy-four tons and erected above the Soviet pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair in 1937 (the task was to visually block the nearby German pavilion), is still widely reproduced in countless posters and book covers.

Many people (including Romain Rolland) considered this dynamic depiction of two gigantic, semi-nude figures striving forward (she brandishing a sickle and he a hammer) the most eloquent symbol of Soviet art and even of the Soviet state. (There are some who insist that honor belongs to El Lissitzky’s poster for the Soviet exhibition in Zurich in 1929, which elaborates a theme similar to Mukhina’s, of the ecstatic unity of the male and female in the name of the socialist idea in a more avant-garde key.)

The beloved daughter of a wealthy merchant, the mannish Mukhina studied in Paris and with her friends Nadezhda Udaltsova and Lubov Popova was one of the “Amazons” of the Russian avant-garde. Mukhina was particularly close to one of the leading Amazons, Alexandra Exter; together they designed the modernist plays of the influential Moscow Chamber Theater, under the direction of Alexander Tairov, and also extravagant hats for the capital’s fashion plates in the early 1920s.

In 1930, Mukhina was arrested and exiled for a year for an attempt to escape abroad, but that did not keep her from becoming one of Stalin’s favorite sculptors just a few years later. Highly admiring her Laborer and Farm Worker, he protected Mukhina from potentially lethal accusations of maliciously hiding an image of Trotsky in the billowing folds of the couple’s drapes.

In her lifetime, Mukhina received five Stalin Prizes (she outlived Stalin by seven months, dying in 1953), but she never did produce the obligatory portrait of the country’s leader. When she was asked to do so, she played the principled realist and set one condition: Stalin had to pose for her personally. (They say that the artist Petr Konchalovsky used the same ruse to avoid having to paint Stalin.)

It would be hard to find a greater opposite to the severe and principled Mukhina than the painter Alexander Gerasimov, who received the Stalin Prize for his painting Stalin and Voroshilov at the Kremlin; most memoirists depict him as a cynical opportunist. Gerasimov always underscored his birth to a peasant family of former serfs: this gave him substantive preeminence in Soviet society over the “socially alien” merchant’s daughter Mukhina. In his youth an epigone of the French Impressionists, Gerasimov began denouncing them publicly as decadent and formalist as soon as the Party directive was announced.

A stocky, curly-haired man who swore freely and sported a foppish, thin mustache, Gerasimov privately enjoyed painting nudes, while millions of reproductions circulated around the country of his formal portraits of Lenin, Stalin, and Marshal Kliment Voroshilov, patron and friend of Gerasimov (who often stopped by the artist’s studio to see the latest depiction of a plump nude beauty).

As president of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, created in 1947 in imitation of the prerevolutionary one, Gerasimov became “chief artist” of the land and a symbol of socialist realism in art, paid fantastic sums by the state for the huge, multifigured official canvases churned out in his studio. Yet to demonstrate his unbreakable bonds with his folksy past, he had his chauffeur pile hay in the backseat of his state-supplied limousine, and he rode up front.

Gerasimov was a colorful figure, but his paintings, recipients of many awards (including four Stalin Prizes and gold medals at the World’s Fairs in Paris and Brussels), are now considered artistically uninteresting: anemic in composition and technically inept. Critics are as dismissive of other idols of socialist realism, even though there were true painterly virtuosi among them: Isaak Brodsky, one of Repin’s favorite students, Vassily Efanov, and Alexander Laktionov.

But is it even possible to judge the work of Gerasimov and his socialist realist colleagues using purely artistic criteria that are based on the aesthetic of the Western avant-garde of the last hundred years while ignoring their social function in Stalin’s society?

Such asocial methods of evaluation until recently were applied to the cultural artifacts of non-European traditions—the sculptures and masks of Asia, Africa, and Oceania. They were ritual objects, valued by their peoples and tribes for their social utility rather than their artistic merit. In the West the artifacts were viewed through the prism of the prevalent modernist aesthetic—what resembled it got high marks, the rest was considered less “interesting,” and therefore, less artistically valuable. Now, this approach is being reconsidered.

The art of Stalin’s era apparently must be treated as ritual to a high degree. In that sense, we can discover intriguing roots of socialist realism (which Western and Russian art historians have recently been examining). At the source of socialist realism stood Gorky and Lunacharsky, who before the revolution toyed with quasi-religious cultural ideas (for which they were berated by Lenin), and the slogan of socialist realism was introduced by Stalin, a former Orthodox seminarian. Both Lunacharsky and Gorky spoke often of the shamanistic influence of art on human behavior. Stalin did not speak of that aloud, but he undoubtedly sensed the magical powers of art as something real; this was noted by Osip Mandelstam: “That is a superstition with him [Stalin]. He thinks we poets are shamans.”⁴

Gorky considered socialist realism a tool to “arouse a revolutionary attitude toward reality, an attitude that will practically change the world.”⁵ Here, Gorky is apparently referring to the ritual, magical role of socialist realism. Lunacharsky was even more frank: “Soviet art is in no essential way different from religious art.”⁶

As befitted a professional politician, Stalin avoided frank declarations but persistently pushed Soviet culture to perform quasi-religious functions: novels had to play the part of lives of the saints, plays and films of religious mysteries, and paintings of icons. The cult of the late Lenin portrayed him as God the Father, with Stalin as the son. Lenin, and after his death, Stalin, were displayed in a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square, embalmed as the relics of Communist saints.

The architecture of the Stalin period served the same goal. Even the subway, which in Western cities had strictly utilitarian purposes, in Moscow was used as a showcase, the stations secular temples that were part of the obligatory tour for foreigners and meant to inspire ritual awe in them as well as in Soviet citizens. The anticlerical skeptic Malraux is said to have responded to the underground miracle with a bon mot: “Un peu trop de metro.”⁷