The eating and drinking lasted until 8:00 a.m., in what the Comintern head Dimitrov described as “an unforgettable night.”160 The mischievous Raikin further recalled that when the gathering finally ended, Khrushchev followed Stalin to the exit, clinging to the despot’s waist.161 Alexander Pirogov (b. 1899), the great bass—and the youngest USSR People’s Artist ever—also received his summons to the Grand Kremlin Palace birthday bash while celebrations were well under way. He had just finished singing Glinka’s Ivan Susanin at the Bolshoi and, exhausted, declined the “invitation.” His aghast friends and relatives expected his arrest. Pirogov was nonplussed. “It’s more difficult to repress me than a people’s commissar,” he is said to have asserted. “A people’s commissar is a political figure, and few are those who could not be replaced in the government. But with a famous actor it’s harder.”162
Sergei Prokofyev had composed a special cantata for Stalin, Zdravitsa (“Hail”), using folk melodies; it was performed by Nikolai Golovanov, director of the USSR’s Great Symphony Orchestra, which played classical music for Soviet radio.163 The Red Army chorus gave a series of special performances, and the theme of Stalin as “Leader and Architect of the Red Army” received renewed emphasis. Stalin’s image was sewn into Turkmen and Ukrainian carpets, northern bone carvings, miniature Palekh lacquer boxes. The State Tretyakov Gallery mounted Stalin and the People of the Soviet Land in the Fine Arts, featuring a mass of oil paintings, busts, engravings, and book illustrations. “The will of millions long ago tasked art with the theme of Stalin as the central theme,” wrote one summary.164 Among the most celebrated works was Alexander Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, depicting them standing tall, dressed in military overcoats and caps, against a cloudy sky and the Kremlin walls and towers.165 Most artists had to paint Stalin from retouched photographs, but the despot had sat for Gerasimov.166 A livelier composition, An Unforgettable Meeting (1937) by Vasily Yefanov, depicted Stalin smiling and grasping, with both hands, the hand of a young maiden at a reception for female activists in heavy industry; in a wood-paneled Kremlin room laden with flowers, Orjonikidze, Molotov, Khrushchev, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Budyonny, Kalinin, and the now deceased Krupskaya are shown applauding.167
Stalin received his first Order of Lenin, a decade after the award had been introduced. As bards in each Union republic outdid one another in panegyrics, “Stalin Prizes” were inaugurated for the country’s top scientists, military designers, and artists—the top awards (“first class”) came with a staggering cash award of 100,000 rubles, at a time when yearly wages averaged perhaps 10,000.168 More than 4,000 students received Stalin scholarships. The party organized group tours of the buildings in which Stalin had lived, in Solvychegodsk, Tbilisi, and Gori. A new museum of the old Bolshevik underground in Baku was opened.169 Soviet newsreels depicted how factories all across the country had fulfilled production pledges for the approaching occasion, but also showed pilgrimages to Stalin’s birth hovel in Gori, even though Stalin had denied TASS permission to convey the hordes’ enthusiasm.170 “Who won at ‘Krivi’ [Georgian boxing]? Soso!” recalled Grigory Elisabedashvili, a school chum at both the Gori parish school and Tiflis seminary. “Who could throw the ball the farthest? Soso! At the same time who could read the most books? Soso! . . . Who sings better and more enchantingly than everyone? Soso!” Stalin forbade publication of these recollections, noting that, “apart from everything else, the author shamelessly lied.”171
The despot did authorize Pravda (December 21) to carry a new “short biography,” in twelve broadsheet pages (double the usual edition), produced by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute; it was also published as an eighty-eight-page book, with an initial print run of more than 1 million. Upon receiving his copy, Stalin told his aides that he had “no time to look at it.” In fact, he had changed some wording, made insertions, cut text, and substituted some different photographs.172 The link to Lenin remained the touchstone. “He thinks about Lenin always; even when his thoughts are deep in problems that require decisions, his hand automatically, machine-like, writes on a sheet of paper, ‘Lenin—friend . . . teacher,’” Poskryobyshev and Dvinsky, Stalin’s two top aides, wrote in Pravda. “Often at the end of the workday we remove papers from his desk with these very words written along and across them.”173
