386. Katerina Clark presents “Soviet socialist realism as a canonical doctrine defined by its patristic texts,” and offers an “official short list of model novels.” For Boris Groys, socialist realism just signifies “the art of the Stalin period.” Evgeny Dobrenko calls socialist realism “the USSR’s most successful industry . . . a machine for distilling Soviet reality into socialism.” Clark, Soviet Novel, 3, appendix B; Groys, Total Art of Stalinism, 72; Dobrenko, Political Economy of Socialist Realism, 5–6.
387. Jelagin, Taming of the Arts, 42–3. Jelagin was himself class enemy, like his stand-partner, “Count” Sheremetyev. See also Smrž, Symphonic Stalinism.
388. Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 87, 109. As Bown notes, there is scant information on Stalin’s views on painting (184). Bown rehabilitates socialist realist visual art by arguing that avant-garde artists changed their style voluntarily in order to make their work widely accessible, a goal they passionately wanted to achieve. Margarita Tupitsyn’s work on photography—which the authorities did not consider an art form, and therefore for which no union was established—also argues that the Soviet version of the avant-garde aesthetic project was about mass media, such as the photograph in a mass-produced journal, and mass culture. Christina Kiaer, in her work on Alexaander Deneika, attempts to show how socialist realism was avant-garde. These works follow from Boris Groys’s provocation. Tupitsyn, Soviet Photograph; Kiaer, “Was Socialist Realism Forced Labor?,” 45; Kiaer, Imagine No Possessions. See also Susan Reid, “Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror”; Reid, “In the Name of the People,” 716; and Johnson, “Alternative Histories of Soviet Visual Culture.” Stalin had become the subject of oil paintings in 1928, 1931, and 1932 by the Leningrad-based artist Isaac Brodsky (b. 1883), who depicted him in exaggerated size, with an iconic copy of Pravda on the desk. In 1934, Brodsky became the first painter to receive the Order of Lenin. That same year Alexander Gerasimov (b. 1881), a traditional realist before the revolution (when he opposed the avant-garde) and a Red Army veteran of the civil war, completed his Stalin Gives His Report to the 17th Party Congress. Gersaimov, too, favored a larger-than-life heroic realism. Pravda, April 10, 1934, and Feb. 6, 1935. Mikhail Avilov painted The Arrival of Comrade Stalin at the First Cavalry in 1919 for the 1933 exhibition “15 Years of the Red Army.” Pravda, Aug. 13, 1933. Yevgeny Katsman recorded Stalin’s reaction to the exhibition: “Next to Nikonov’s picture, Stalin said, when looking at Kolchak with a revolver in his hand, ‘he wants to shoot himself.’ . . . When we got to Avilov, Stalin saw himself painted, laughed and immediately turned his eyes to other works. Then back to Avilov, and he examined himself longer.” Plamper, Stalin Cult, 136–7 (citing RGALI, f. 2368, op. 2, d. 36, l. 12–3).
389. The sales were carried out by the foreign trade commissariat, which had no expertise in art treasures and formed a state company, Antiquariat. Some of the paintings that were sold, along with icons, furniture, jewelry, and antiquarian books, came from museum collections, but many were looted from the public or churches. The first paintings sold were bartered for oil (in 1930). Andrew Mellon, the U.S. secretary of the treasury, purchased twenty-one of the paintings in 1931, for $6.65 million; one painting alone sold for $1.166 million, then the largest amount ever paid. “‘Nuzhen li nam ermitazh’,” 106–10 (APRF, f. 3, op. 42, d. 141, I ll.89–90, 94–95ob.); Stetsky to Kaganovich; 94–95ob.: Lergan to Stalina); Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 179 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 162, d. 12, l. 183); Odom and Salmond, Treasures into Tractors. Mellon would donate the art in 1937 to the U.S. government in Washington, where they would form the basis of the National Gallery. The Metropolitan Museum of Art bought some. Stetsky wrote to Kaganovich (Oct. 23, 1933) that the secretive process had resulted in rumors of a firesale, lowering prices, and that the Hermitage Museum had sunk from third-ranked in the world to perhaps seventeenth. The politburo resolved to terminate the sales on Nov. 15, 1933. Ilin and Semenova, Prodannye Sokrovisha Rossii. Hermitage deputy director Iosif Orbeli soon replaced his boss (Legran), who had complied with the sales as mandated by the regime. Megrelidze, Iosif Orbeli; Iubashian, Akademik Iosif Orbeli.
390. Bown, Socialist Realist Painting, 87, 109.
