The authors and editors of this collection have taken an unorthodox approach to Stalinist culture. There is very little in the book on Socialist Realism, the Zhdanovshchina, or the close ideological supervision of the intelligentsia by Stalin and the party – topics the reader would expect to be covered here. Instead of taking this traditional route, Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman have brought together a collection of essays examining the notion of space in Stalinist culture, meaning both social and discursive space. There are many ways to approach the spatial dimension of Stalinism: as the actual physical transformation of nature in Stalin’s time, as the utilization of space in Stalinist art, and as the “imaginary geography” of socialism reflected in ideology, art, and everyday life. The authors are primarily concerned with art and ideology, but the reader soon realizes that these three notions of space are analytical categories that may be convenient for later researchers but are barely distinguishable from each other in Stalinist culture. Portraying, imagining, and building socialism were all parts of the same highly ideological process.
In the Introduction Naiman attempts to answer the question editors of all collections find challenging: what do the articles have in common? Certainly not a uniform theoretical or methodological approach, as would have been expected in Stalin’s time, but perhaps the overcoming of disciplinary boundaries and attention to the discursive production of space. Naiman finds a good term for this; he calls the essays “studies of ideological poetics” dealing with “ideology’s attempt to climb into another dimension and transcend the distinction between landscape and space” (P. xiii). Less successful, in my opinion, is the use of Bakhtin’s theory of “chronotope” (a concept of space common to a certain historical period) as a theoretical framework for the book. Only a minority of authors follow Naiman in evoking this theory, and those who do both understand it differently and have diverging opinions on its usefulness. A less fanciful theoretical model – that of relations between the center and the periphery as represented in Stalinist culture – would provide a common ground for most contributors, but the trouble is that they disagree in principle on what this relationship was. Naiman writes, “Nearly all the contributors emphasize the paradoxical centrality of the periphery in the Stalinist landscape” (P. xv), but I beg to differ. Yes, many authors do refer to the periphery’s importance in the imaginary landscape of Stalinism – importance as the center’s “other” or “clean slate” ideal for building the society of the future – yet the majority agrees that the “central” discursive position in Stalinist cultural geography clearly belongs to Moscow.
Of course, it would have been surprising, indeed troubling, if the thirteen authors coming from diverse disciplines and living in different countries were to agree on a single theoretical model. The collection’s value lies precisely in the dissimilarity of methodological approaches and theoretical interpretations of the notion of space in Stalinist culture. I also see in a positive light the difficulties the editors apparently had in dividing the contributions into three parts, “Space and Art,” “Mobilizing the Soviet Subject,” and “The Blank Page.” It would have been disappointing to see the articles neatly divided into those that discuss the concept of space in literature and the arts, the cultural construction of space in everyday life, and the portrayal of exotic or remote locales. As it is, however, some chapters can easily be transferred from one part to another, and readers with a background in history would want to group them differently than those trained as literary scholars. I, for one, would put Richard Taylor’s chapter on the topography of utopia in the Stalinist musical (Part Two) with Hans Gьnther’s paper on the Mother archetype in the Soviet mass song (Part One). Also, Boris Groys in his philosophical essay on totalitarian art (Part One) spends much time analyzing the Moscow Metro, on which topic there is also a paper by Mikhail Rykhlin in Part Three. Such potential interchangeability of articles among the three parts is not a sign of poor organization but of the collection’s deeper structural coherence, with related topics often being approached differently in separate places. That the articles do not easily fall into places (“spaces”) according to their subject matter is a refreshing feature in a book dealing with Stalinist ideology of space and its totalizing aspirations.
While in the Introduction Naiman searches for the theoretical approaches common to the collection’s participants, Katerina Clark in her opening chapter on “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space” introduces the conceptual models that the reader will encounter frequently in later chapters. Clark sees the spatial binary “high-low” or “sacred-profane” as central to Stalinist culture’s metaphorical system, with architecture, just like the Orthodox icon, existing simultaneously in two orders of reality: “The inside of a given building might be defined largely by its mundane function (for example, as the location of a Soviet institution) while outside it functioned as a sacred monument to inspire awe and contemplation” (P. 11). The exception was the Kremlin, sacred both inside and outside, and also positioned at the center of the country’s spatial hierarchy. Many novels and films in Stalin’s time feature a symbolic opposition between the periphery, representing the past, and Moscow, representing the future – the modern capital where the main characters strive to go and where magical things can happen. The Palace of Soviets as the highest and most sacred, yet explicitly modern, building was to provide Moscow with its own symbolic center, but it was never constructed.
The theme of centralized, sacrally charged authority as reflected in Soviet art carries over into Jan Plamper’s chapter on “The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult.” The author’s main focus is on painting and, in particular, on the spatial arrangement of canvases featuring Stalin. Plamper shows convincingly that, as a rule, Stalin was positioned in the center of a painting, often in the exact geometrical center, with other personages arranged in concentric circles grouped around him; other leaders closest to him, and the “people” in the outer circle. All the paintings reproduced and discussed in the chapter fit this model well, except one: Aleksandr Gerasimov’s Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin (1938). Ironically, this is the one Plamper considers his best example and the one he spends most time on, primarily because of the telling arrangement of background details. But Voroshilov is actually in the painting’s center; both personages stare thoughtfully in the same direction; and there seems to be nothing in the painting per se indicating Stalin’s superiority – unless the viewer knows that the person on the left is the leader.
A Soviet person was also very familiar with the symbolic meaning of a park bench in Gorki outside Moscow; the place where the ailing Lenin spent his last years. Lenin’s park bench appeared repeatedly in stories and photographs, including the famous fake photo of Stalin visiting Lenin in Gorki, as Oksana Bulgakowa shows in her chapter on spatial figures in Stalinist cinema. The bench is featured as a sacred symbol in Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934), in which a photograph of Lenin sitting on the bench is inserted once into the montage sequence of the empty bench during different times of the year. In Mikhail Chiaureli’s The Vow (1946) Stalin is shown contemplating in front of the empty bench (pp. 55-56). Moscow, too, functions in contemporary cinema as a symbol, that of a socialist future, which explains why many directors of the time built all the sets in the studio to present Moscow as it would look after the completion of all the grandiose construction projects – including the cardboard Palace of Soviets shown in Aleksandr Medvedkin’s New Moscow (1938).
I am a bit uneasy, however, about the interpretations found in the article’s last section on Lev Kuleshov’s 1941 film, The Siberians. In this movie for young adults, two boys and a girl in a Siberian village dream of meeting Stalin, who decades earlier had lived in exile here. The boys find a pipe Stalin had lost and take it to Moscow, while the girl meets Stalin in her dreams. Bulgakowa claims that this “father complex” of the young protagonists is “attributed by Kuleshov to infantile neuroses (really, to the neuroses of the whole nation)” (P. 71), while the pipe functions as a classic fetish (P. 73). I think Bulgakowa imputes her own, and very interesting, psychological reading to an unsuspecting Kuleshov, who was trying to make a good Stalinist film for children, rather than diagnose the country’s “neuroses.”
After the chapters on spatial imagery in paintings and films, it is time to look at the Soviet mass song, which is the subject of Hans Gьnther’s study. If the Stalinist myth was based on the notion of the Great Family with Stalin as father, what about the (symbolic) mother? The author argues that the ancient Slavic cult of Mother Earth during the 1930s – the time when this folkloric tradition was officially revived – was combined with Marxist ideology to produce a “mother archetype” in Stalinist culture. The Motherland is characterized in Soviet mass song by broad expanses: “boundless,” “vast,” or “enormous,” as in the famous beginning of the “Song of the Motherland” from Grigorii Aleksandrov’s Circus (1936): “Broad is my motherland / Many are her forests, fields, and rivers!” But anthropomorphic features also appear regularly, especially references to the river Volga as the blood of the Motherland and Moscow as its heart.
One wonders to what body part of the Motherland a mass song would compare the Moscow Metro, one of the central subjects of Boris Groys’ article on “The Art of Totality.” The author begins with a witty suggestion that Stalinism constructed its utopian “heaven” underground, where a mythological “hell” would normally be. Designed as a communist city of the future, the Moscow Metro featured traditional architectural styles severed from their historical contexts and combined with Soviet propaganda images, as well as illumination by bright artificial light, so typical of the avant-garde. According to Groys, what might appear to be a mixture of artistic styles or retrograde architectural thinking in Stalinist culture was actually a radical attempt to abolish the gulf between high and mass culture, thus reaching the totality to which a totalitarian culture strives (P. 102).
In her chapter, Randy Cox discusses a different way of bringing together the high and mass cultures – in this case, the cultures of consumption. Her study of spatial notions in Soviet commercial advertising highlights the transition during the 1930s from politically-charged commercials of the NEP era to the propaganda of “cultured consumption” that “plac[ed] the private, consumer sphere over the productive sphere and redefin[ed] public space as sentimentalized leisure space” (P. 127). The class iconography and cubist language of earlier ads gave way to Westernized images of glamour and beauty on posters and in shop windows. Cox then proceeds to examine what she calls the “fantasy world of Soviet advertising” – the content of commercial posters and ads. The locale pictured in them is mostly urban and affluent, while the characters are usually Caucasian and young. But the big question remains: why did Stalinist ideologues approve mass advertisement of luxury consumer goods in a society where the overwhelming majority still lived a hand-to-mouth existence? Cox’s answer is that the commercials “incited desire for goods that only the state could provide” in exchange for loyalty and good work. Advertising, thus, was “part of the disciplinary apparatus” (P. 157).
The three case studies in Evgeny Dobrenko’s chapter, “The Art of Social Navigation: The Cultural Topography of the Stalin Era” also deal with cultural products that embodied the Stalinist state’s ideological agenda: postage stamps, a tourist magazine, and a popular geography book for young adults. The stamps of Stalin’s time featured mostly urban and industrial landscapes as opposed to portraits and symbols – although I am under the impression that Dobrenko uses the word “landscape” in the meaning it has in philately rather than in art history. His examples of “landscapes” include Lenin giving a speech from atop an armored vehicle at the Finland Station, the storming of the Winter Palace, and Komsomol members sitting in a student auditorium (Pp. 169 and 175). In any case, contemporary buildings and scenes from Soviet life clearly predominate on Stalinist stamps, and Moscow is featured more often than any “periphery.” In contrast, the tourist magazine Na sushe i na more describes the periphery, where hikers (and readers) conquer and overcome nature, while becoming stronger and fitter. Finally, Nikolai Mikhailov’s popular book, Map of the Motherland (1947) contains very few general maps – paranoia about foreign spies hunting for detailed maps was typical of Stalinist culture – but instead narrates Soviet geography as a story of communists transforming nature. The reader’s imaginary journey has to end, of course, in the heart of the country, in Moscow, and even more precisely, in the heart of Moscow, the Kremlin: “The rays that bring happiness to the people radiate from here. Here, in the Kremlin, Stalin lives and works – the leader, friend, teacher, and great architect of communism” (P. 199).
As Richard Taylor shows in his chapter on the topography of the Stalinist musical, the cosmography presented there was similar, but the two fathers of the genre, Georgii Aleksandrov and Ivan Pyr’ev, charted slightly different itineraries for their heroes. Aleksandrov’s musicals are geographically centripetal, with both The Jolly Fellows and Volga-Volga portraying a journey to Moscow, a voyage of self-discovery for the main characters. Pyr’ev, however, “explore[s] the periphery and validate[s] it as part of the overall utopia” (P. 210). In Tractor Drivers, the main hero travels from the Far East to a Ukrainian kolkhoz, while in The Kuban Cossacks, the leading characters remain in the periphery, portrayed as the “Potemkin village.” The All-Union Agricultural Exhibition in Moscow functions in Stalin-era cinema as a complex sign; it represents Moscow to the periphery, while in Moscow “it represents the country in all its diversity” (P. 212).
The representation of the country in documentaries is the topic of Emma Widdis’ article, “To Explore or Conquer?” This excellent text is a bit of a misfit in the collection because it focuses on documentaries from the 1920s, which portrayed space as decentered and fragmented; both because of the aesthetic vision of such avant-garde directors as Vertov and because the policy of korenizatsiia favored the non-Russian periphery, where many of these filmmakers headed. Widdis proposes the term “exploration” for such “nonassimilative investigation of space in which difference is emphasized over sameness and the quest for information is differentiated from control” (P. 221). In contrast, the use of panoramic shots and long takes in the 1930s, including the increasingly popular aerial shots, “offers a controlling gaze that maps and orders” (P. 235).
Indeed, aviation facilitated the boldest and most mythologized journeys of exploration (and conquest) of Stalin’s time: expeditions to the Arctic. John McCannon in his chapter on “Tabula Rasa in the North” discusses the Arctic as the mythical landscape in Stalinist popular culture and a key element in Soviet propaganda in the 1930s. The Arctic of the polar pilots and the Cheliuskin expedition was pictured in mass media as the ultimate periphery, a land of silence and wilderness. Yet the civilizing influence of Moscow could reach even there, transforming the remotest polar wasteland into a land of socialism. Created on a perfect blank slate, Soviet settlements like Igarka and temporary “advance posts,” such as the Cheliuskinites’ camp pitched on the ice, were presented in mass culture as perfect communist collectives complete with political education circles, vibrant cultural life, and socialist competition. Popular celebrations of these polar exploits promoted the idea that only a Soviet person could conquer the Arctic, and all Soviet people thus lived in the land of heroes.
But for most Soviet people the Arctic expeditions remained imaginary, while millions of them experienced the Moscow Metro as a real, but no less mythological, Stalinist landscape. Mikhail Ryklin, in his chapter on the discourse of the Moscow Metro, analyzes this project as an example of symbolic architecture aimed at maintaining social cohesion. The palace-like stations adorned by enormous quantities of semiprecious stones and brightly lit by daylight lamps functioned in Stalinist culture as an ideal utopian place, built by and for the common people. In a country with a chronic shortage of housing, the people could go underground on their way to work and see the communist future there. Twelve of the thirteen stations on the first line had central island platforms – technically more difficult to build than the side platforms, but important symbolically “as the triumph of the principle of collective organization” (P. 275).
Passengers departing from the single central platform could also be seen as another manifestation of the complex intermingling of space and collectivity in Russian history, one of the central subjects of Mikhail Epstein’s concluding chapter on “Russo-Soviet Topoi.” As the author confesses, much of the text was originally written in Moscow during the early 1980s. This is evident in the constant use of alliterations (which almost always lose much of their spark in translation and require Russian originals in brackets) and certain descriptives that today’s Western scholar would not hazard (well-dressed Soviet women with large shopping bags as “a genuine mixture of the European and the Asiatic” on P. 299). Epstein’s “sketches,” as he calls them, are often brilliant, but in most of them the author voices grand ideas about Russian culture in general and its pre-Revolutionary period in particular. It is difficult, for example, to see how the fragment on khandra as a Russian spleen, a longing born while traveling across boundless spaces (Pp. 282-284) is relevant to an analysis of Stalinist culture. The section on spaciousness and crowding is interesting, but its main argument is that “Russian closeness is born of a desperate, heroic resistance to an equally Russian spaciousness” (P. 280). I am not sure how to apply this interpretation – at once elegant and totalizing – to Epstein’s own example of ultimate crowdedness, a Soviet concentration camp, where “density attains an improbable concentration” (P. 279) or even the preference Metro designers had for central platforms.
Overall, the diverse essays in The Landscape of Stalinism make for engaging and enlightening reading. They do not present a coherent picture of Stalinist culture, but this is appropriate because the stories they tell often focus precisely on the Stalin regime’s totalizing attempts to impose cultural coherence. In addition to the minor points mentioned earlier, my only general complaint relates to a certain incongruity between the cover art and the text. The book’s cover features a well-known 1951 poster portraying Stalin with his right hand extended upward, his forefinger pointing to the direction in life for innumerable Soviet people placed in the background. But the topic of the poster is revealed by a huge map behind Stalin’s back. It shows the new canals and hydroelectric stations then under construction – components of the so-called “great Stalin’s plan for the transformation of nature” during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The irony is that the collection does not discuss this “great Stalin’s plan” at all, and very few of its authors incorporate postwar Stalinist culture in their analyses. For decades books on Stalinism have focused on the 1930s. Social and political historians of Stalinism are now moving into the postwar era, and it is high time for cultural historians to follow suit.