Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The "Industry of Socialism

Socialist Realism in theStalinist Terror: The Industryof Socialism Art Exhibition,1935–41

SUSAN E. REIDSUSAN E. REIDSUSAN E. REIDSUSAN E. REIDSUSAN E. REID

The first All-Union art exhibition, The Industry of Socialism, was initiated in 1935, ayear after the doctrine of Socialist Realism was adopted by the First Congress of SovietWriters. Conceived as a celebration of the achievements of socialist industrialization, itwas intended to open in autumn 1937 to commemorate the completion of the first two Five-Year Plans and the twentieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.1 The opening wasdelayed, however, until March 1939. This exhibition was arguably the most importantartistic event of the 1930s, both in defining the stylistic and iconographic parameters ofSocialist Realism at a particular historical moment, and in implementing, on an unprec-edented scale, the planned production of art under state patronage, in line with the central-ized control of industry and agriculture.2 It was trumpeted in advance as the advent of a newRenaissance. Twenty-five years later, when Stalinist Socialist Realism was under attackduring the Thaw, conservatives in the art world looked back nostalgically on Industry ofSocialism as a golden age for what they considered the cornerstone of Socialist Realism—thematic painting.3 Yet both archival records concerning preparations for the exhibition andreviews following its opening in 1939 cast doubt on claims for its unqualified success, ifnot for its historical significance. The picture they present is, rather, one of a monumentalfiasco, typical in many ways of the Stalinist 1930s as a whole: a grandiose project thatfoundered on purges and power struggles, recalcitrance and disarray. A study of the

1Industriia sotsializma: Tematicheskii plan vsesoiuznoi khudozhestvennoi vystavki (Moscow, 1935), 7; Rossiiskiigosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 13 (publicity for Industry ofSocialism); E. Bekreeva, “Vystavka ‘Industriia sotsializma,’” Politicheskii sobesednik (Cheliabinsk) (January 1989):22–23. I would like to thank The Russian Review’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments, and theSchool of Humanities, University of Northumbria at Newcastle upon Tyne, for supporting research for this article.

2I. Abramskii, “Vystavka ‘Industriia sotsializma,’” Iskusstvo, 1962, no. 7:25.3Ibid.; A. Bubnov, “Zhit’ bol’shimi ideiami vremeni,” Iskusstvo, 1957, no. 5:32–33.

The Russian Review 60 (April 2001): 153–84Copyright 2001 The Russian Review

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genesis, fate and significance of Industry of Socialism not only helps flesh out the bones ofthe doctrine of Socialist Realism but also affords an insight into the (mis)workings ofStalinism in the Soviet art world of the 1930s.

To attempt to answer the question “What is Socialist Realism?” it is necessary, as JørnGuldberg has argued, to study the formation of the institutional structures and practices ofthe Soviet art world, including the system of patronage, practices of hanging committees,and art criticism. For only through the practices of production, presentation, and mediationdid the term “Socialist Realism,” introduced in 1932, take on specific meanings.4 Thecriteria of Socialist Realism were defined through what Catherine Cooke, writing of Social-ist Realist architecture, calls “the feedback loop of continuous debate about success or oth-erwise of particular solutions.”5 Where, for architecture, the successive stages of the projectfor the Palace of the Soviets were paradigmatic, Industry of Socialism offers an enlighten-ing case study of the formation of Socialist Realism in the practices of fine art. No simpledefinition will emerge from this study, however. It will, rather, demonstrate the contin-gency of Socialist Realism upon political and artistic power relations at different historicalmoments. Contested between different artistic factions struggling for dominance withinthe art world, as well as among the Stalinist bureaucracies that patronized and controlledart, Socialist Realism never achieved a stable, concrete ontology.

The contribution of Industry of Socialism to the process of defining the canon in termsof style, artistic media, and genre will be my focus here, although the exhibition also playedan important part in the formation of an iconography of “reality in its revolutionary devel-opment” and a typology of the new Soviet person. The question whether Socialist Realismwas a style or a method was debated inconclusively throughout its history. The First Con-gress of Soviet Writers in 1934, which laid down the basic principles of Socialist Realism,defined it as the single “artistic method” requiring “a true, historically concrete depiction ofreality in its revolutionary development.” Although this ecumenical definition, presuppos-ing the integration of all existing loyal tendencies, said nothing about style, the first speakerin the debate at the congress declared, “We must reflect in literature the new world, the newperson, and create a new style. The “style sovietique” (stil’ sovetik) already exists.”6 Anintroduction to Socialist Realism written for foreign consumption in 1935 betrayed the

4J. Guldberg, “Socialist Realism as Institutional Practice,” in The Culture of the Stalin Period, ed. H. Günther(London, 1990), 149–77; Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism (Princeton, 1992), 6; and compare Katerina Clark,The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 2d ed. (Chicago, 1985), 3. On Socialist Realism’s theoretical formulation seeHerman Ermolaev, Soviet Literary Theories, 1917–1934: The Genesis of Socialist Realism (New York, 1977); C.Vaughan James, Soviet Socialist Realism: Origins and Theory (New York, 1973); and Margaret M. Bullitt, “To-ward a Marxist Theory of Aesthetics: The Development of Socialist Realism in the Soviet Union,” Russian Review35 (January 1976): 53–76.

5Catherine Cooke, “Beauty as a Route to the ‘Radiant future’: Responses of Soviet Architecture,” Journal ofDesign History 10, no. 2 (1997): 137–60; and see Jeffrey Brooks, “Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All aboutIt!” Slavic Review 53 (Winter 1994): 973–91.

6M. Dzhavikashvili, cited by A. G. Dement’ev, “Voprosy sotsialisticheskogo realizma na pervom vsesoiuznoms"ezde sovetskikh pisatelei,” in Iz istorii sovetskogo iskusstvovedeniia i esteticheskoi mysli 1930-kh godov, ed. V.V. Vanslov and L. F. Deniskova (Moscow, 1977), 26. The “Soviet style” was identified with Socialist Realismeven before the Congress. Adam Efros declared in 1933, “The Soviet style is already on the threshhold. ... We allknow its name ... everyone is talking about ‘Socialist Realism’” (cited in Leonid Zinger, “Dialektika tridtsatykh,”Tvorchestvo, 1989, no. 7). In 1937, MOSSKh declared artists’ task to “forge the style of our epoch, the style ofSoviet art” (RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 75, l. 24).

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slippage regarding whether it was a style or a method: “Soviet art began to master thecreative method which determined the whole of its development, vis. the method of Social-ist Realism. Naturally, the creation of a style of Socialist Realism presupposes wide com-petition among the various art tendencies.”7

The competition to define the “Soviet style of Socialist Realism” and its art-historicalgenealogy preoccupied artists and critics, with the party’s sanction, during the second halfof the 1930s, when work for Industry of Socialism was commissioned and produced.8 Forpractitioners attempting to establish themselves as exemplary exponents of Socialist Real-ism, the question of which formal techniques, historical influences, or current artistic ten-dencies would find favor were of immediate concern. Already since the early 1930s, aseries of important exhibitions and institutional measures had begun defining the param-eters of the “Soviet style.” In April 1932 the party decreed the dissolution of the plethora ofindependent artistic associations to make way for a single artists’ union uniting all loyaltendencies, at which point the Moscow Regional Union of Soviet Artists (MOSSKh) wasfounded.9 Nevertheless, the memory of former group allegiances, rivalries, and grievancescontinued to structure relations within the art world for decades to come, and the formergroup names will therefore be used here to distinguish the opposing factions. Their strugglefor power and material resources was a central determining factor on the course of events inthe Stalinist—and, indeed, post-Stalinist—art world which, contrary to the unifying prin-ciple of the 1932 decree, threatened to tear the Artists’ Union apart.10 The milestone exhibi-tion Artists of the Russian Federation after Fifteen Years held in 1932–33 consigned theavant-garde to history and lined up the main players in the contest for Socialist Realismwhich, at cost of oversimplification, may be treated contingently as two camps. On the onehand were modifications of the Russian realist tradition of the nineteenth-centuryPeredvizhniki represented by the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR).On the other were a range of more reflexive, figurative tendencies informed by recent inter-national developments from impressionism to expressionism: the “Cézannism” of the formerJack of Diamonds, exemplified by Petr Konchalovskii and Il’ia Mashkov; its successorgroup OMKh, the Society of Moscow Artists (1927–32), including Sergei Gerasimov, whichemphasized painterliness, the process and materiality of painting itself as an active meansto change the world as opposed to passive, naturalistic reflection; Four Arts (Chetyreiskusstva) including Martiros Sar’ian, Pavel Kuznetsov, and Vladimir Favorskii; and theSociety of Easel Painters (OST), committed to a cosmopolitan, modern, and expressiveform of figurative painting, notably David Shterenberg, Aleksandr Deineka, and Iurii

7A.Y. Arosev, Introduction, Art in the USSR, special edition, The Studio (Autumn 1935): 10.8See a statement by party “instructor” Sergei Dinamov, “O stile sovetskogo iskusstva,” Iskusstvo, 1935, no.

4:1–4.9The union changed its name to the Moscow Union of Soviet Artists, MSSKh, in 1938 but will be refered to

throughout as MOSSKh.10See a 1937 letter from artists requesting Molotov’s adjudication, cited in Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Intelligentsia and

Power: Client-Patron Relations in Stalin’s Russia,” in Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg: Neue Wege derForschung, ed. M. Hildermeier (Munich, 1998) 42–43. In the music world, similarly, pressures came almost asmuch from within the ranks of composers and musicians as from the party leadership and the arts bureaucracy. SeeCaroline Brooke, “Institutions and Decision-Making in Soviet Music Policy of the 1930s,” 24 (paper presented inthe Soviet Industrialisation Project series, University of Birmingham, May 1998).

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Pimenov.11 The style of Socialist Realism was to be defined in relation not only to Sovietart of the 1920s but also to more distant art-historical traditions, both indigenous and inter-national, which, according to Lenin, must be “critically assimilated.”12 However, the 1933exhibition left unresolved whether the usable past ended with the Peredvizhniki or whetherimpressionism and even postimpressionist tendencies might be legitimate influences. Thisissue of lineage remained a battle ground between the two camps. An aggressive campaignhad been under way since the 1920s, allegedly with Stalin’s blessing, to claim the mantle ofthe Peredvizhniki and appropriate the honorific “realism” for one style alone, the meticu-lously detailed illusionism exemplified by rector of the Leningrad Academy of Arts andformer student of Il’ia Repin, Isaak Brodskii. Led by Evgenii Katsman and AleksandrGerasimov, the “AKhRR camp” denigrated rival tendencies in politicized and Russian chau-vinist terms.13 Opposition to their hegemonizing impulse was led by David Shterenberg,former leader of OST and a prominent figure in the leftist art administration of the 1920s.14

In 1935, when the story of Industry of Socialism begins, Shterenberg forced a public con-frontation with the AKhRR faction, which currently dominated the leadership of MOSSKh,accusing them of monopolizing material resources and trying to impose AKhRR’s “com-mercial realism,” as he disparaged it, on all artists. His attack was supported by fellow OSTassociate Aleksandr Deineka and writer Il’ia Erenburg, and was enthusiastically endorsedfrom the floor by union members.15

THE GENESIS OF THE GENESIS OF THE GENESIS OF THE GENESIS OF THE GENESIS OF THE EXHIBITIONTHE EXHIBITIONTHE EXHIBITIONTHE EXHIBITIONTHE EXHIBITION

Industry of Socialism was the brainchild of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, commissar for heavyindustry. The commissariat set its budget in April 1935 and appointed a jury, pricing com-mission, and exhibition committee consisting both of prominent artists and critics and ofrepresentatives of the industrial bureaucracy, and chaired by B. M. Tal’, editor of the news-paper Industriia. A range of artistic tendencies was represented by its membership; thepresidium or executive was dominated, however, by former members of AKhRR, includingIsaak Brodskii, Aleksandr Gerasimov, and Georgii Riazhskii.16 It is worth noting that theCommissariat of Heavy Industry was also responsible for two other key institutions of

11A. I. Morozov, “K istorii vystavki ‘Khudozhniki RSFSR za 15 let,’ Leningrad-Moskva, 1932–1935,” Sovetskoeiskusstvoznanie, 1982, pt. 1 (Moscow, 1983).

12V. I. Lenin, “The Achievements and Difficulties of the Soviet Government,” Collected Works, vol. 29 (Mos-cow, 1965), 70.

13Vitalii Manin, “Istoriia iz istorii,” Tvorchestvo, 1989, no. 7; Zinger, “Dialektika tridtsatykh”; and Elizabeth K.Valkenier, Russian Realist Art (Ann Arbor, 1977), 150–59.

14The split into two main factions was clear by 1926 when David Shterenberg headed a petition to Stalin fromartists of OST, Makovets, 4 Iskusstva, Bytie, and Obshchestvo molodykh appealing that AKhRR’s unmeritedprivileged status was forcing members of other groups out of production. See A. Artizov and O. Naumov, comps.,Vlast’ i khudozhestvennaia intelligentsiia (Moscow, 1999), 59–65.

15“Spetsoobshchenie sekretno-politicheskogo otdela GUGB NKVD v TsK VKP(b) o konferentsii moskovskikhkhudozhnikov, 2 Dek. 1935,” in Artizov, Vlast’, 272–74.

16Elena Bekreeva, “Problemy sovetskoi zhivopisi v khudozhestvennoi kritike 30-kh godov” (Cand. diss., Mos-cow State University, 1989), 124; RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948; ibid., ed. khr. 513, l. 6 (annual accounts forIndustry of Socialism, 1939); Industriia sotsializma. Tematicheskii plan, n.p.


prewar Stalinist culture: Stakhanovism and Obshchestvennitsa, the movement of “sociallyactive wives.” Like them, the exhibition’s conception was characteristic of the reinstate-ment of social and cultural hierarchies that began in the mid-1930s; it identified SocialistRealism with the forms of “high” art canonized in the prerevolutionary academy, oil paint-ing and sculpture. And like its patron and his commissariat, it fell afoul of the Terrorof 1936–38, although, unlike many of the personnel of heavy industry, the exhibitionsurvived.

The historical importance which, looking back from the cultural struggles of the Thaw,opponents of artistic de-Stalinization would later claim for Industry of Socialism was that itestablished the supremacy of the “thematic principle”: artists were contracted to producepaintings and sculptures on predetermined themes subordinate to a master narrative. The-matic painting and thematic exhibitions had been vigorously promoted in the 1920s byAKhRR in the face of the modernist repudiation of narrative. For Industry of Socialism thescript, or “Thematic Plan,” consisted of an eighty-page handbook published by the Com-missariat of Heavy Industry and worked out, Tal’ claimed, “with the active participation ofa number of masters of art and workers of industry.” As Ordzhonikidze conceived it, theexhibition was “to reflect, in artistic works by the best masters of fine art, the successes ofsocialist industrialization in the Soviet land.” The artists’ brief was to show the transforma-tion of the “backward, impoverished, powerless old Russian Empire” into “the leadingindustrial, flourishing, powerful, and joyful Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”: to de-pict, in other words, “reality in its revolutionary development,” in accordance with the 1934definition of Socialist Realism. Titles contrasting “the old and the new” figured promi-nently in the Thematic Plan, identifying the benefits of industrialization with socialist mod-ernization in all aspects of Soviet life. Organized into twelve sections, it began with thehistory of the Revolution and Civil War, electrification under Lenin, and the exploration ofthe Soviet Union’s natural resources as the basis for rapid industrialization and progresstoward self-sufficiency. The fifth section, “The Country Transformed,” was by far the larg-est, listing a plethora of themes concerning the participation of all regions and republics inthe process of Soviet modernization, including the reconstruction of Moscow and the Metro,balloon flight, abundance in the Urals, the Volga port Sormovo, the railway opening up theTaiga, the transformation of backward and oppressed former colonies into socialist indus-trialized regions, and the emancipation of women (“The first light bulb in the kishliak isswitched on”; “A Kazak woman driver!”). Section six, “The USSR Has Become Metallic,”then concentrated on metallurgical industries, including, alongside portraits of various leadersvisiting major plants, themes about the employment of women in foundries and the appren-ticeship of son to father. A sense of immediacy and drama was lent by titles based on recentevents, even accidents, with references to relevant newspaper reports helpfully included.Four further sections explored the benefits of industry for agriculture, transportation, de-fense, and everyday life and culture. The latter section strayed from the focus on heavyindustrial production to include such themes as “Delegates of Congress of kolkhozniki at anexhibition of consumer goods” and even “Kolkhozniki look at the album Industry of Social-ism” which, in a rare instance of self-reflexivity, was to project how the Moscow art exhibi-tion would enter every Soviet person’s life through mechanical reproduction. Finally, there

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was a set of satirical themes against the Soviet Union’s enemies and a triumphal conclusionregarding the Soviet Union’s world position.17

On the basis of the Thematic Plan all professional artists—members of either the Art-ists’ Union or of the less prestigious City Committee of Artists (Gorkom)—were invited topresent preliminary sketches to the jury on 15 January 1936.18 If their sketches were ap-proved they signed a contract to produce work for the exhibition and received an advanceagainst a price set by the evaluating commission according to genre, size, medium, com-plexity, and the artist’s standing.19 In addition, the participation of some well-establishedartists was actively solicited and their commission negotiated. The commissariat dispatcheda select few on paid trips around the country to acquaint themselves with the achievementsof the Five-Year Plans and meet their subject and audience, the working masses. PainterArkadii Rylov, who took part in a cruise down the Volga, subsequently recalled the impres-sion made on him by the sight of tractor factory workers bending red hot steel to their will,while the exhibition’s responsible secretary, caricaturist Isaak Abramskii, fondly remem-bered the huge ball held at the end of the trip for artists to meet workers. Tired but happy inthe knowledge that they had “drawn closer to the Soviet working people” and “got to knowlife,” the artists returned home to work on their sketches.20

The significance of these assignments was enormous, exhibition guides would latertell viewers, for “here was born the new artist of the present day.” Indeed, Industry ofSocialism was an exercise in integrating artists into socially useful, planned production: theromantic and modernist paradigm of the individualistic creative genius working in myste-rious and unaccountable ways was to be superseded by the industrial model of “engineer ofhuman souls,” as Stalin reputedly called them. Artists were now paid employees fulfillingthe social command in accordance with a predetermined master plan.21 While the birth ofplanned, socialist art production gave cause for official jubilation, it was not necessarilywelcomed by all artists, even though the thematic principle had been pioneered by artiststhemselves, specifically by AKhRR. Many perceived it as a slight on the specific means ofvisual art and a curtailment of their professional autonomy, as would become clear in thecourse of preparations for the exhibition; the reduction of art to the illustration of a script—preconceived by a committee, published, and hence subject to screening and censorship—not only marginalized aesthetic criteria but facilitated external, bureaucratic direction ofboth the production and the reception of art.

17Industriia sotsializma. Tematicheskii plan; RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948 (publicity for the exhibition);Bekreeva, “Problemy sovetskoi zhivopisi,” 124. On thematic plans in general compare G. N. Iakovleva, “Put’totalitarnoi ideologii k kartine,” in The Aesthetic Arsenal: Socialist Realism under Stalin, ed. M. Banks (LongIsland City, NY, 1993), 90–94.

18RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 76 (closed session of board of MOSSKh, 11 January 1936).19RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513, ll. 28–47; Matthew Cullerne Bown, Socialist Realist Painting (New Haven,

1998), 136.20Abramskii, “Vystavka,” 26. Those privileged with komandirovki included former AKhRR associates such as

Evgenii Katsman, Fedor Bogorodskii, Viktor Perel’man, Nikolai Denisovskii, Georgii Riazhskii, and Boris Ioganson,but also representatives of other tendencies such as David Shterenberg and Ekaterina Zernova, Sergei Pakhomov,Pavel Kuznetsov, and Il’ia Mashkov.

21RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, ll. 13–14 (script of General Tour of Industry of Socialism). See alsoBrooks, “Socialist Realism in Pravda.”


Just two days after the jury allocated the commissions, on 17 January 1936, the Cen-tral Committee established a new authority to bring theatre, music, cinema, and the visualarts under closer ideological control, the All-Union Arts Committee.22 Very soon the ArtsCommittee began to intervene in Industry of Socialism, threatening to organize “prophylac-tic” consultative commissions to prevent “wastage” by vetting work in progress.23 Artistsstarted work for Ordzhonikidze’s exhibition just as the Arts Committee launched a vitu-perative campaign in the party press against the perpetrators of “petit-bourgeois formalism”in each of the arts. The integrative and relatively inclusive cultural policy inaugurated bythe party decree of 1932 was abandoned.24 Where, in 1933, impressionism and Russian“Cézannism” were admitted, with reservations, as legitimate sources for the “Soviet style,”critics now declared impressionism the beginning of bourgeois art’s decline into subjectiv-ism and formalism, the influence of which must be expunged from Soviet art.25

The purge of formalism in the arts took place against the backdrop of the Great Terrorof 1936–38. Much further research is required to illuminate the dynamics and scope of thePurges in the art world, and the intertwining of artistic and material interests with relationsof power and patronage. One effect was to curtail the relative independence of artisticinstitutions, notably the art cooperative Vsekokhudozhnik and MOSSKh. A “review” ofunion membership was undertaken, and in May 1937, amid mutual recriminations andslander, its executive, currently dominated by moderates, was ousted.26 Although landscapepainter Sergei Gerasimov appears to have remained its president until at least the end of1937, he was then replaced by Aleksandr Gerasimov, a leader of the AKhRR camp andprotégé of Commissar of Defense Kliment Voroshilov.27 Aleksandr Gerasimov presided

22The initiative was apparently Stalin’s in a Politburo decree of 16 December 1935, “Ob Organizatsii Vsesoiuznogokomiteta po delam iskusstv (tov. Stalin)” (Artizov, Vlast’, 281). On the Arts Committee see Kurt London, TheSeven Soviet Arts (New Haven, 1938); Juri Jelagin, Taming of the Arts (New York, 1951); and its archive, RGALI,fond 962.

23RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 85, l. 3 (meeting of board of MOSSKh, 22 December 1936).24The “discussion of formalism” was the party’s first directive to the Arts Committee according to its president,

Platon Kerzhentsev (Manin, “Istoriia,” 12). One of the first attacks on formalism in visual art was “O khudozhnikakh-pachkunakh,” Pravda, 1 March 1936. In May 1936 the Arts Committee requested Stalin’s authorization to purgeart museums of formalist work and to organize special exhibitions of Repin, Surikov, and Rembrandt (Artizov,Vlast’, 308–9).

25P. Lebedev, “Protiv formalizma v sovetskom iskusstve,” Pod znamenem marksizma, 1936, no. 6, reprinted inProtiv formalizma i naturalizma v iskusstve (Moscow, 1937), 45. See also N. V. Iavorskaia, “Problemaimpressionizma v sovetskom iskusstvoznanii i khudozhestvennoi kritike poslednikh desiatiletii,” in Iavorskaia, Izistorii Sovetskogo iskusstvoznaniia: O frantsuzskom iskusstve XIX–XX vekov (Moscow, 1987), 69–70. For a neo-Stalinist account of discussions of naturalism and formalism in the thirties see E. I. Savost’ianov, “Problemyiskusstva sotsialisticheskogo realizma v sovetsksoi khudozhestvennoi kritike 30-kh godov,” Sovetskoeiskusstvoznanie, 1978, no. 1 (Moscow, 1979), 307–38.

26MOSSKh lost its independent publishing house and its editors were purged (RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr.85, l. 17). Vsekokhudozhnik was harshly attacked in 1936 and its director Iuvenalii Slavinskii and his successorEdel’son were purged (RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 196 [meeting of aktiv of Vsekokhudozhnik, 10, 13 April1937]); ibid., ed. khr. 200–205; ibid., f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126 (meeting of MOSSKh board, 19 September 1937);“Prezrennye vragi naroda,” Iskusstvo, 1936, no. 4:iv; and Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (Oxford,1991), 132.

27Sergei Gerasimov chaired a meeting of MOSSKh on 19 November 1937 (RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126).Cullerne Bown states that Aleksandr took over in June 1938 but admits uncertain chronology (Socialist RealistPainting, 135, 474 n.15); idem, “Aleksandr Gerasimov,” in Art of the Soviets, ed. M. Cullerne Bown and B. Taylor

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over a campaign against influential individuals and tendencies which, prior to the dissolu-tion of independent associations in 1932, had rivalled AKhRR’s bid for artistic leadership.While we must be wary of reducing relations in the art world to a one-dimensional opposi-tion of “goodies and baddies”—Katsman’s position, for example was more complex, whilemuch of Gerasimov’s work showed an interest in French impressionism—it appears thatKatsman, Gerasimov, Nikolai Denisovskii, and other AKhRR artists took the lead in de-nouncing their colleagues, often in anti-Semitic or Russian chauvinist terms: Katsman hinteddarkly that the critics Adam Efros, Osip Beskin, and the responsible secretary of MOSSKh,A. M. Gol’dshliak, had neglected the question of Russian artistic tradition.28 Influentialartists and theoreticians whose personal authority among artists represented a threat toAKhRR’s hegemony were denigrated in the press, including Shterenberg, Vladimir Favorskii,Vladimir Tatlin, Aleksandr Tyshler, Nikolai Punin, Ivan Matsa, and Adam Efros.29 Mean-while, Oktiabr’, founded in 1928 on the platform of enthusiasm for new technological artforms such as photomontage, was “unmasked” as a “Bukharinite-Trotskyite Organization.”30

Ordzhonikidze died in suspicious circumstances (probably by suicide), and final prepa-rations for the exhibition he had sponsored to celebrate the achievements of his commis-sariat coincided with an avalanche of repressions on the cadres of heavy industry. Therevelation that high-level personnel closely involved in organizing Industry of Socialismwere enemies of the people—notably Ordzhonikidze’s deputy and chair of Gosbank, IuriiPiatakov, sentenced to death as one of the “anti-Soviet Trotskyite ring” in the Show Trial ofJanuary 1937—cast a pall over preparations, reducing its priority to resources and demoral-izing those involved.31

By the end of 1936, less than ten months before Industry of Socialism was due to open,preparations were in crisis. Chaos reigned in the artistic community. If total, centralizedcontrol over the art world was the aim, it failed; not only were orders from “above” incon-sistent or contradictory, but they were variously interpreted and implemented on the ground

[Manchester, 1993], 132). For years, the ostensibly elected leadership of the union oscillated between Aleksandrand Sergei, representing hard-line and relatively liberal approaches to Socialist Realism respectively. Artistscelebrated the latter’s victory on one occasion by painting a pastiche of Velasquez’s Surrender of Breda, in whichAleksandr Gerasimov, surrounded by former AKhRR members, handed over the city keys to Sergei Gerasimovthronged by young artists. See V. I. Kostin, “Kto tam shagaet pravoi? Vospominaniia. Chast’ II: V gody tridtsatye,”Panorama iskusstv 9 (Moscow, 1986), 145.

28RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126, ll. 28–30.29P. Lebedev, “Protiv formalizma v sovetskom iskusstve,” Pod znamenem marksizma, 1936, no. 6; “Iskusstvo v

strane sotsializma,” Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:11. Shterenberg was denounced for “leftism” and “audacious innova-tion” and Vladimir Favorskii for his credo that “material dictates the character of the image” (Editorial, “V bor’beza iskusstvo sotsialisticheskogo realizma,” Iskusstvo, 1936, no. 3:v–xv). Deineka was still honored: the sameissue included his work as a frontispiece and long article by R. Kaufman, “Aleksandr Deineka,” 85–100.

30On Oktiabr’ see Hubertus Gassner and Eckhart Gillen, eds., Zwischen Revolutionskunst und SozialistischenRealismus: Dokumente und Kommentare (Cologne, 1979). On the purge of Oktiabr’ and Vsekokhudozhnik seeRGALI f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 200–205.

31When the commissariat was split up, funding for the exhibition was shared by its successors which failed togive it adequate support (RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513, ll. 1, 3). On Ordzhonikidze and his commissariatduring the Purges see O. V. Khlevniuk, Stalin i Ordzhonikidze: Konflikty v Politbiuro v 30-e gody (Moscow, 1993).Piatakov was also chief editor of SSSR na stroike and chair of Gosbank. See Erika Wolf, “When PhotographsSpeak, To Whom Do They Talk? The Origins and Audience of SSSR na stroike,” Left History 6 (Fall 1999): 54.


and inflected by factional strife.32 The Moscow artists were far from either the unified bodywishfully imagined by Soviet mythology or the browbeaten bunch implied by receivedWestern narratives of the “imposition” of Socialist Realism. As archival records of discus-sions in MOSSKh indicate, they still considered themselves a sovereign breed and main-tained a crucial distinction between artistic creativity and industrial labor. They duly re-sented the attempt to establish planned, bureaucratic control over art. But what forms ofresistance were still possible? Artists had no real choice but to seek commissions for theexhibition, both to demonstrate their loyalty and because state organizations were the solesource of patronage. The increasingly shrill exchanges regarding preparations for Industryof Socialism indicate, nevertheless, that their collaboration was less than wholehearted.Discipline in MOSSKh was confessedly atrocious. Abramskii complained that numerousartists had an intolerably “irresponsible” attitude toward the exhibition or had taken um-brage at the jury’s criticism of their work, threatening, like prima donnas, to withdraw italtogether rather than “correct” it.33 By June 1937, with only four months left to the ap-pointed opening day, many contracted artists had still failed to produce any work at all.Dmitrii Moor, well known for his poster designs, “hadn’t lifted a finger.” Painter Il’iaMashkov, patriarch of the prerevolutionary Jack of Diamonds, was singled out as particu-larly recalcitrant. He had missed all his deadlines.34 Sergei Gerasimov—shortly to bedeposed from the union leadership by his namesake, Aleksandr—objected that it was inap-propriate to try to regulate artistic creation in the same way as socialist industrial produc-tion. One can only marvel that he had missed the point for so long. Even Evgenii Katsmancame to Mashkov’s defense, arguing that good artists were few and must be protected.Mashkov was a great artist who should not be beaten but, like a difficult child, must becoaxed and cajoled into contributing. Coercion could be counterproductive in the case ofartists, he warned: the state needed their specialized skills and cooperation, and the rod wasa clumsy instrument that could all too easily knock the brush from an artist’s hand. Never-theless, the exhibition organizers demanded that the union leadership exert closer controlover the artists to make them deliver (“not that they should burst into artists’ studios—many artists might not even want that!” Abramskii conceded). Nikolai Denisovskii, a painterassociated with the AKhRR camp, called for harsh disciplinary measures to be deployedagainst unruly colleagues.35

It was not through mulishness alone, however, that artists fell behind on the plan. Theinchoate system of state patronage was fraught with problems in practice. Shterenberg

32Other grand cultural projects suffered a similar debacle during the Purges, including pavilion architecture forthe All-Union Agricultural Exhibition. See Jamey Gambrell, “The Wonder of the Soviet World,” New York Reviewof Books (22 December 1994): 30–35; and Greg Castillo, “Peoples at an Exhibition: Soviet Architecture and theNational Question,” in Socialist Realism without Shores, ed. T. Lahusen and E. Dobrenko (Durham, 1997), 102–3.

33Artists’ recalcitrance and indiscipline was repeatedly discussed in MOSSKh in 1936–37. See RGALI, f.2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 127, ed. khr. 124, and ed. khr. 85, ll. 5–9; and compare Natal’ia Adaskina, “Neofitsial’noeiskusstvo 30-kh godov v SSSR,” in Moskva-Berlin 1900–1950, ed. I. Antonova and J. Merkert (Moscow andMunich, 1996), 385–89.

34RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 85, ll. 3–5; ibid., ed. khr. 124, ll. 1, 4, 19. Compare accounts of indisciplineamong workers and the state’s failure to secure control over the labor process: Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers andStalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928–1941 (London, 1986); andStephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995).

35RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 85, l. 9; ibid., ed. khr. 124, ll. 8–9, 13, 19–20.

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publicly deplored the situation that artists were under orders from three different quarters atonce. When he tried to get on with his commission for Industry of Socialism his otherpatron, Vsekokhudozhnik, reacted by breaking his contract.36 The piling up of overlappingand competing bureaucracies, so characteristic of the emerging Stalinist system, imposedconflicting demands on the artistic organizations, as the subleaders vied to secure Stalin’sfavor and their own immortality (in more senses than one!) through their patronage of vi-sual art. Artists were torn between work for Ordzhonikidze’s exhibition, the major All-Union Agricultural Exhibition, also planned for 1937, and Voroshilov’s latest Red Armyanniversary exhibition for 1938.37

Even if the spirit was willing, insurmountable practical difficulties prevented artistsfrom fulfilling their commissions for Industry of Socialism, as they repeatedly complained.They were dependent on state suppliers of canvas and paint (hard currency to buy foreignmaterials being released only by special dispensation), but canvas was nowhere to be found,while the paints issued by the Leningrad factory run by Vsekokhudozhnik were of miser-able quality: not only did the white never dry, but work produced for the exhibition wasliable to blacken within months and would require restoration in as little as three years.38

Such grumbles no doubt reflected a real crisis. But it should also be recalled thatmaterial and economic matters—access not only to privileges but to the very means ofartistic production—had been a topos of intra-artistic conflict since the mid-1920s. It isalmost impossible for the historian to disentangle spontaneous complaints from orches-trated and encoded campaigns to denigrate particular individuals and organizations for“wrecking” in the context of the Terror. Thus, artists’ complaints about deficit materialscould have been incited to be used as evidence of criminal dereliction against the bodyresponsible for their supply, Vsekokhudozhnik, a key target of the purge; referring to therecent disappearance of canvas, Abramskii insinuated that the supply catastrophe was causedby wreckers in the art cooperative.39 The rot was traced back to “enemy of the people” JanRudzutak, the Latvian-born chairman of the Central Control Commission responsible forparty discipline, who was arrested in 1937. Rudzutak had allegedly infiltratedVsekokhudozhnik. Although the precise nature of his somewhat surprising connectionwith the artistic community was not specified, it served to imbricate artistic “sabotage”with other anti-Soviet activities. Thus, the leadership of Vsekokhudozhnik, along withMOSSKh, Oktiabr’ and other “weak links,” were all party to a far-reaching conspiracy.With Nikolai Bukharin, Rudzutak had exploited the rifts in the artistic community, attemptingto seduce young artists away from the importance of thematic painting to squander theirtalents on still lives. Rudzutak had also incited members of Vsekokhudozhnik to resistintegration into planned production, declaring that artists were “savages and loners” whohad no need of being organized in a union but must work alone.40

36Ibid., ed. khr. 85, ll. 3, 10–12.37Ibid. Deineka was also preoccupied with a major commission to decorate the Moscow Metro station

Maiakovskaia.38Ibid.39Ibid., ed. khr. 124, l. 27. Similarities to the Purges in the music world indicate they were driven at least in part

by an orchestrated campaign across the arts, although this does not preclude the role also of spontaneous, grass-roots discontent (compare Brooke, “Institutions”).

40RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126, ll. 2–5, 16. Rudzutak may have acted as patron of Oktiabr’ and


Particularly strong passions were aroused by the issue of studio and living space. Manyartists complained that they had nowhere to work or even to live. When some space becameavailable in January 1936, just as the purge of formalism began, and only weeks afterShterenberg had publicly accused AKhRR of monopolizing resources, the allocation reekedof corruption. Shterenberg complained that the availability of rooms had not been properlypublicized but passed from hand to hand with the result that poorly connected young artistsfailed to see it in time to apply. “Inconvenient” artists such as Aleksandr Tyshler wererefused space without adequate explanation. Those who objected against such discrimina-tory practices, including Shterenberg, Sergei Gerasimov, and Aleksandr Deineka, foundthemselves the object of threatening insinuations.41

The studio situation was catastrophic, Sergei Gerasimov lamented shortly before hisouster from the union leadership: how could artists work enthusiastically if they had no-where to paint? Even a prominent and successful painter such as Petr Kotov complainedthat unless he received a studio in a matter of weeks he could do no further work on hiscommission: his apartment was too small to stand back to view a large painting, and thelight was wrong. The union had been building its own “artists’ house,” consisting of bothapartments and studios, but although the construction trust contracted for the job was ad-ministered by the Commissariat of Heavy Industry, which, as the exhibition’s sponsor, hadan interest in its prompt completion, it had suspended work to concentrate on a “shockproject,” a factory named for Stalin.42 A typical story of the time, the endless delays andindefinite postponement of the promised artists’ house were inevitably blamed on sabotage.Surely it was no coincidence, Nikolai Denisovskii insinuated, that construction had been“left to marinate” at the very time when artists needed to work intensively on the exhibi-tion?43 Emergency measures were called for. When construction of studios was postponed,yet again, in June 1937, just months before the show was due to open, schools were requi-sitioned to serve as makeshift studios for the three months of the summer recess, duringwhich artists were to work like Stakhanovites using every hour of the long summer days tofulfil their commissions in record time.44

Plans for a purpose-built exhibition hall for Industry of Socialism suffered the samefate as the artists’ house. The brothers Aleksandr and Viktor Vesnin (who had already workedon architectural projects for the Commissariat of Heavy Industry) were commissioned todesign the pavilion, their plans were approved by the Moscow City Council and Commis-sariat of Heavy Industry, and a suitable plot was found. But in June 1937, five monthsbefore the show was due to open, Abramskii announced that the new pavilion would not be

Vsekokhudozhnik. Detailed research on client-patron relations in the art world could help explain the seeminglyarbitrary way the Purges affected certain individuals and not others (Fitzpatrick, “Intelligentsia and Power,” 49n.78).

41RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 76, ll. 16, 27–28. Some artists were driven to suicide (“Spetssobshchenie,” inArtizov, Vlast’, 274). For accounts of the conditions under which young and, particularly, female artists had to liveand work see RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173; Galina Shtange’s diary entries on her artist daughter IrinaShtange, in Intimacy and Terror. Soviet Diaries of the 1930s, ed. V. Garros, N. Korenevskaia, and T. Lahusen,trans. C. A. Flath (New York, 1995) 174; and Susan E. Reid, “All Stalin’s Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Artof the 1930s,” Slavic Review 57 (Spring 1998): 166–67.

42RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 85, ll. 9–14.43Ibid., ed. khr. 126, l. 19.44Ibid., ed. khr. 124, ll. 9–10.

164 Susan E. Reid

ready until September 1938. At this point planning permission was suddenly and inexpli-cably withdrawn and the promised pavilion abandoned altogether to join a prestigious listof unbuilt monuments of Stalinist architecture. As a temporary solution the show had to beinstalled in the premises of the Permanent Construction Exhibition on Frunze Embank-ment. And there it remained, despite this venue’s gross inadequacies as an art gallery: notonly did it urgently require renovation, but it had no natural light. The task of providingsufficient electricity to illuminate the artistic celebration of the triumph of socialist indus-trialization was a typically Stalinist tale of ad hoc solutions and obstacles surmounted:special cables even had to be laid to bring power from two different electricity generatingplants.45

In face of these problems, Abramskii accused the carping artists of un-Bolshevik de-featism: “We had greater difficulties when we fulfilled the first and second Five-Year Plans,yet they were completed on time.”46 Yet there were other, even more fundamental factorsinhibiting artists’ production. Even if they were fortunate to have a studio, paints, andcanvas, some artists were unable to come to terms with the thematic principle underpinningIndustry of Socialism, whether they dissented from it by artistic conviction or because theirtraining and skills ill-equipped them for it. To commission work according to a writtenscenario privileged, from the outset, narrative painting, identifying Socialist Realist artalmost exclusively with the kartina—a large-scale, labor-intensive, multifigural composi-tion on a significant theme in the medium of easel painting in oil on canvas. In his originalconception, Ordzhonikidze emphasized that the main thrust of Industry of Socialism mustbe to represent the transformation of human psychology through industrial labor, a task towhich the narrative genre of the kartina was best suited.47 At the same time, very large,multifigural compositions were considered a legitimate reflection of the mass nature of thenew protagonist.48 Portraits of important people in historically significant situations wereincluded in this privileged category. The kartina, which roughly corresponded to the high-est genre in the academic hierarchy, history painting, demanded specific competencies inanatomy, facial expression, perspective, and the composition of complex figure groups.Where in the past these were the foundation of an artists’ training, they could no longer betaken for granted in the 1930s since modernist challenges to the privileged status of thenarrative figure composition with its deep, stage-like space had shifted the priorities ofartistic education. Even an established artist such as Sergei Gerasimov could be technicallyshaky in composition, modeling, or figure drawing, as may be judged from his CollectiveFarm Festival, discussed below (Fig. 1). Artists trained at a time when narrative was con-sidered retrograde might also find themselves helpless before the task of conceiving visualembodiment for a given theme without resorting to pedestrian illustration. AlthoughAbramskii protested that the Exhibition Committee had only allocated artists themes

45Ibid., ll. 1, 6–7; ibid., ed. khr. 126, l. 20; ibid., ed. khr. 127, ll. 13, 26–27. I have been unable to trace theVesnins’ plan. Abramskii promised that the new commissar of heavy industry and deputy chair of Sovnarkom,Valerii Mezhlauk, had “resolved all the problems” and had ordered completion of the building in September 1938,but Mezhlauk was removed in August 1937.

46Ibid., f. 2943, ed. khr. 126, ll. 72–73; ibid., ed. khr. 124, l. 27.47Abramskii, “Vystavka,” 25.48RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 12 (publicity for Industry of Socialism, c. 1940, quoting Viktor Vesnin).


FIG. 1 Sergei Gerasimov, Collective Farm Festival, 1937. Oil on canvas, 235 x 370 cm. StateTret’iakov Gallery.

appropriate to their talents, Denisovskii observed that “many comrades cannot come toterms with the theme they have undertaken.”49 It is conceivable that Il’ia Mashkov’s failureto deliver was caused as much by an artist’s block faced with an unsympathetic task in agenre that was not his forte, as by wilful non-cooperation; an attempt he made to produce akartina around this time, The Partisan’s Family, is stilted and lifeless. Some also objectedto the thematic approach on principle because it harnessed painterly creativity to the illus-tration of a predetermined script, slighted the specific communicative capacity of paintingand prioritized ideological correctness over artistic quality. As A. M. Gol’dshliak com-plained in 1936, “if a picture is very big and all the Politburo is there, then it will be givenpride of place.”50 Gol’dshliak, who also spoke out against the mismanagement of Industryof Socialism, and who was allegedly associated with the purged “Oktiabr’ platform,” wasdeclared an enemy of the people, deprived of his union membership, and arrested by theNKVD.51

One prominent artist forced to undertake work for Industry of Socialism to which, byhis own admission, his expertise was ill-suited was Vladimir Favorskii. Highly respectedas a printmaker and monumental artist, Favorskii was not, however, an easel painter. The

49RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, ll. 4, 13; Abramskii, “Vystavka,” 27.50RGALI, f. 990, op. 3, ed. khr. 8, l. 54 (discussion of formalism in MOSSKh, 29 February–13 April 1936);

Bekreeva, “Problemy sovetskoi zhivopisi,” 128. The problem of allowing thematic appropriateness to drive selec-tion and hanging of work for the exhibition was discussed by the board of MOSSKh on 22 September 1937(RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 127, ll. 15–18).

51RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124; ibid., ed. khr. 126.

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tale of woe Favorskii presented in his defense to a meeting of MOSSKh highlights both thefate of artists working in media other than oil painting or sculpture, and the impact onartists of the many failures of organization. To the consternation of participating artists,with just five months left before the exhibition was due to open, the Exhibition Committeehad made no announcement regarding such fundamental questions as the venue and preciseopening date, or even whether decorative and applied arts were to be included, art formswhich had been prominent in the 1920s and which were still strongly represented in theunion’s membership. In practice the answer to the latter question was a foregone conclu-sion: identifying Socialist Realism with the traditionally privileged medium of oil paintingand, to a lesser extent, with sculpture, commissions for Industry of Socialism excludedartists working in the new technological media espoused by the Constructivists and Oktiabr’,such as photography, photomontage, and industrial design, as well as in mural, graphic andposter art, textiles, and other applied or “minor” arts (with the exception of ceramics).Favorskii found himself dangerously sidelined from preparations for Industry of Socialism.Under pressure to deliver a thematic kartina, he tried to produce a group portrait of seniorworkers in a machine tool factory. However, the factory management told him his interestin concentrated human craftsmanship was an anachronism and he had better draw the newmachinery. Despairing of the task of depicting conveyer belts, Favorskii had hoped insteadto participate in Industry of Socialism as a mural painter, for he had noted that the Vesninbrothers’ plans for a purpose-built pavilion for the exhibition specifically included provi-sion for murals. The abandonment of these plans was particularly unfortunate for Favorskii,Lev Bruni, and other monumentalists, for it deprived them of a surface on which to demon-strate their commitment to building communism. This was not an isolated case of bad luckbut symptomatic of the declining support for mural painting, with its specific conventionsand flattened pictorial space, which Favorskii had actively promoted. For the artist, whosepersonal authority rendered him a considerable threat to the hegemony of a narrowly de-fined realism, exclusion not only meant a loss of remuneration and prestige but, in thecontext of the Terror, exposed him to politically loaded accusations of un-Soviet behavior.52

I have argued elsewhere that the conservative turn of the 1930s, which in artistic termstook the form of the restoration of the prerevolutionary academic hierarchy of media andgenres, was particularly detrimental to the status of women artists.53 Women were betterrepresented both in decorative and applied media and in “lesser” or more intimate genres ofpainting. The identification of Socialist Realism with the large, public kartina rendered itincreasingly difficult to make a reputation on the basis of intimate painting, such as stilllife, landscape, and domestic portraiture which had traditionally provided a space for fe-male practitioners. To indulge in such “chamber” work was even regarded as an inadmiss-able and potentially subversive retreat from public statements into the kind of apolitical “artfor art’s sake” which “enemy of the people” Rudzutak allegedly advocated.54 Even if the

52Ibid., ed. khr. 126, ll. 70–73; ibid., ed. khr. 124, ll. 11–12. In a letter of 14 June 1934, Katsman singled outFavorskii as the realist camp’s chief rival for leadership in the art world (Manin, “Istoriia iz istorii”).

53Reid, “All Stalin’s Women,” 133–73.54Miuda Iablonskaia suggests that the intimate or “chamber” painting of Nadezhda Udal’tsova, Antonina Sofronova

and others represented a “countermovement” to Socialist Realism (Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia’s NewAge [London, 1990], 171–74). See also Adaskina, “Neofitsial’noe iskusstvo,” 387. Regarding literature, Beth


sex of the artist was not a direct consideration, gendered criteria contributed to women’sexclusion: Socialist Realism became identified with a traditionally male aesthetic, and thejob description “artist”—or “engineer of human souls”—was reconfirmed as an essentiallymasculine one. As Ordzhonikidze put it, the artist must love his subject “as a bridegroomloves his bride.”55 Aleksandra Iakusheva, a painter associated with intimate, painterly stud-ies, reported in distress the humiliations she had suffered at the hands of the committeewhen she sought a commission for Industry of Socialism.56 The graphic and monumentalartist Ekaterina Zernova (who had joined OST in 1928) complained that only 7 percent (56out of 812) of the commissions went to women.57 Furthermore, women were adverselyaffected by the increasing professionalization and regulation of artistic life through theunion and other institutions which formalized the hierarchical division between profes-sional artist and dilettante. Many female artists were not accepted into the elite Artists’Union, but either belonged to the less prestigious Gorkom or had no professional affiliationat all. Women were locked in a vicious circle. Without recognition or access to commis-sions they did not have the resources or studio space to compete with their male colleagueson the hallowed ground of the kartina. Nor, as they complained, did women have themental space for the sustained, concentrated work a kartina demanded. For, given thefailure of the Soviet state to deliver on its promises, female artists remained enslaved todomestic chores: as one put it, they had to paint “between husband, children, and stove.”58

With preparations for Industry of Socialism in shambles and the Terror raging, theatmosphere in the Moscow Artists’ Union was hysterical. “There are no grounds for panic,”Abramskii protested in a forlorn attempt to quell rumors that the exhibition would be post-poned or fall through altogether.59 Artists’ mounting anger was directed against the orga-nizing bodies. Gol’dshliak, Sergei Gerasimov, Zernova, and others condemned the Exhibi-tion Committee’s high-handed tendency to command rather than consult with artists andtheir union, and to slight their professional status. As Abramskii indicated above, manyclearly resented intrusion in their specialist work by bureaucrats and party functionariespresuming to demand corrections. Artists whose work was under consideration by the jurywere treated demeaningly, made to wait in a corridor until called in, like schoolchildren toan examination. If their work was refused no explanation was offered. The committee alsoimposed sudden decisions on the artists without warning or explanation while leaving

Holmgren argues that the “chamber” genres associated with the traditionally feminine realm of the home remaineda potential site of resistance to official values (Women’s Works in Stalin’s Time [Bloomington, 1993], 2, 9-10).

55Cited by Abramskii, “Vystavka,” 25.56RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 127, ll. 34–38. On Iakusheva see Elena Aleksandrova, comp., A. Iakusheva.

Zhivopis’, grafika. Katalog vystavki (Moscow, 1986).57RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, l. 16. For complaints of tokenism see ibid., ed. khr. 173, ll. 22–23. Only

two women, Zernova and Mukhina, benefited from komandirovki for Industry of Socialism. See E. S. Zernova,Vospominaniia monumentalista (Moscow, 1985), 77–84. Female exhibitors at Industry of Socialism included, inaddition to Ianovskaia and Zernova, Serafima Riangina, Nina Korotkova, Klavdiia Kozlova, Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Evgeniia Georgieva, Kseniia Kupetsio, Aleksandra Petrova, Liudmila Protopopova, Vera Orlova, ZinaidaRakitina; the sculptors Antonina Romodanovskaia, Marina Ryndziunskaia, Tat’iana Smotrova, Sarra Shor andVera Ingal; and the ceramicist Natal’ia Dan’ko (RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513). The Food Industry branchincluded Ianovskaia, Vera Mukhina, Irina Vilkovir, Ol’ga Maliutina, and Dan’ko.

58RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 14; RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, ll. 9–31, 58.59RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, ll. 9–10.

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essential matters unresolved.60 In light of the Exhibition Committee’s failure to ensureprogress on the exhibition, word went out that the Arts Committee was poised to intervenedirectly and enforce discipline. But as the momentum of the Terror turned on its perpetra-tors, the Arts Committee itself succumbed. Its leader, Platon Kerzhentsev, came under firefor negligence regarding the Vsekokhudozhnik affair and other matters, and was removed inJanuary 1938.61

THE EXHIBITION EXPOSEDTHE EXHIBITION EXPOSEDTHE EXHIBITION EXPOSEDTHE EXHIBITION EXPOSEDTHE EXHIBITION EXPOSED

Despite Terror, organizational chaos, and the failure even of the promised pavilion to mate-rialize, the show went up on time on Frunze Embankment in November 1937. But thedoors remained closed to the public as the Purges compelled one ex-hero after another to beeffaced. Offending works were removed or the familiar faces of public figures were paintedout and replaced by anonymous models, while Aleksandr Gerasimov had to abandon hisgroup portrait The People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry altogether and begin fromscratch.62 With its patron, Ordzhonikidze, dead and his commissariat suspected as a havenof “wreckers” and “enemies of the people,” the importance of his celebration of socialistindustrialization receded behind new priorities, above all, the promotion of the leader cult.Other bureaucracies and their leaders plundered the ruins of Industry of Socialism for spoliafrom which to erect their own temples to Stalin’s genius.63 Yet, unable to depart fromroutine triumphalism to admit the possibility of failure, an editorial in the central art journalIskusstvo claimed that work produced for Industry of Socialism demonstrated “the consoli-dation of the realist kartina.”64 Meanwhile, the art historian German Nedoshivin hailed theunseen exhibition as proof that “we stand on the threshold of a new Renaissance!”; it marked

60Ibid., ed. khr. 85, ll. 2–8; ibid., ed. khr. 124, ll. 20–21, 28–29; ibid., ed. khr. 127.61Ibid., ed. khr. 126, l. 19; “Rech’ Deputata A. A. Zhdanova,” Pravda, 18 January 1938, 2–3; Brooke, “Institu-

tions,” 8. Artists petitioned Molotov against the Arts Committee in early 1937 (Fitzpatrick, “Intelligentsia andPower,” 42–43).

62Bekreeva, “Problemy sovetskoi zhivopisi,” 129, citing participant witness, art historian Rafael Kaufman;Bown, “Aleksandr Gerasimov,” 131. Similar delays and disruptions befell celebratory volumes dedicated to theMetro, the Belomor Canal, and other prestige pojects when many of their heroes were arrested. See DavidBrandenberger, “Proletarian Internationalism, ‘Soviet Patriotism’ and the Rise of Russocentric Etatism During theStalinist 1930s,” Left History 6, no. 2 (2000): 87–88.

63Under Lavrentii Beria’s patronage a rival exhibition of paintings by Georgian artists dedicated to Stalin, On theHistory of the Bolshevik Organizations of Transcaucasia, opened 14 November 1937 at the very time whenIndustry of Socialism had been due to open (Bekreeva, “Problemy sovetskoi zhivopisi,” 129; idem, “Vystavka,”22). Mark Neiman redeployed work from both exhibitions in an article promoting the Stalin cult (“Novye portretytovarishcha Stalina,” Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:66–68). MOSSKh announced a competition in November 1938 forcommissions for work dedicated to the image of Lenin and Stalin (RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 227, l. 11).Works commissioned for Industry of Socialism were poached for the New York World’s Fair in 1939, including amap of the Soviet Union made of gems and Vasilii Efanov’s Unforgettable Meeting (RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr.694, l. 11; L. Grigor’ev, “Industriia sotsializma [Na otkrytii vsesoiuznoi vystavki]’,”Pravda, 19 March 1939).Annual accounts for 1939 state that it was “significantly underfinanced” (RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513, l. 6).

64Editorial, “Iskusstvo v strane sotsializma,” Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:22–23. A brief review evidently went topress before opening was postponed (N. Shchekotov, “K otkrytiiu ‘Industriia sotsializma,’” Tvorchestvo, 1937, no.10–11:14).


“the highest stage in human artistic development,” the advent of the style of SocialistRealism.65

A full eighteen months were to pass before the public could test the justice ofNedoshivin’s hallelujahs for itself. The exhibition, consisting of nearly two thousand worksby some seven hundred artists, opened at last on 18 March 1939, during the EighteenthParty Congress.66 To mediate it to the mass viewer an unillustrated catalogue was pub-lished, an album of reproductions was prepared, and detailed scripts for conducted tourswere compiled under the auspices of the Arts Committee to ensure the catholicity of do-cents’ selection and interpretation of works. The tours focused on selected highlights toconstruct edifying subnarratives such as “Stalin and the Triumph of Socialism in the USSR,”“Socialist Industrialization and the Collectivization of Agriculture,” “Industry Strengthensthe USSR’s Defense,” and “The Rise of the Culture and Well-Being of the People.”67 Toreconstruct these tours in detail would help us retrieve the viewers’ experience of the exhi-bition, but space only permits us to outline the structure of the installation and pause beforea handful of the key works on which professional critics based their conclusions about the“Soviet style” in 1939–40.

The exhibition, as hung, preserved the thematic principle and basic structure of theoriginal plan with some adaptations necessitated both by the changed venue and by shiftingpriorities (Fig. 2). Viewers were ushered into the exhibition by a colored plaster statue oftheir deceased host, Ordzhonikidze (by Vera Ingal and V. Bogoliubov), to find themselvessurrounded by portraits of the great and good. While waiting for the tour group to assemblesome might wander into a new section added in a dead-end by the entrance, “Soviet Arcticand the Mastery of Siberia” (where Serafima Riangina’s Lumberjacks and two works byFedor Reshetnikov commemorating the Cheliuskin Epic were hung). The remaining roomsof the ad hoc premises were arranged enfilade so that viewers had to follow a preterminedroute through the narrative, then retrace their steps.68

Although preparations for the exhibition had coincided with the Terror and the purgeof formalism, the installation in 1939 accredited a certain diversity of stylistic models withinthe bounds of accessibility, recognizability, and optimism, imperatives which all had bynow accommodated to some degree. Viewers began their tour in a section entitled “Pagesfrom the Past,” representing the history of the Revolution, where they stopped before BorisIoganson’s In an Old Urals Factory. This gloomy composition, depicting the iniquities of

65G. Nedoshivin, “O kharaktere iskusstva epokhi sotsializma,” Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:69–79.66According to a tour script c. 1940, work by 700 artists was shown—100 less than the 812 recorded in 1937

(RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, ll. 13ff). A lower total of 479 artists showing 1015 works is given by V. G.Azarkovich et al., Vystavki sovetskogo izobrazitel’nogo iskusstva: Spravochnik, vol. 2, 1933–1940 gg. (Moscow,1967), 280–82. This may refer to the reduced version installed in 1940.

67RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948. The script for the last-mentioned tour, apparently dating from the 1940rehanging, consists of two columns, one providing historical-political context for interpretation, based on the ShortCourse, the other containing comments on the paintings. Plates for a planned album are kept in RGALI, f. 2458,op. 2, ed. khr. 127, possibly published as A. Zotov and P. Sysoev, Vsesoiuznaia vystavka Industriia sotsializma(Moscow, 1940), but the publication has not been found.

68G. Bandalin, ed., Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka “Industriia sotsializma” (exhibition catalogue)(Moscow, 1939).

170 Susan E. Reid

FIG. 2 Plan of Industry of Socialism, 1939. G. Bandalin, ed., Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaiavystavka “Industriia sotsializma” (exhibition catalogue), Moscow, 1939.

prerevolutionary capitalism in the Urals, embodied, they learned, a significant historicalmoment of awakening class-consciousness in well-found human types and their dramaticconfrontation, indicating the potential for revolutionary development. Combining Repin’ssense of psychological drama with Rembrandt’s dramatic lighting, it exemplified an early(1933) definition of Socialist Realism by Ivan Gronskii (chairman of the OrganizationalCommittee of the Writers’ Congress, editor of Izvestiia, and a patron of Ioganson and otherAKhRR artists) as “Rembrandt, Rubens, and Repin put to serve the proletariat.”69 It wasawarded First Prize by the Arts Committee (on whose Artistic Council Ioganson, formerlyof AKhRR, served alongside Aleksandr Gerasimov).70

69Valkenier, Russian Realist Art, 169; Fitzpatrick, “Intelligentsia and Power,” 50.70The other Arts Committee’s awards in 1940 included: Second class: Sergei Gerasimov, Efanov, Plastov (for In

the Meadow); Third class: Shegal’. I. Grabar’ and V. Vesnin also served on the Artistic Council established 4March 1939 by Politburo decree (Artizov, Vlast’, 427–28; “Premii khudozhnikam-uchastnikam Vsesoiuznykhkhudozhestvennykh vystavok ‘Industriia sotsializma’ i ‘Pishchevaia industriia,’” Tvorchestvo, 1940, no. 8 [insideback cover]).


Pausing before a number of portraits and historical paintings by other AKhRR associ-ates, the tour then arrived in the Defense section. Given its increasing topicality, this hadbeen brought forward from the ninth to the fourth and fifth rooms. The main item here wasLaunch of a Warship, painted by Georgii Nisskii, who had been loosely associated withOST in the 1920s and had preserved that group’s characteristic concern to express enthusi-asm for technological modernity through formal means. Launch of a Warship betrayed avestigial expressionism in its vertiginous perspective, dynamic composition, stark con-trasts of light and shade, and monumentalized treatment of the figures. The docent invitedviewers to admire Nisskii’s bright colors and strong maritime light. She made a rare excur-sion into formal analysis to draw her audience’s attention to the compositional devicesthrough which the artist conveyed the imposing scale of the ship without it dominating thehuman beings, although prominent critic Nikolai Shchekotov found that the exaggeratedperspective caused distortions and disorientation, which made it hard to read and departedtoo far from realist norms.71

Since there were seventeen rooms, rather than the twelve of the original plan, somesections were attenuated, apparently at the expense of rigorous selection. Obediently fol-lowing their guide, the viewers now traversed a long sequence of eight rooms dealing withthe process of industrialization. The narrative relation between one room and the nextlacked momentum here, and as I shall elaborate below, contemporary accounts representedthis as the nadir of the exhibition, overstuffed with monotonous, pedestrian, and poorlypainted enumerations of factories, industrial processes, and portraits of Stalin, Voroshilov,Kirov, and other leaders viewing factories. For Shchekotov the sections “The USSR HasBecome Metallic” and “The New Face of the Country,” concerning the new industrial land-scape, were particularly numbing.72 Here hung many works by AKhRR associates includ-ing Dmitrii Nalbandian, I. A. Modorov, and Fedor Modorov, and a wall-sized panneau by V.Pchelin of Stalin at the VIII All-Union Congress of Soviets illuminated to imitate a pan-orama. A new section was inserted, “Shockworkers of the Five-Year Plans,” featuring por-traits of Stakhanovites, the heroes of Soviet industrialization, by Brodskii’s student AleksandrLaktionov and others. Numerous other portraits both of Stakhanovites and political leaderspunctuated the exhibition throughout, including a vast group portrait, Stakhanovites of HeavyIndustry Meeting with Sergo by Aleksandr Gerasimov, which Aleksandr Zotov, an art criticassociated with AKhRR, counted among the best works in the exhibition. At the princelysum of fifty-five thousand rubles it was certainly one of the most expensive. Other imagesof Stakhanovites included Georgii Riazhskii’s portrait of the founder of the movement,Aleksei Stakhanov, a 1936 drawing of Aleksandr Busygin by Katsman, and Petr Kotov’sRed Sormovo, depicting Stakhanovite shipbuilders in the Volga dockyards at Gor’kii.73

71RGALI f. 962 op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 37; N. Shchekotov, “Vystavka ‘Industriia sotsializma,’” Iskusstvo, 1939,no. 4:74; G. Nisskii, “‘Spusk voennogo korablia,’” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 23 October 1936; M. Iakovlev, “Rozhdeniekartiny,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 23 August 1937; M. Kiselev, Georgii Nisskii (Moscow, 1972), 38-39. Nameddocents and compilers of tours are female including S. Fomina and S. Zombe.

72Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 78. Plates for the planned album of reproductions corroborate this assessment, butsince visitors’ books have not been found it cannot be weighed against contemporary viewers’ responses. For theplates see RGALI, f. 2458, op. 2, ed. khr. 127.

73Al. Zotov, “Khudozhestvennaia vystavka ‘Industriia sotsializma’” (draft article, possibly for the planned al-bum), RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 624, l. 2; Bandalin, Khudozhestvennaia vystavka.

172 Susan E. Reid

At last the weary viewers emerged from this purgatory into the final and most cheerfulroom of the exhibition. Suddenly, all around was light, bright color, and rich, sensuous,painterly facture. Here they could glimpse the radiant future. In line with a general driftaway from the iconography of labor, beginning in the mid-thirties, this culminating sectionshifted attention away from the laborious process of building socialism, so tediously ex-plored en route, to focus on its rewards.74 Based on section ten of the plan, “Industry,Everyday Life and Culture,” now retitled with Stalin’s incantation “Life has got better, Lifehas got jollier!” it represented abundance, women’s emancipation, and social harmony as ifachieved already in the present, and identified the source of these benefits less with theongoing process of socialist industrialization—Ordzhonikidze’s original aim for the exhi-bition—than with the person of Stalin.

Stalin presided over one of the most-discussed paintings in this section, Arkadii Plastov’sCollective Farm Festival (Fig. 3). Mounted on a combine harvester above a banner bearinghis words “Life has got better, Life has got jollier!” a portrait of the Leader gazes downbeneficently over the celebration of an abundant harvest, the fruit of the collectivization andindustrialization of agriculture. By means of color, composition, and telling detail, Plastovrepresented the collectivized rural workforce as a stable community, integrated by love forthe Vozhd’ and national tradition. Two group portraits of Stalin among his subjects anddisciples dominated the room and formed the climax of the whole tour: Grigorii Shegal’sLeader, Teacher, and Friend, and Vasilii Efanov’s celestial marriage between the Leader and

FIG. 3 Arkadii Plastov, Collective Farm Festival, 1937. Oil on canvas, 188 x 307 cm. RussianMuseum, St. Petersburg.

74Compare H. Gaßner and E. Gillen, “Vom utopischen Ordnungsentwurf zur Versöhnungsideologie im ästhetischenSchein” in Stalinismus: Probleme der Sowjetgesellschaft zwischen Kollektivierung und Weltkrieg, ed. G. Erler andW. Süß (Frankfurt, 1982), 309–10; and Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters underLenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 43–44.


FIG. 4 Iurii Pimenov, The Delegate, 1937. Oil on canvas, 300 x 260 cm. State Molotov PictureGallery.

his People, Unforgettable Meeting (represented by a copy, the original having been poachedfor the 1939 World’s Fair in New York). Viewers would be familiar with these paintingsfrom reproductions which were already in circulation in service of the growing Stalin cult.75

As I have argued elsewhere, both linked the emancipation of the New Woman to Stalin, asthe genius behind the 1936 Constitution, while at the same time, using conventional gendercodes to naturalize the subjection of the Soviet people.76

75Neiman, “Novye portrety”; and R. Kaufman, “Tvorcheskie voprosy sovetskoi istoricheskoi zhivopisi,” Iskusstvo,1939, no. 3.

76Reid, “All Stalin’s Women,” 152–58.

174 Susan E. Reid

The New Soviet Woman was also central to the work of Iurii Pimenov, a former mem-ber of OST, with the difference that he celebrated her emancipation without direct referenceto Stalin. In New Moscow, hung in the same room, Pimenov personified the modernizationof Moscow under the 1935 General Plan in the figure of a New Woman driving herselfalong the city’s new boulevards in a car. Another painting by Pimenov, The Delegate,continued Efanov and Shegal’s theme of the female delegate who personifies the sexualequality codified in the Constitution (Fig. 4). The respectable and even fashionable dress oftheir socially active women was symptomatic of the campaign for kul’turnost’, or culturedliving and consumption, beginning in the mid-1930s. Pimenov expressly addressed thesubject of cultured consumption in another painting, In the Shop, which was originallyshown at a branch of Industry of Socialism, Food Industry, held in a pavilion in Gorky Park.This smaller subexhibition, initiated by Commissar of Food Industries Anastas Mikoian,was dedicated entirely to the theme of material abundance and cultured everyday living.77

What is striking about the broad, new Moscow boulevards, the prosperous Soviet wayof life, and confident, fashionably attired representatives of the Soviet people Pimenovdepicted is their Western-looking modernity, recalling cinematic representations of Americamixed with late nineteenth-century French paintings of bourgeois consumption. The man-ner in which they were painted was also self-consciously modern, defined in Western terms.As a member of OST in the 1920s, Pimenov had taken a keen interest in modern French andGerman tendencies, and even in the late 1930s his paintings betrayed a vestigial affinity forforeign expressive devices, although he had abandoned his earlier expressionism in favor ofAuguste Renoir. The French impressionist had been enthusiastically dubbed “the painter ofhappiness” by Anatolii Lunacharskii in 1933, but he had since joined other impressionistsin the dustbin of art history.78 We might have expected In the Shop to have been declaredun-Soviet and decadent on account of both the rather bourgeois scene of luxury it depictedand of its foreign stylistic origins. Reviewing Food Industry in 1939, the critic and editor ofthe two central art journals, Osip Beskin, mildly censured it for “a certain aftertaste of anabstract, Central European prettiness or modishness.” More importantly, however, he wel-comed the artist’s hallmark “flickering manner” and declared the painting “quite beautiful,”a judgment that was disseminated to viewers by the tour guide.79

The influence of the impressionist Renoir was explicitly welcomed in a painting byOl’ga Ianovskaia, In the Box of the Bolshoi Theater. If just two years earlier this Frenchancestry could suffice to damn it for formalism, in 1939 the painting was praised not onlyfor its correct characterization of the new Soviet audience but also for its “painterliness,” itscritical appropriation of impressionist devices, and the attractive way it was structured by

77Ninety-eight artists participated in Food Industry, showing a total of 149 works of painting, graphics, sculp-ture, and porcelain (Azarkovich, Vystavki, vol. 2). Mikoian’s commissariat also celebrated his achievements inprovisioning by publishing a book: A. I. Mikoian, Pishchevaia industriia Sovetskogo Soiuza (Moscow, 1941).

78A. V. Lunacharskii, “Zhivopisets schast’ia,” (1933), in his Ob izobrazitel’nom iskusstve, vol. 1 (Moscow,1967). On Pimenov’s “French feminine types” and the influence of Renoir see A. I. Morozov, Konets utopii(Moscow, 1995), 184–88; and V. Almoeva, Iurii Ivanovich Pimenov (Moscow and Leningrad, 1950), 36.

79O. Beskin, “Sredi obrazov izobilii i radosti,” Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 9:14–17; RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr.948, l. 45 (General Tour).


delicate color relations.80 It was one of only two works by women to receive a prize, theother being Vera Mukhina’s sculpture group Bread, shown at the Food Industry branch.Ianovskaia was also included in Food Industry with her Master Confectioners (1939), whichOsip Beskin again praised for its “painterly qualities” and its construction on the basis ofcolor relations of green and pink (Fig. 5).81

FIG. 5 Ol’ga Ianovskaia, Master Confectioners, 1939. Oil on canvas (dimensions and loca-tion unavailable).

The theme of Food Industry—including not only the victories achieved by Soviet foodproduction and processing but, more generally, consumer goods and consumption—pro-vided a legitimating narrative within which still life and everyday genre painting took ongreater ideological significance than in Industry of Socialism as a whole. As a result, thesmaller subexhibition was rather less officious than the main display and gave more play toaesthetic pleasure and stylistic diversity. Artists of the more cosmopolitan tendencies werequite prominent here. David Shterenberg was represented by a still life, Bread, in spite ofhis “formalist” proclivities and his intransigence, as were another colleague from OST, PetrVil’iams, and former members of Four Arts, Pavel Kuznetsov and Martiros Sar’ian.82

One of the most important artists to exhibit at Food Industry was the former Jack ofDiamonds, Petr Konchalovskii, represented by a monumental decorative panneau The WineHarvest and two sumptuous still lives, Lilac Bush and Still Life in a Winter Window. These

80A. Devishev, “Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka ‘Industriia sotsializma.’ I. Zhivopis’,” Tvorchestvo,1939, no. 6:3; RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 42.

81Beskin, “Sredi obrazov,” 17.82Iu. Lobanova, comp., Pishchevaia industriia: Otdel vystavki “Industriia sotsializma”. Katalog (Moscow,

1939), 4.

176 Susan E. Reid

were transferred at some point to the main display of Industry of Socialism to hang in thecrowning section “Life Has Got Better.” Konchalovskii’s still lives were remote from thethematics of socialist industrialization and represent an exception to the general emphasison the thematic kartina. Along with the efforts invested in salvaging the participation ofKonchalovskii’s fellow Jack of Diamonds Mashkov (despairing of a kartina, Katsman evenproposed accepting one of his still lives), their inclusion suggests that the patriarchs of earlytwentieth century Russian Cézannism still commanded such respect, at least within theMoscow artistic community, that their presence was considered essential to the success ofthe exhibition.83 This must warn us against trying to identify any stable, fully consistentand monologic identity for Socialist Realism. While Industry of Socialism went a long waytoward making the primacy of thematic painting the rule, important exceptions remained.As I shall argue in the next section, by 1939 there were other agendas in play too, includingan increasing concern to make the viewer’s experience of the exhibition an uplifting, visu-ally pleasurable, and aesthetically satisfying one. Konchalovskii’s still lives might be lessdirectly relevant to the theme of industrialization than the many works in the dreary preced-ing rooms, but they were appropriately life-affirming in their joyful color, energeticbrushstroke, and representation of abundance. Above all, they were good painting. Theguide would invite viewers to admire Konchalovskii’s “painterly temperament,” noting that,“in his magnificent ability to convey material nature with its powerful vital energy andsucculent, sparkling colorfulness, Konchalovskii continues the best traditions of the Flem-ish still life.”84 Beskin, too, noted Konchalovskii’s passion for the process and materialityof painting; steeped in the traditions of European art, he sought to synthesize the lessons ofmodern French painting with the color of Venetian art.85

PPPPPAINTERLAINTERLAINTERLAINTERLAINTERL Y CULY CULY CULY CULY CULTURETURETURETURETURE

Perhaps surprisingly, the emphasis on “painterly qualities” was characteristic of all themajor reviews of Industry of Socialism and Food Industry in 1939–40. Thus NikolaiShchekotov enthused about the still life of produce in the foreground of Arkadii Plastov’sCollective Farm Festival, pronouncing it “first-class painting.” He praised the work as awhole for its immediacy and warm coloration and the way the figures were bound togethervisually to suggest a solid community; the rich, saturated color, heavy impasto, and densecomposition, as well as the human types reinvigorated Russian painterly traditions exem-plified by Surikov, Maliavin, and the early twentieth-century Union of Russian Artists.86

Most notable in regard to the issue of “painterliness” was a large painting by SergeiGerasimov of the same title, Collective Farm Festival (1937), depicting collective farmworkers welcoming an official guest with abundant, traditionally Russian hospitality (Fig.1). It was greeted as a milestone in the development of the Soviet thematic composition,but one which was, yet, deeply flawed.

83Abramskii, “Vystavka,” 27–28.84RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 41.85Beskin, “Sredi obrazov,” 17.86Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 64–66.


Gerasimov, formerly of OMKh, had been accused of formalism in the 1936–37 Purge,and although Collective Farm Festival had left far behind the youthful flirtations withCézannist and even proto-cubist stylization which had united him with the Jack of Dia-monds, it was clearly indebted to the impressionist tradition. This was no longer con-demned out of hand, however. Gerasimov’s painting became a kind of test case on the basisof which critics tried to define what the Soviet style could legitimately glean from impres-sionism and what it must surmount. Gerasimov had attempted to synthesize the thematic,multifigural composition with the impressionist practice of plein air painting.87 The criticNikolai Shchekotov enthused: “It appears like a broad window opened directly on to thefields. It is suffused with crystal pure light in which there play delicately chosen pale blue,pinkish-lilac, and golden hues of the group of farmers gathered together for their festival.”88

Even for Aleksandr Zotov “the colors seem to laugh on the canvas, creating a polyphonicbut harmonious and joyful peal.”89 But while the critics admired Gerasimov’s mastery ofplein air technique, they doubted whether it was adequate to the characterization of thehuman protagonists, which they regarded unquestioningly as the main vehicle of contentand the most important task of Soviet art. It was all well and good that the figures seemedto live in the landscape and breathe the air of the fields where they worked, but it wasregrettable that their fusion with their natural ambience was at the cost of modeling. Notonly did the figures lack weight and mass, but the facial expressions were insufficientlydefined, especially that of the speaker. Gerasimov had even averted the face of the centralfigure (a criticism that was also leveled against Iurii Pimenov’s New Moscow). Shchekotovacknowledged that this indecorum was a deliberate device to give the composition the im-mediacy of a fleeting impression captured in a quick sketch from nature, but found it detri-mental to the main import of the painting: the characterization of the new people of theSoviet village.90 Impressionist informality was incompatible with the genre of kartina, forwhich the monumentality and historical significance of the human figure were fundamen-tal. Shchekotov considered Gerasimov’s attempted synthesis an important direction forSocialist Realism, but he doubted if he had achieved a genuine kartina rather than merely alandscape with figures.

The degree of attention critics paid to the formal means of painting in 1939 marks asignificant shift in the discourse of Socialist Realism since the height of the Purges in 1937,apparently sanctioned by the party, in favor of the more cosmopolitan and formally self-reflexive tendencies, above all of OMKh. As art historian Nina Iavorskaia has noted, “inSoviet artistic culture at the end of the 1930s ... the principle of functionalism yields to that

87Mark Neiman, “O moskovskikh zhivopistsakh,” Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 6:18–19. On Gerasimov’s reform seeN. Mashkovtsev, “S. V. Gerasimov,” Tvorchestvo, 1936, no. 5:1–4; and S. V. Razumovskaia, Sergei Gerasimov(Moscow, 1937), 20–24.

88Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 60.89Zotov, “Khudozhestvennaia vystavka,” l. 5. Ten years later, Zotov would condemn this painting for its im-

pressionist patrilineage and Sergei Gerasimov, disgraced, would lose his teaching post (A. Zotov, “Za preodolenieperezhitkov impressionizma,” Iskusstvo, 1950, no. 1:78–79).

90Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 64. Zotov also found the treatment of the human types careless (“Khudozhestvennaiavystavka,” l. 5). Criticism of Pimenov was attributed to visitors (Industriia Sotsializma [single issue broadsheet],June 1939, 6).

178 Susan E. Reid

of ‘artisticness.’”91 While the critics in 1939 did not question the orthodoxy that realistpainting’s function was “cognitive,” they insisted that this must be achieved by means of asynthetic, expressive and “genuinely pictorial” treatment of theme, summed up in the term“painterliness” or “painterly culture.” High artistic quality had been part of the originalprescription for Socialist Realism, but, as they now lamented, the overzealous crusade againstformalism had resulted in neglect of such professional matters in recent years. However,the best Soviet artists sought a “contemporary artistic language” in which to express ideo-logical content synthetically and invest it with human experience and imagination, usingspecifically painterly means of expression such as lively brushstroke, energetic tonal con-trasts, and rich color.92

So important was the issue of “painterly culture” that MOSSKh devoted a conferenceto the subject in April 1940, with the declared aim of redirecting the union’s efforts toward“creative” rather than organizational issues. It was chaired, appropriately, by another formerJack of Diamonds and former president of OMKh, Aristarkh Lentulov, and the keynotelecture was given by a younger devotee of Cézanne, painter and art historian Aron Rzheznikov.Defying his opponents to accuse him of formalism, Rzheznikov unapologetically made“creative questions” of form and technique the focus of his argument. These elements, heemphasized, were not merely an appendage to content, but its vehicle. Painting must “con-vey content not only in the subject matter” (siuzhet) but also through painterly culture, thatis “an understanding of the painterly means of expression, of ... the harmonious unity ofcolor, form, and all elements of the art of painting.”93

As indicated by responses to Sergei Gerasimov’s Collective Farm Festival, as well asto the work of Ianovskaia, Pimenov, and Konchalovskii, renewed concern for the specificityof painting, color, and facture went hand in hand with the relegitimation of aspects of mod-ern French art, especially impressionism. In early summer 1939, the State Museum ofModern Western Art held an exhibition of French landscape painting, primarily of theBarbizon school and impressionism, which was extensively reported in Tvorchestvo, in-cluding a remarkably enthusiastic and well-informed discussion of Cézanne by Rzheznikov.Impressionism was no longer condemned outright as the beginning of formalism but wasregarded more sympathetically as the continuation of the realist project of Corot, Daubigny,and Courbet. As such, it became a legitimate source for the Soviet style of realism. Ac-knowledging that impressionism had profoundly influenced Soviet artists of his own gen-eration, especially in work they did for themselves rather than on commission, Rzheznikovproposed that its project had been left incomplete. Genuine “painterliness” could not, heargued, be achieved “without its simultaneous treatment as plasticity.” The task was left toSoviet artists to carry on what Cézanne had begun: the attempt to transcend the archetypalimpressionist, Monet’s preoccupation with the “skin of the visual world” in the name of agrand, modern, painterly style. The “Soviet style” required a synthesis of impressionist

91Iavorskaia, “Problema impressionizma,” 71.92Beskin, “Sredi obrazov,” 14–15; Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 73.93RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 1170, ll. 3–4 (report of conference on the culture of painting). Compare N.

Shchekotov, “Gruppa piati,” Tvorchestvo, 1940, no. 12:14–19.


immediacy of observation, Cézanne’s compositional architectonics and treatment of toneand volume through color, with the objectivity (predmetnost’) of the old masters.94

Painterly culture was defined by antithesis to naturalism, which now took the place offormalism as Socialist Realism’s arch-enemy. The day after the opening of the long-awaitedexhibition which Nedoshivin had hailed as the advent of the Soviet style, Pravda, the partydaily, treated it as the occasion for a tirade against naturalism and hackwork. The reviewercondemned the predominance of paintings that “copy, photograph nature as it turns up bychance,” neglecting specifically pictorial concerns.95 Reviews in the two central art journalsIskusstvo and Tvorchestvo followed suit, elaborating a critique of naturalism and promot-ing, as its converse, painterly culture.96 The campaign against naturalism was directed partlyagainst the “inert” and “unartistic” work critics found prevalent in the section “The USSRHas Become Metallic.” While numerous examples of hackwork remained nameless andunillustrated, it also targeted, ad hominem, prominent artists associated with AKhRR, longresented in the artistic community both for their monopoly of power and resources in the artworld and as the perpetrators and chief beneficiaries of the purges of formalism. The pre-cise drawing, tonal modeling, attention to detail, and high finish achieved by the use of afine brush which they cultivated as the epitome of realism in accordance with the teachingof Brodskii (who died in 1939) was devoid of painterliness. As Shchekotov put it, theymade the painted surface as smooth as possible, fearing the “live, succulent, energeticbrushstroke that speaks of the artist’s ardent temperament.”97

Chief culprits included Evgenii Katsman, Ivan Cheptsov, Dmitrii Nalbandian, andFedor Modorov, whom Beskin derided for allowing a large blue teapot to dominate hiscomposition Comrade Mikoian at the Astrakhan Fish Processsing Plant. NikolaiDenisovskii, who had earlier advocated a harsh line against recalcitrant colleagues, wascriticized by Beskin for the “harsh and drily painted” still life of women’s toiletries in hisStalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Mikoian Inspect Products of TEZHE, a painting origi-nally intended for Food Industry (Fig. 6).98 Brodskii’s stellar students at the LeningradAcademy of Arts, Vasilii Iakovlev, Vladimir Serov, and Aleksandr Laktionov also cameunder attack. In Iakovlev’s Gold Prospectors Writing a Letter to the Author of the StalinConstitution, the tour guide pointed out, the meticulous, virtuoso description of even themost trivial detail (such as the tucks and buckles on the back of the central man’s overalls)fragmented perception of the image. And as the reviewer in Tvorchestvo, A. Devishev, putit, “instead of a poetic expression of the theme the artist painstakingly depicts posed figures

94A. Rzheznikov, “O zhivopisnykh traditsiiakh frantsuzskogo peizazha,” Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 7 (back cover);A. Rzheznikov, “Chto takoe zhivopisnost’?” Iskusstvo, 1940, no. 4:69–78; A. Rzheznikov, “Pol’ Sezann,” Iskusstvo,1940, no. 2:129; RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 1170, ll. 7–9; O. Beskin, Aron Rzheznikov 1898–1943: Katalog(Moscow, 1968), 8. On painterliness as a practice of resistance to official norms and the “social command” seeMorozov, Konets utopii, 173–74; and A. Morozov, “Kakie oni — 30-e?” Sovetskaia kul’tura, 7 April 1990.

95I. Grigor’ev, “‘Industriia sotsializma.’”96Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 59–84; Devishev, “Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka.”97Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 76–77. Shchekotov tried to distinguish between “pseudorealism” and naturalism

but the editor, Beskin, condemned this as a red herring (See Savost’ianov, “Problemy,” 320–21).98Beskin, “Sredi obrazov,” 16. Portraits by Evgenii Katsman were specifically criticized in Pravda (Grigor’ev,

“‘Industriia sotsializma’”). Ioganson and Aleksandr Gerasimov were exempt from the attacks on AKhRR artists,whether because their work was more painterly or because they retained powerful personal protection.

180 Susan E. Reid

FIG. 6 Nikolai Denisovskii, Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich, and Mikoian Inspect Products ofTEZHE, 1937. Oil on canvas (dimensions and location unavailable).

and objects.” The result was unconvincing, artificial, and mannered, an “indifferent, piece-meal enumeration of objects.”99

If followers of the recently deceased Brodskii and former AKhRR members had hith-erto enjoyed powerful patronage, this did not save them in 1939–40. Their patron, Voroshilov,was himself in disgrace for his unsuccessful management of the Soviet-Finnish War andwas relieved of his position as defense commissar in April 1940. The campaign againstthem in the name of painterly culture was evidently sponsored by the party, whose newspa-per launched it, was endorsed by the Art’s Committee’s distribution of prizes, and wassustained in professional discussions. They had to resort to a special issue broadsheetdevoted to the exhibition (published by the press of Industriia) to mount their defense.100

From this platform, in face of widespread criticism of the exhibition, Aleksandr Gerasimovinsisted unrepentantly that Industry of Socialism demonstrated the superiority of the methodof commissioning an exhibition as a collective treatment of a theme. Moreover, it dis-proved, once and for all, the bourgeois prejudice—most recently reasserted in the West in

99RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 33; Devishev, “Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka,” 3. ThatBrodskii’s “school,” emphasizing drawing, technique, and composition, was targeted is made explicit by an at-tempted defense by Emelian Iaroslavskii, “O sovetskom izobrazitel’nom iskusstve,” Industriia sotsializma, June1939, 3.

100Industriia sotsializma, June 1939. An early report by Iakovlev in Izvestiia was dismissed as “biased” byDevishev, “Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka,” 2.


Trotsky and Breton’s 1938 manifesto “Toward a Free Revolutionary Art”—that artists couldnot work to order.101

TTTTTAKING STAKING STAKING STAKING STAKING ST OCKOCKOCKOCKOCK

Who was to blame? And what was to be done? Was this huge exhibition, in which suchgreat ambitions and resources had been invested, simply to be written off as a flop? Theprevalence of naturalism, hackwork, and mediocrity at Industry of Socialism was attributedto the AKhRR-dominated Exhibition Committee and jury.102 Their mismanagement andlack of selectivity provided a pretext for moves to further centralize the control of art. Re-sponsibility for the exhibition was transfered to the Arts Committee in December 1939.Under its auspices a new central bureaucracy, the Directorate of Art Exhibitions and Panora-mas, was set up in 1940 to organize museum and traveling exhibitions from the stock ofwork produced for Industry of Socialism, having no budget of its own for commissioningwork. These moves spelled the end to the devolved initiative of competing state bodies andtheir leaders in the patronage of art, which had played so important a part in the formativeyears of Socialist Realism, although, perhaps naively, the transfer from the Commissariatof Heavy Industry to the Arts Committee was apparently welcomed by the artistic commu-nity as a shift from control by an industrial bureaucracy to one dedicated to culturalaffairs.103

When the Arts Committee took stock of the exhibition it found it had adopted a whiteelephant. Its public resonance fell far short of expectations: the press coverage it receivedwas found meagre and at best ambivalent; so, reportedly, were the responses viewers re-corded in visitors’ books, which, if they should ever come to light, would add an importantdimension to this discussion.104 Bearing the scars of its protracted preparation during thePurges, by the time it opened its moment had passed. Although, as Vesnin claimed, itadequately reflected the first two Five-Year Plans, it said nothing about the third. Theworks, commissioned in 1935 and completed mostly by 1937, could no longer meet currentideological or artistic priorities: as we saw, the section “The USSR Has Become Metallic,”so topical at the time of its conception, was found particularly dated and dull. Nor could thetheme of industrialization fire the public imagination any more; poor attendance was blamedon a widespread misperception that it was a “boring” exhibition of machines rather than ofart. Attendance was not helped by the fact that the makeshift venue on Frunze Embankmentlay off the beaten track and was poorly served by public transport; the vaunted new MoscowMetro ran nowhere near it, and even the keenest visitors were deterred by a long wait for a

101A. Gerasimov, “Pafos boev za industriiu,” Industriia sotsializma, June 1939.102Editorial, “Vystavka ‘Industriia sotsializma,’” Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 6: (inside front cover); Devishev,

“Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka,” 5; Shchekotov, “Vystavka,” 60.103RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513, ll. 1 and 7; ibid., ed. khr. 694, ll. 1–5; ibid., ed. khr. 689, l. 5; RGALI, f.

2458 (Directorate of Artistic Exhibitions and Panoramas), op. 1 (introduction to opis’).104RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513, l. 139; ibid., ed. khr. 694. References to visitors’ books are made by

Devishev, “Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka,” 2.

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connecting bus.105 A publicity campaign including posters, flyers, and combined tickets toencourage visitors to the concurrent All-Union Agricultural Exhibition to take in Industryof Socialism at the same time (and thereby to enact the interdependence of agriculture andindustry), was launched, but it was too little, too late: attendance figures remained insuffi-cient to satisfy the Arts Committee that it was viable. The Arts Committee pronounced insummer 1940 that it “can no longer fulfil its original purpose as an art exhibition reflectingthe achievements of socialist industrialization of the USSR.”106

In a spirit of parsimony and pragmatism the Arts Committee conducted anxious dis-cussions concerning how to “liquidate the assets” of the failed exhibition. This entailedtreating it no longer as a cohesive visual narrative, a collective art work as envisaged in theThematic Plan, but simply as a stock of individual works to be redeployed for variouspurposes. Copyists were commissioned to capitalize on successful works both financially,through sales, and by further disseminating their influence on people.107 Paintings whichlanguished unseen in storage were to be “realized” by being dispatched to provincial muse-ums and sanatoria, although a residue of pieces considered unusable or “worthless” re-mained to be sold off at cut price, including some paintings by Shterenberg, AleksandrSamokhvalov, and Pavel Kuznetsov—an indication that the status of these artists remaineddubious despite the change of climate.108 Meanwhile, works from the unused stock, aug-mented by copies of key paintings still on show in Moscow, were used to compile travelingexhibitions dispatched in summer 1940 to the western Ukraine and Belorussia, newly “lib-erated” from “White Polish occupation” by the annexation of eastern Poland in September1939. Visitors’ books—the only ones to be found for any version of the exhibition—con-firmed that the newly Sovietized viewers in this strategic buffer zone well understood thepurpose of these peripatetic offshoots of Industry of Socialism to foster a sense of sharedSoviet identity and patriotism and root out Polish modernism in favor of Socialist Realism,although some complained of their meagre quality.109

Back in Moscow, the ill-fated exhibition was to be reconfigured and born again in timefor the founding congress of the Union of Soviet Artists, planned for Fall 1940, under thenew title, “Achievements of Realist Art after Twenty Years.” Artists participating in the ArtsCommittee’s deliberations were optimistic that, released from narrow, “departmental” in-terests, the re-exposition need no longer be dictated by the task of illustrating the theme ofindustrialization but could be selected more rigorously according to specifically artisticcriteria, rehung according to considerations of visual coherence, and unambiguously pro-moted as an art exhibition. With a newly pragmatic regard for the viewer’s experience,possibly in response to visitors’ comments, greater variety and visual pleasure were to beprovided by shifting priorities away from “dull,” industrial sections toward a broader, more

105In 1939, 161,806 viewers visited the exhibition, most on group excursions (RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr.694, ll. 5–6; ibid., ed. khr. 513, ll. 6–7, 21).

106Ibid., ed. khr. 948, ll. 1–12; ibid., ed. khr. 864, l. 7; ibid., ed. khr. 689, l. 50.107Ibid., ed. khr. 513, l. 10; ibid., ed. khr. 864, l. 7.108Ibid., ed. khr. 513, ll. 116–17, 135; ibid., ed. khr. 689, ll. 40–46.109The exhibition was shown in Białystok 26 May–25 June 1940, then moved on to L’viv (ibid., ed. khr. 689, ll.

1–38 [planning documents and visitors’ books for peripatetic exhibition]).


joyful and entertaining picture of contemporary Soviet life, such as had been presented inthe culminating room. To create a lighter and more “festive” feel, more genre painting,landscape, and still life were included by incorporating the best paintings, such asKonchalovskii’s, from Food Industry, although, in light of current events, more emphasiswas also to be given to defense.110 Reproductions in a brochure advertising the 1940 rehangingall but denied the industrial theme in favor of pastorals and celebrations.111

Revised, abridged, and rebranded, Industry of Socialism was intended to live on afterits closure as the core collection of a planned Museum of Soviet Art, whereby it wouldconstitute the stylistic and thematic canon of Socialist Realism.112 The definitive statementof the nature and scope of Socialist Realism was deferred once more, however, when theseplans were overtaken by the outbreak of war in 1941. By the time the project of definingSocialist Realism was resumed, with the foundation of the USSR Academy of Arts in 1947,the balance of power had shifted again and, in Stalin’s last years, artists criticized for natu-ralism in 1939–40 dominated the institutions of art.113

Conceived in 1935, prepared and hung during the Purges, and opened to the public only in1939, Industry of Socialism could not satisfy the capricious and contradictory demands ofdifferent moments and different bodies. By the dominant criteria of 1939–40 it failed as anart exhibition as well as in its original purpose to inspire the mass viewer with enthusiasmfor industrialization. Contrary to Aleksandr Gerasimov’s confident protestations, the vicis-situdes of Industry of Socialism demonstrated the problems of trying to extend the plannedeconomy to the production of art, of subordinating visual art to an ideological narrative, andsubjecting artists to a bureaucratically administered “social command.” Nevertheless, itplayed a crucial role, both in the process of working out the practices of Socialist Realistpainting and defining the terms of its critical discourse, and in the fine-tuning of the central-ized, bureaucratic system for the management of art. Many of the best-known works ofSocialist Realism were produced on commission for it. Even as critics condemned it for theprevalence of naturalism, they confirmed it as a watershed in the formation of SocialistRealism. For, above the morass of mediocrity, there shone out some bright beacons which,they claimed, demonstrated the advent of the Soviet style. Masterpieces to vie with theclassics, these works made it possible to advance beyond abstract principles toward con-crete analysis of how Socialist Realism was taking shape in the practice of painting.114

These were the lessons Industry of Socialism held for contemporaries. For historians itprovides, in addition, a further case of the dysfunctionality of the Stalinist system, in whichterror, infighting, and competing bureaucratic competencies brought a grand project to its

110Ibid., ed. khr. 694, l. 1–16.111Pamphlet illustrated with Efanov’s Unforgettable Meeting, Plastov and S. Gerasimov’s Collective Farm Fes-

tivals, and another painting by Plastov, In the Pasture (ibid., ed. khr. 948, l. 11).112Ibid., ed. khr. 694, ll. 2–3; ibid., ed. khr. 513, ll. 140–41).113For example, Sergei Gerasimov was ousted as rector of the Moscow Surikov Institute of Art for proselytizing

“painterly vision” and replaced by Fedor Modorov in 1948 (E. Kotova, “Vospitanie sovetskikh khudozhnikov,”Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 28 August 1948).

114Devishev, “Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka,” 6; Grigor’ev, “Industriia sotsializma.”

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knees. In the contest to define Socialist Realism, the struggle between artists for the sur-vival of the fittest was decided as much by the vacillating fortunes of their patrons and ofthe bureaucracies involved in the production and control of art as by considerations of thequality and effectiveness of their art as a means of engineering human souls. Thereby, thedefinition of Socialist Realism was always contingent on the external power relations ofany particular moment.

Documents

Socialist Realism in the Stalinist Terror: The "Industry of Socialism