Word: stalins
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...otherwise nothing like this show has been seen in America before. The very notion of an American museum asking for Stalinist paintings seems so weird that any interest in them is bound to seem morbid. To look at, say, Vasili Svarog's ebullient 1939 painting of Stalin and the jolly butchers of the Politburo frolicking with smiling children in Gorky Park is like hearing a particularly ghastly fairy tale told from the point of view of the ogre...
...matter for political purposes that the writer Maxim Gorky should be depicted taking lessons on the rifle range from Marshal Voroshilov, the commissar of war? It mattered because Gorky, though a literary favorite and a devoted friend of Lenin's, was opposed to shooting, and this bothered Stalin...
...fantasy. Realism in Stalinist terms did not mean painting things as they were or even as they might be: the inevitability of Socialist progress erased that conditional "might," along with the gap between present and future. That which will be already is, under the world-sustaining gaze of Comrade Stalin. Ideology ascribed to Stalin the actual role of God, the creation of reality itself...
...once one does grasp this inspiring process, everything falls into place. One sees how Socialist Realism transcends history, with Stalin (who in 1917 was the editor of Pravda but had no role in planning the October Revolution) being painted into the very heart of the first Bolshevik conclaves cheek by jowl with Lenin. One sees Stalin protecting the motherland from the Kremlin ramparts, towering over generals or members of the Politburo who in biological life were considerably taller than he. There he is conducting the defense of Stalingrad (though in fact he prudently avoided going anywhere near a battle), encouraging...
...most of all he is busy being himself: God. Fyodor Shurpin's Morning of Our Motherland, 1946-48, is a portrait of Stalin in the literal form of the Pantocrator, contemplating a new world he has brought into being. He wears a white coat of radiant purity and is bathed in the light of an early spring morning. Behind him stretch the green pastures of a transfigured Russia, Poussin (as it were) with tractors and electricity pylons, and shy plumes of smoke rising to greet the socialist dawn from far-off factories. As Dante wrote, in God's will...