Dobrenko, Evgeny, and Eric Naiman. The Landscape of Stalinism

Dobrenko, Evgeny, and Eric Naiman. The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space. University of Washington Press, 2005.

In Introduction, Eric Naiman  (UC Berkley) sets the agenda of the volume as an exploration of the relationship between the Soviet chronotope (a specific understanding of space in any given time, a Bakhtin’s term) and ideological production of meanings. Katerina Clark (Yale) in “Socialist Realism and the Sacralizing of Space” explores the centrality of Soviet “socialist realist” architecture for the sacralisation of Soviet space, with a focus on “purification or repurification” (a forerunner of the purges). Mentions the role of novels in the cartography of Soviet space. The relations between center and periphery became (1930s) vertical – hence many novels/movies end with a hero’s trip to Moscow. “Stalin is like a monument or a monumental building” (12). Clark does a bit of analysis to the sacralisation of Stalin’s figure in socialist realism (mentioning, for example, its connection with Soviet sexuality).

Jan Plamper (Goldsmith, University of London) in “The Spatial Poetics and the Personality Cult. Circles around Stalin” studies the representations of space in those objects of art where Stalin was present himself; he argues that the space is often organized “around” Stalin in these pictures, to the degree that by the late 1940s “he was sometimes represented indirectly, without showing his physical appearance at all” (43). Oksana Bulgakova (Universität Mainz) focuses on changes in spatial representation in the Soviet cinematography (spatial canon). The 1920s as the revolutionary transformation of (cinematic) landscape, esp. through montage; the 1930s as its “cementation” through introduction of vertical axis of semantic meanings (periphery-center). Hans Gunther studies how the archetype of Mother was used for the symbolic legitimation of the Stalinist ideology and regime.

Boris Groys in “The Art of Totality” explores the Stalinist aesthetics of totality. “Works of totalitarian art do not describe the world—they occupy the world” (98). He argues that avant-gardists claimed total authority over the masses (doubtful) which gives him the ground to call it a totalitarian project: “The inclusion of the spectator in the work of art represents the actual project of the avant-garde—and this project itself was from the beginning totalizing or, as it were, totalitarian” (100). He compares the Soviet and Nazi art of the 1930s as two totalitarian projects to draw a conclusion that “a fundamental similarity is obvious… in both cases, the issue is the replacement of customary rules governing the writing of art history with a vision of a single battle [class struggle or Arians vs. non-Arians]. This battle penetrates the innermost part of all history. Hence, all periods are synchronized, and all places are housed in a single, total space” (107). While much of Groys’s material is interesting, sometimes his analysis is too “kulturologicheskii,” based on no empirical or factual basis. “In Stalinist architecture, unlike in bourgeois architecture, every architect attempted to build something total, absolute, undifferentiable, and indescribable” (114). A-ha.

Randi Cox (Stephen F. Austin State University) in “All this can be yours! Soviet commercial advertising and the social construction of space, 1928–1956,” taking as her starting point the assumption that advertising in the Soviet Union played a didactic function of teaching citizens how to consume in a “correct” way, aims to explore the connection between advertisement and the construction of public and private space. Notes that new social characters are produced through advertisement which have nothing to do with production: “we know nothing about [characters] except that they are young, urban, and affluent… As class faded from advertising, youth and gender became increasingly important.” (147) A switch to female consumption. “Two kinds of women appeared in Stalin-era ads: the sentimentalized mother and the glamorous urbanite” (148). She can’t, however, distance herself from the authoritative picture of the Soveit state: speaking of the emphasis on consumption, she refers to some agent “outside” of the society (i.e., Soviet ideologists): “This transformation… was intended to encourage a Soviet identity in which politics and class carried far less weight than family life, gender, and leisure… Advertising from the very beginning of the Stalin period deemphasized production, politics, and class and focused instead on the private, emotional effects of consumption” (156). And what did she expect to find??? A kind of “all-resources-to-the-production-of-weapons” thing? Consumption wasn’t invented out of nowhere, it was culturally rooted in NEP-era consumption, in already existing social values. Perhaps, the best explanation of this is through Hegelian objectification: these advertisement were not part of social engineering by the Stalinist regime, it would be a very big simplification, but themselves embodied certain social trends and tendencies: for example, the figures of “glamorous urbanites” could actually be brought into Soviet discourse by “middle class” women during the NEP from pre-revolutionary and Western fashion (Ellochka-liudoedochka from 12 chairs).

Evgeny Dobrenko studies representations of space (‘cultural topography’) in postage-stamps, tourism journals and popular geography. John McCannon (University of Saskatchewan) explores “the Arctic’s space in the USSR’s modern cosmography” (242), arguing that it was more a testing ground for the making of a new Soviet man/woman and the last frontier rather than anything else (hence ignorance of conditions, costs, psychological influence, etc.). Use of the Arctic myth to reinforce the structures of authority (Stalinist mythology). Interesting observations: polar explorers and Arctic pilots typically came to Moscow to meet Stalin after the completion of their adventures; i.e., the archetypical plot of the socialist realism was materialized in these cases (249-250).