Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption: Post-Stalin Hybrids

In July 1954, Ekaterina Davydovna Voroshilova copied into her diary a letter in which she recounted what appears to have been a private gathering of the Stalinist elite and their children following a Soviet holiday or a family celebration. Voroshilova, the Old Bolshevik and wife of Klimentii Efremovich Voroshilov, undisputed patron of the Socialist Realist easel painters, described a small, private celebration whose participants were mostly family members of the Stalinist elite—Mikoian, Kaganovich, and Shvernik were among the names mentioned. "These are good people," Voroshilova wrote,

busy, cultured, and full of strength and energy. Most of them—both men and women—are engineers or military people of the tank, air, and chemical industries. There were some historians and architects as well, even an art historian. Many of them are Ph.D.'s. They all dedicate their work and knowledge to the building of communism. They are worthy sons and daughters of their fathers and mothers. We discussed a lot, including art from the perspective of Socialist Realism. Picasso got his fair share of criticism. Some defended him. To be precise, they did not defend his incomprehensible art (even though everyone understands the peace dove) but rather Picasso the communist, the authoritative public figure and French fighter for peace.¹

A little over a year after Stalin's death, the families of the Stalinist party leadership were discussing Picasso and the implications of modern art. This friendly discussion was a final harmonious moment between fathers and sons, right before the cacophony of the Khrushchev era erupted.

Letters and diaries are but one window into such discussions. The opening of the archives and discovery of such sources as letters to newspapers and party leaders, surveillance reports (svodki_) by various agencies, including the secret police, petitions, and denunciations, have allowed us a glimpse into what some historians call "popular opinion" or the "mentalités" of the wider population. Susan Reid and Catriona Kelly, in their excellent articles, make good use of some relatively unexplored sources of this type—Reid, the comment books (knigi otzyvov) which lay out at art exhibitions; and Kelly, selected and collated letters to the editors of the Detizdat children's publishing house, in addition to oral histories. The two articles are typical of a pronounced shift in the center of gravity of Soviet studies to the post-Stalin era, specifically the Khrushchev years, which has taken place in recent years.² Moreover, they are part of a recent trend toward studies of cultural production, which use available contextual evidence to situate cultural products and their meanings within material, personal, and institutional webs. A good example of such work is Thomas Lahusen's How Life Writes the Book: Real Socialism and Socialist Realism in Stalin's Russia, which joins textual interpretation with a reconstruction of the making (including, e.g., reader conferences) of the Socialist Realist writer Vasilii Azhaev's novel Far from Moscow.³ Both articles are also part of a larger shift toward transdisciplinary studies—Kelly, a literary scholar by training, uncovers archival documents and uses oral history sources; Reid, a historian, works with archival documents on Soviet visual culture.

Reid focuses on a single event, the 1962 Manège Hall exhibit in Moscow. More specifically, she is interested in the Moscow Artists Union (MOSKh) exhibit on the first floor, not the upper-floor nonconformist art exhibit that was quickly shut down by the authorities (but is often conflated with the entire exhibit, as Reid points out). She analyzes patrons' written reactions to two paintings—Robert Fal´k's 1922 Nude in an Armchair and Aleksandr Laktionov's 1947 Letter to the Front—showing how these two paintings had become emblematic of what were thought to be diametrically opposed movements: the avantgardism of the 1920s and the Socialist Realism of the Stalin period. Much of Reid's article is devoted to the careful reconstruction of the cultural baggage—the acquired patterns of viewing, museumgoing, and making entries in comment books—that visitors brought along. She also chronicles the semiosphere—the ways in which the pictures were hung, the impact of other visitors and...