The Stalin Prize and The Soviet Artist

The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist:
Status Symbol or Stigma?

Author(s): Oliver Johnson
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 70, No. 4 (WINTER 2011), pp. 819-843
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
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The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist:

Status Symbol or Stigma?
Oliver Johnson
The prize carries the name Stalin. This bears witness to the great signicance our committee places on the awards as a means to educate the masses
through the medium of art.
Aleksandr Fadeev, 17 January 1949
How did the Stalin Prize function in the Soviet ne art establishment of
the 1940s and 1950s and how were the awards interpreted by members of
the artistic community and the public? This examination of the discussions of the Stalin Prize Committee and responses to the awards reveals an
institution that operated at the intersection of political and expert-artistic
standards within which the parameters of postwar socialist realism were
negotiated and to some extent dened. The Stalin Prize was the highest honor that could be bestowed by the Soviet state in recognition of a
single piece of work in science or culture, but in the case of the ne arts
its symbolic capital was often compromised by its role, perceived or actual,
in the consolidation of a generational and ideological hegemony within
the Soviet art world.
In common with other state prize institutions worldwide, the Stalin
Prize played a central role in the promotion of political and ideological agendas. In the ne arts, the establishment of the Stalin Prize was
closely connected to the revival of the Academy as the principle administrative organ. The 1947 establishment of an All-Union Academy of the
Arts was the culmination of an ongoing campaign to wrest power away
from the increasingly uncooperative local and regional unions and to
reengage with the traditional prerevolutionary artistic practices of the
imperial Academy.1 Just as the prestigious Prix de Rome, the highest accolade of the Acadmie Royale in Paris, contributed to the development
of an authoritarian and centralized approach to painting and sculpture in
Epigraph taken from the introductory comments of Aleksandr Fadeev, chairman of the
Stalin Prize Committee for the arts, to the opening meeting of the committee for the 1948
round of selections, 17 January 1949, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva
(RGALI), Komitet po Stalinskim premiiam pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR v oblasti literatury i
iskusstva, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 30, l. 8.
1. The connection between pre- and postrevolutionary incarnations of the Academy
was long established at the Leningrad Academy, which was reformed as an All-Russian
institution in 1933. In 1939 the Academy published an exhibition catalogue that traced
the history of the Academy from its founding under Catherine the Great to the present
day, and proudly declared, We are 175 years old! Vserossiiskaia Akademiia khudozhestv,
1764 1939 (Leningrad, 1939), 1. S. M. Chervonnaia has observed that such a position
cast doubt on the correctness and necessity of one of the rst acts of Soviet power, namely
the Resolution on the Liquidation of the Imperial Academy of the Arts. S. M. Chervonnaia, Akademiia khudozhestv i regiony Rossii (Moscow, 2004), 114.
Slavic Review 70, no. 4 (Winter 2011)
820
Slavic Review
seventeenth-century France, so too did the Stalin Prize seek to promote

and sustain an approved artistic elite to serve as a model to be emulated
and reproduced. Albert Boime, in his review of a 1983 exhibition of works
from the Prix de Rome competition, documents the relationship between
the selection process and developing notions of French nationalism to reveal an award institution that was highly politicized and sought to recruit
the most talented young artists in the service of the royal court.2 Boime is
dazzled by the technical accomplishment of the works but comments on
the relentless uniformity of the product, which required competitors
to yield their imaginative facilities and experience of the present. 3 A
similar criticism is often leveled at the outputs of highly decorated Soviet
artists by detractors of the socialist realist method of art production. The
Stalin Prize may have granted public acclaim, celebrity, and privilege to its
laureates, but its symbolic capital was undermined in professional circles
by its role in the aesthetic and ideological standardization of Soviet art.
Pierre Bourdieu has argued that arts prizes are essential institutions
for the consecration and canonization of art and artists, as part of the
process by which works of art are identied as a form of high culture.4 The
Stalin Prize played an important role in the development of the public
face of the artist in the Soviet Union and contributed to the establishment
of an enduring (and often misleading) semiotic connection between the
terms Stalinist and socialist realism. However, James English has modied
Bourdieus theory to contend that it is not necessarily the award itself, but
the contempt and controversy generated by the awards process, which
result in this consecration. The very contention that committee selection
processes are awed and often fail to pick the most worthy winner maintains the illusion that the work of art is a sacred object, which cannot be
reduced to a set of straightforward selection criteria.5 In this sense, the
Stalin Prize played an important role in the polarization of conceptions
of ofcial and unofcial culture in the postwar period and contributed to
the development of a rift between the establishmentrepresented by the
senior bureaucracy of the All-Union Academy of the Artsand the grass
rootsrepresented by the young rank-and-le membership of the local
and regional artists unions.
The following analysis of the discussions of the Stalin Prize Committee for the ne arts draws on the work of Kiril Tomoff and Maria FrolovaWalker, who have provided valuable accounts of the equivalent awards
in the disciplines of music and opera, respectively.6 Their analyses reveal
2. Albert Boime, The Prix de Rome: Images of Authority and Threshold of Ofcial
Success, Art Journal 44, no. 3 (Autumn 1984): 281 89. Boime describes the Academie de
France as a kind of colonial headquarters for the extraction of aesthetic wealth and comments on the strict aesthetic regime imposed upon its visiting students. Ibid., 283 84.
3. Ibid., 282.
4. Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans.
Susan Emanuel (Stanford, 1996), 22526.
5. James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural
Value (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 187.
6. Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939
1953 (Ithaca, 2006), and Tomoff, Most Respected Comrade . . . : Patrons, Clients, Brokers
Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?
821
that a number of features were common to Stalin Prize institutions across

cultural elds. In particular, selection committees functioned as extensions of existing patronage networks, simultaneously creating and reinforcing hierarchies of authority, and their debates played a signicant
role in the negotiation of a delicate balance between political and artistic authority.7 Debates surrounding the Stalin Prize for the ne arts were
distinguished by a number of specic features, however, and interpretations of the award itself were subject to considerable variation between
elds. The relationship between the Stalin Prize and the practices of the
leader cult on the one hand, and its close association with the ideological and aesthetic program of the All-Union Academy of the Arts on the
other, ensured that the award became synonymous with the promotion
of a conservative and demagogic line in painting and sculpture. Thanks
to the developed infrastructure for the widespread exhibition and reproduction of works of painting, sculpture, and graphics in the postwar Soviet
Union, ne art was a eld in which the boundary between popular and
critical or elite opinion was especially blurred. Likewise, while Andrei Zhdanovs decrees of 1946 48 provided specic commentary on the
tasks of Soviet composers, writers, theater producers, and lmmakers, the
eld of ne art was not subjected to the same degree of focused intervention from the Central Committee leadership in this period. Against this
backdrop, the Stalin Prize for the ne arts became an important site of
negotiation, rather than reinforcement, of cultural authority. As an indicator of prestige, it failed to live up to its ostensible status as a mark of
individual artistic distinction, and its symbolic capital was compromised by
its manipulation and appropriation according to bureaucratic and political, rather than aesthetic, measures of success.
What Was the Stalin Prize?
The Stalin Prize was conceived in 1939 to coincide with the sixtieth birthday of its namesake as a Soviet alternative to the Nobel Prize.8 The award
and Unofcial Networks in the Stalinist Music World, Contemporary European History 11,
no. 1 (February 2002): 33 65; Frolova-Walker, Elite Conversation on Art for the People:
Music in the Stalin Prize Committee (paper presented at American Museological Society
Convention, Philadelphia, 12 November 2009), and Frolova-Walker, Stalin and the Art
of Boredom, Twentieth-Century Music, no. 1 (2004): 10124. For a discussion of the Stalin Prize for the sciences, see Ethan Pollock, Stalin and the Soviet Science Wars (Princeton,
2006), 114.
7. Tomoff, Creative Union, 248.
8. A mid-1950s document relating to the development of the Lenin Prize (a postStalin replacement for the previous awards scheme) includes an extensive report on the
Nobel Prize including statistical data relating to the nationality of its laureates. In comparison with Germanys 38, Englands 22, and France and the United States 18, Russias single
award to Ivan Bunin (in emigration) in 1936 ( just 0.8 percent of the awards presented)
appears to have been an issue of some frustration for the Soviet Union. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsialno-politicheskoi istorii (RGASPI), Lichnyi arkhiv Molotova, f. 82,
op. 2, d. 467, ll. 9 20. James English attributes the rise of the modern prize institution to
what he describes as Nobel envy, whereby every eld, every subeld of culture would
feel the need to have its own Nobel. English, Economy of Prestige, 29.
822
Slavic Review
was rst presented in 1941, and by the time the practice was discontinued
in 1953, almost one thousand Stalin Prizes had been presented in the
elds of art and culture.9 A Stalin Prize First Class carried with it a signicant nancial bonus of 100,000 rubles, but it also held a less quantiable
degree of symbolic capital, which in many cases granted the new laureate
a rapid improvement in living and working conditions. The rst round of
awards in 1941 recognized all works completed over the past six to seven
yearsin other words all work completed since the 1934 inauguration
of socialist realismbut later awards were made in recognition of works
completed within the previous twelve-month period.10 First-, Second-,
and, from 1947 onwards, Third-Class Prizes were made in each eld of
artistic activity, as dened by the Stalin Prize Committee.11 The number of
awards available in each eld remained a bone of contention throughout
the 1940s and 1950s as members of the selection committee vied to secure
a greater number for their own special areas.
The Stalin Prize formed part of a complex system of civilian awards
and orders that closely mirrored the hierarchical system of Soviet military
decorations. Imperial-style ranks, decorations, titles, and even uniforms
had been abolished after the revolution as symbols of status and class
that were considered incompatible with the creation of a socialist society.
Sheila Fitzpatrick has written of the reinstatement of military ranks and
the establishment of new titles in the 1930s as part of a process whereby
Soviet citizens were encouraged to aspire toward the same (or similar)
marks of distinction that their forebears had held under the imperial system.12 This revival of tsarist-style ranks, orders, uniforms, and titles was
not intended to create a rigid class framework, as had been the case in
the prerevolutionary period, but to provide an open incentive system as
part of the wider practice of socialist competition.13 In theory at least, any
Soviet worker could be given the title Hero of Labor, and any aspiring artist could achieve the rank of Distinguished Artist.
Tomoff has demonstrated that this was far from the case in the eld
of Soviet music, where the honors system simultaneously created and reproduced hierarchies of authority and legitimized the material privilege
9. Postanovlenie Soveta narodnykh komissarov Soiuza SSR: Ob uchrezhdenii premii i stipendii imeni Stalina, Pravda, 21 December 1939, taken from V. F. Svinin and
K. A. Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii: Dve storony odnoi medali (Novosibirsk, 2007), 711. This
valuable book contains a compilation of published material and archival documents connected with the Stalin Prize awards in the eld of culture, as well as extensive statistical
and biographical information about the Stalin Prize Committee, the awards, and their
laureates.
10. Ob izmenenii poriadka prisuzhdeniia Stalinskikh premii po nauke, izobreteniiam, literature i iskusstvu, Pravda, 12 January 1941, taken from Svinin and Oseev, eds.,
Stalinskie premii, 43 44.
11. The number of elds expanded over the years to include previously unrecognized areas including graphics and documentary cinema. Ibid.
12. Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet
Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999), 106 9.
13. For an analysis of socialist competition and its application in a agship construction project, see Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley,
1997), 204 5.
823
that accompanied them. 14 Yet while the honors structure functioned as a

kind of closed system that was related directly to seniority and professional
status with associated rises in salary and pension, the Stalin Prize was promoted as an open competition with an independent selection committee
in which anyone could compete for the award regardless of age or position.15 The Stalin Prize was unique in that it was awarded (in the majority
of cases) in recognition of a single outstanding piece of work and new laureates were chosen by a selection committee made up of members of the
artistic intelligentsia, in other words by a kind of peer-review panel. Their
decisions hinged on a ballot of committee members, the results of which
were used to prepare a list of recommendations. The composition of the
Committee for the Arts included representatives from all elds of culture
eligible for awards and was presided over initially by the theater director
Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, who was succeeded after his death in
1943 by the writer Aleksandr Fadeev. The structure, size, and procedural
remit of the committee underwent a number of changes over the fourteen
years of its existence, but its role as a panel of expert-specialists who participated in a secret ballot on a selection of nominated works remained
fundamentally unchanged.16
The Stalin Prize Committee played an important role in the formulation of a legitimate model for ofcial culture and represented what Tomoff
describes as an interface between political power and creative authority.17 Yet, where Tomoff argues that in the eld of music the Stalin Prize
was a powerful force that legitimized material privilege based on accomplishments recognized by elite audiences, evidence from the eld of ne
art demonstrates that the Stalin Prize contributed to the delegitimization
of that material privilege within the artistic community, based on its circulation among a closed group of establishment gures and its associated
role in the suppression of criticism relating to those gures.18 In the case
14. Tomoff describes the four titles that were conferred upon members of the creative intelligentsia: Peoples Artist of the Soviet Union; Peoples Artist of the Republic;
Honored Figure of the Arts; and Honored Artist. The most prestigious of these awards
was Peoples Artist of the Soviet Union, which could be conferred only by the all-union
government. Tomoff, Creative Union, 236 45.
15. Early Pravda articles about the Stalin Prize advertised the award as an open competition and provided the address of the Stalin Prize Committee for the submission of
nominations. V Komitetakh po Stalinskim premiiam, Pravda, 16 December 1941 and
10 December 1943. Arguing for the importance of the selection committee following a review in 1952, Fadeev described its role as a social path of preparation for granting prizes.
Cited in Tomoff, Creative Union, 263.
16. The composition of the committee was reviewed in February 1947 and again in
1952, after the committee had been threatened with liquidation following an investigation into its activities by the Department of Literature and Art headed by V. Kruzhkov.
O rabote Komiteta po Stalinskim premiiam v oblasti iskusstva i literatury, in Svinin and
Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii, 438 44. See also Tomoffs analysis of the 1952 investigation
in Creative Union, 262 65.
17. Tomoff, Creative Union, 246.
18. Ibid., 265. Galina Yankovskaya, in her analysis of the economic structure of the
Soviet art establishment, has described the Stalin Prize for the arts as an institution that
decisively positioned hierarchy and status as the dominant qualities of Stalinist culture.
Slavic Review
824
of painting and sculpture, the specialist committee proved to be a weak

arbiter of ofcial tastes. The nomination and voting processes were often
characterized by confusion over the relative signicance of political and
artistic measures of quality, and the decisions of the committee were often
adjusted or overruled by those whose inuence extended further up the
bureaucratic strata. The creative authority of the Stalin Prize Committee
for the Arts was largely symbolic and its decisions were always subordinate
to the nal ruling of the Arts Committee (KPDI), the Department of Propaganda and Agitation (UPA), the Politburo, and Stalin himself.
The Selection Process
How was a Stalin Prize awarded to a Soviet artist? First, it was the responsibility of the local, regional, and national artists unions, or other professional arts organizations such as Vsekokhudozhnik and the Moscow
Comradeship of Artists, to submit works to the Stalin Prize Committee for
consideration. Works were usually submitted in the form of photographs
accompanied by a short biography of the artist concerned and in many
cases supported by a brief description of the signicance of the work from
the Arts Section of the Professional Union of Arts Workers.19 Even this
preliminary stage was subject to political inghting. For instance, in 1949,
Sergei Gerasimov, president of the Moscow Artists Union (MOSSKh) and
a relatively liberal gure in the art establishment, was accused by a Central
Committee investigation into his affairs of deliberately submitting works
to the Stalin Prize Committee by artists of a formalist inclination and
omitting the works of more traditional realists.20 Thus in 1947 works by
Aleksandr Deineka and Petr Konchalovskii were put forward by MOSSKh,
while work by Aleksandr Laktionov was denied a nomination.21 This posed
little obstacle to a well-connected artist since the initial list of nominees
could be supplemented by members of the Stalin Prize Committee, the
bureaucratic review bodies, or individuals within the Politburo. The Stalin
Prize selection process thus became a eld within which personal agendas
and patronage relationships played an important role at all levels of the
establishment hierarchy.
Although the composition of the committee included representatives
from various elds of culture, there was a strong bias toward literary, theSee Galina Yankovskaya, The Economic Dimensions of Art in the Stalinist Era: Artists
Cooperatives in the Grip of Ideology and the Plan, Slavic Review 65, no. 4 (Winter 2006):
783. See also Galina Yankovskaia, Iskusstvo, dengi i politika: Khudozhnik v godakh pozdnego
Stalinizma (Perm, 2007). On the suppression of criticism, see, for example, V. Sazhin,
Against Naturalism in Painting, Komsomolskaia pravda, 6 July 1948, and a meeting called
to discuss the article at the Moscow Artists Union, Stenographic Report of a Meeting
of the Secretariat of MOSSKh, 16 July 1948, in RGALI, Moskovskaia organizatsiia soiuz
khudozhnikov RSFSR, f. 2943, op. 1, d. 505.
19. For the 1949 list of recommendations, see Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 5508, op. 2, d. 801.
20. RGASPI, Komitet po delam iskusstv pri Sovete Ministrov SSSR, f. 17, op. 132,
d. 245, l. 20.
21. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 25.
825
atrical, and musical arts and away from the ne arts. Of the forty original
committee members (later expanded to fty-six) only two were painters
(Aleksandr Gerasimov and Igor Grabar) and two were sculptors (Vera
Mukhina and Sergei Merkurov). In contrast there were nine writers, poets,
and playwrights; ten theater directors and actors; and eleven composers
or musicians.22 This representational disproportion was not directly reected in the numbers of awards given in each eld. Over the twelve-year
period of the Stalin Prizes a total of 149 awards were made for ne art and
sculpture, 191 for music, and 199 for theater, ballet, and opera. Literature
was the most highly decorated eld with writers, poets, and playwrights receiving a total of 264 awards.23 Of course, categories were overlapping and
in principle all members of the committee were encouraged to participate
in all plenary meetings and viewings regardless of individual specialization. In practice, discussions tended to be dominated by specialists in a
particular eld and the small number of visual arts experts meant that the
decision-making power was concentrated in a very few hands. The accessible nature of ne art to the opinions of nonspecialists meant, however,
that debates about works of art were often interdisciplinary, with alliances
forming between cultural gures of a similar artistic or ideological leaning.
The committee was divided not only according to specialization but
according to status and authority, with a small number of well-connected
members exerting considerably more inuence than their individual vote
would suggest. Aleksandr Gerasimov, head of the Orgkom of the Union
of Soviet Artists and, from 1947 onwards, president of the USSR Academy
of the Arts, was an especially dominant gure who exercised a virtual monopoly over discussions relating to the ne arts.24 Grabar, on the other
hand, became an increasingly marginalized gure on the committee over
the course of the 1940s, as his professional reputation was brought into
disrepute by accusations of formalism in his position as an art historian.25
Thus could powerful members of the committee extend their reach over
its purportedly democratic basis.
The task of the Stalin Prize Committee was vast, as Fadeev emphasized
22. RGASPI, Upravlenie propagandy i agitatsii TsK VKP(b), f. 17, op. 125, d. 400.
After 1951, the artists Sergei Gerasimov, Vasilii Efanov, Boris Ioganson, and Dementii
Shmarinov and the cultural theorist Vladimir Kemenov were added to the newly formed
Art Section (Izo-sektsiia) of the committee. The structure of the committee comes under discussion in a 1952 investigation by Goskontrol. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 345,
ll. 17578.
23. Svinin and Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii, 852.
24. Tomoff has noted that the dominance of certain personalities within the committee was understood to be one of its major shortcomings. Fadeev expressed this very
concern in his 1952 report, in which he singled out Ivan Bolshakov as an offender in the
eld of cinema. Tomoff, Creative Union, 264.
25. Grabar and Mukhina came under attack on 27 May 1952 for their failure to
support the struggle for realist art. O rabote Komiteta po Stalinskim premiiam v oblasti
iskusstva i literatury, 438. Kruzhkovs conclusions are based on Fadeevs report to Stalin
on the activities of the committee, a report in which Fadeev complains about Grabars and
Mukhinas behavior. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 133, d. 345, l. 165. A wider smear campaign was
carried out against Grabar in the Institute of Art History in 1947, where he was denounced
for his proclivity toward western art. GARF, f. 5446, op. 54, d. 40, ll. 216 19.
Slavic Review
826
in his opening address to the committee in 1947. We must view and judge
such a huge quantity of works that the form of our own work will have to
change. In the elds of painting and sculpture the long list of nominated
works was pared down initially based on an examination of a photographic
portfolio by relevant specialists within the committee. Those works that
went on to be short-listed were then viewed at a private exhibition arranged
specially for the Stalin Prize Committee at the Tretiakov Gallery, or from
1949 onwards at the premises of the USSR Academy of the Arts. Time was
always short for assessment of the proposed works, which was usually carried out over a two- or three-month period between late December and
early March. For the 1947 round of awards, a total of 362 works had to be
assessed in this short time frame over a series of fourteen plenary meetings, sixteen section meetings, and fty-eight viewing sessions.26 Such a
clear overload of reading, watching, viewing, and assessing led Merkurov
to complain that all other work would have to be put on hold for a threemonth period. Likewise the composer Aleksandr Goldenveizer argued
that all of the assessing needed to be done in a great hurry and at the last
minute.27 The majority of participants on the selection committee were
members of the creative intelligentsia in their own right, who continued
to pursue an active career in their own elds of culture. Why then, did several of the nations most inuential and successful artists choose to devote
so much time to this monumental bureaucratic task?
The answer is a simple one: participation on the Stalin Prize Committee was perceived as a means of exercising considerable power and inuence within the Soviet art establishment. Committee members not only
assessed and voted for works of art, but they also overruled the proposals
of local artists unions, canvassed for the works of their friends and associates, and put themselves forward for awards with audacious regularity.
Mukhina won the Stalin Prize a total of ve times and Aleksandr Gerasimov four times while serving on the committee, and of the forty original
committee members thirty-two received the Stalin Prize at least once.28
A review of the committees work in 1952 highlighted the fact that members who had been nominated for the Stalin Prize not only continued to
work and vote on the committee but even promoted their own work at
its sessions. Likewise committee members were accused of putting forward works by their friends and students for consideration and of securing
votes from their colleagues as part of an unspoken reciprocal arrangement.29 The upshot of these procedures was that members of the Stalin
Prize Committee were able to exercise a signicant degree of control over
the formation of the Soviet cultural canon. The Stalin Prize Committee of
artist-specialists played an important role in the public legitimization of
the awards as a democratic process informed by expert opinion. Yet as we
shall see, the authority of the committee was strictly limited by the latter
stages of the selection process.
26.
27.
28.
29.
RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 587, l. 8.

RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 30, l. 391.
Svinin and Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii, 39 43.
Ibid., 438 44.
827
Opinions within the committee tended to be most sharply divided when

it came to works of art produced by artists with a formalist inclination. The
veteran artist and founder of the renowned Bubnovyi valet ( Jack of Diamonds) art movement, Petr Konchalovskii, had only partially adapted his
postimpressionistic style of painting to the method of socialist realism and
was committed to the production of still lives and landscapes, which were
considered to be the lesser genres of Soviet art. His 1947 canvas Na poldni
(Midday) depicts a bathing pond in the middle of an expansive summer
landscape beside which a family enjoy a picnic in the shade of a lush copse
(see gure 1). A group of children are playing in the water while a herd
of cows cool themselves in the shallows. A bright and optimistic work, it
shows little of the brushy paintwork and emphasis on color for which Konchalovskii had become somewhat notorious, and Goldenveizer felt that it
was an outstanding work of landscape painting that is very attractive and
represents a good, bright view of nature. 30 Fadeev argued, however, that
it was the task of the Stalin Prize Committee to select a work for its clear
socialist theme and that rewarding Konchalovskii for a landscape painting would send a misleading message to younger artists.31 Mukhina posed
the following problem in response: One question has worried me at all
meetings of the Stalin Prize Committee: surely we are rewarding a work
for its execution rather than for its theme? . . . A great theme also needs
to be well executed. We undoubtedly need to turn our attention to the important themes, but they must be better made. An indulgence [poblazhka]
cannot be excused by its theme. 32 Mukhinas remark, part of an ongoing
conict with Fadeev over Soviet aesthetics, demonstrates that the selection
committee was split over the question of style versus content, or more precisely over the question of artistic individuality versus ofcial formulations
of socialist realism. Identifying a hidden polemic against his own work in
Mukhinas words, Fadeev urged the committee to stand behind important
socialist-historical works in their decision-making process. Konchalovskiis
landscape won only fteen votes, of which just six were for a First-Class
award, and it was not put forward by the committee.
A similarly politically charged argument broke out over Sergei Konenkovs monumental sculpture Osvobozhdennyi chelovek (Liberated Man,
1947) (see gure 2). Konenkov was an acclaimed sculptor and one of the
few remaining members of a generation of Russian artists who began a
successful career in the prerevolutionary period. His work was dened by
an organic or direct approach to form derived from the medium itself,
which he developed during a long period of emigration in America during the 1920s and 1930s.33 Following a much publicized return to Moscow
after the war, Konenkov was awarded a large studio space and a number of
major commissions but nonetheless found himself a marginalized gure
in the Stalinist art establishment. Liberated Man continued the theme of
30. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 25, l. 66.
31. Ibid., l. 68.
32. Ibid., l. 70.
33. Marie Turbow Lampard, Sergei Konenkov: An Introduction, in Marie Turbow
Lampard, John Bowlt, and Wendy R. Salmond, eds., The Uncommon Vision of Sergei Konenkov, 1874 1971: A Russian Sculptor and His Times (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001), 3 53.
Slavic Review
828
Figure 1. Petr Konchalovskii, Na poldni (Midday, 1947) held by

the Russian Museum, St. Petersburg. Reproduced from an unannotated postcard.
overcoming repression that Konenkov had dealt with in his previous work
Samson, razryvaiushchii uzy (Samson Breaking His Bonds, 1930s). The immensely powerful gure in this new work, standing tall and raising his
once-shackled arms aloft, is a representation of the Soviet victory over
fascism and shows its authors clear stylistic development toward gurative
realism, although it retains a somewhat loose approach to anatomical scale
and proportion. Goldenveizer praised the physical and spiritual power
of Konenkovs sculpture and pointed out that it is impossible to ignore
this work of art. Fadeev expressed admiration for the physical strength
of Konenkovs gure but subjected it to the following criticism: When
you look at this sculpture you get the impression that it is not a person
but a beast; just look how it is standing. This is precisely what we object
to. This is not the creative line set out in our art; it is what we are ghting
against. 34 His sentiment was echoed by the architect Arkadii Mordvinov,
who argued that it is not made according to the socialist plan. Here is a
great talent, but at the same time he is following a different ideological
line. Konenkovs sculpture was not short-listed for the voting process by
the Stalin Prize Committee.
Both of these examples demonstrate that the Stalin Prize Committee
was divided over the relative importance of aesthetic and ideological measures of quality in their evaluations of works of art. While certain mem34. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 25, ll. 1517.
829
Figure 2. Sergei Konenkov, Osvobozhdennyi chelovek (Liberated Man,

1947) held by the Russian Museum,
St. Petersburg. From Iu. A. Bychkov, L. A. Sharafutdinov et al.,
S. T .Konenkov: Vspominaniia, stati,
pisma, vol. 1, Moi vek (Moscow,
1984), unnumbered plate.
bers of the committee including Mukhina, Goldenveizer, and Grabar

argued for artistic merit as the main criterion of success, they were often
overruled by higher-ranking functionaries such as Aleksandr Gerasimov
and Fadeev, who out of duty, responsibility, or what Galina Yankovskaya
has described as the virus of professional cynicism, pushed for a close
adherence to the ofcial line of the Zhdanov-era cultural apparatus.35 In
particular, the policies of antiformalism and anticosmopolitanism were
adopted as central considerations of the committee toward the end of
the 1940s, and a failure to prioritize these factors in the consideration of
works of art could jeopardize a committee members position. Grabar in
particular came under attack in a 1952 report by the Department of Literature and Art on the functioning of the Stalin Prize Committee, which
blamed the inuence of personal tastes and sympathies for his failure
to further the struggle for a realist line in ne art. 36 The following ex35. Yankovskaya, The Economic Dimensions of Art, 785. It is likely that as presidents of the Stalin Prize Committee and the Subcommittee on Art, respectively, Fadeev
and Gerasimov carried a degree of answerability for the decisions of the group that other
members were less constrained by.
36. O rabote Komiteta po Stalinskim premiiam v oblasti iskusstva i literatury, 438.
Slavic Review
830
change between Fadeev and Merkurov regarding Pavel Korins 1947 painting, Portret Konenkova (Portrait of Konenkov), demonstrates the dual role
played by the committee as both a peer-review panel and an interpreter
of the ofcial line:
Fadeev: Konenkov has only recently returned to our country and his work
displays a range of features that are not compatible with our understanding of Soviet art. Furthermore Korin has emphasized these very characteristics of Konenkov in his portrait. These three factors prevent me from
voting for this work.
Merkurov: In light of the Central Committee resolutions?
Fadeev: In light of those ideological-artistic principles for which we are
responsible in our art.37
As Fadeevs somewhat pompous response emphasizes, the committee was

required to translate ofcial rhetoric into the language of artistic evaluation. Its members were aware of the relative importance of personal taste
and political ideology and undertook a delicate process of negotiation
between the two. Yet in spite of its ostensible adherence to ofcial pronouncements on art and culture, the Stalin Prize Committee was often
far from the mark in its selection of works, and its sometimes passionate
debates were often rendered insignicant by subsequent stages of the selection process.
Voting took place at the nal session of the committee in a hurried
manner after a day of prolonged discussion. As E. Kuznetsov complained
at the concluding meeting of the 1948 round of selections, I doubt that
comrades who arrived this morning and voted at ve oclock this evening can look objectively at the facts. I dont want to offend anyone, but
it is disrespectful to the responsibility which the government has placed
upon us. 38 Committee members could vote for as many or as few works as
they liked until 1949, after which they were limited to four votes for each
eld of production, thus encouraging a more considered approach by the
more enthusiastic participants. After the voting process was complete, the
Stalin Prize Committee prepared a list of recommendations to be sent to
the KPDI and UPA. A revised list, together with annotations and amendments was then forwarded on to the Politburo, from which the nal roll
of honor would be transmitted to the press.
It is important to emphasize that the authority of the Stalin Prize Committee was largely a matter of perception, and the powers of selection that
were at its disposal were always subject to the conrmation or emendation
of politicians and bureaucrats. To demonstrate just how ineffectual the
voting process of the Stalin Prize Committee could be, it is worth looking
at the 1947 round of awards for painting (see table 1). For a First-Class
award, the Stalin Prize Committee recommended two works: Georgii Melikhov for the painting Molodoi Taras Shevchenko v masterskoi u K. P. Briullova
(The Young Taras Shevchenko in the Studio of Karl Briullov, 1947) with a
37. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 25, l. 340.
38. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 30, l. 397.
831
total of forty votes, thirty-three of which were for a First-Class award; and
Aleksandr Bubnov for the painting Utro na Kulikovom pole (Morning on
Kulikov Field, 1947) with a total of thirty-nine votes, twenty-six of which
were for a First-Class award.39 Following the editing process of the KPDI,
UPA, and the Politburo, the nal list of laureates demoted Bubnov to a
Second-Class and Melikhov to a Third-Class award. In their stead FirstClass awards were presented to Vladimir Serov for the painting V. I. Lenin
provozglashaet sovetskuiu vlast (V. I. Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power, 1947),
which had gained a total of eleven votes in the Stalin Prize Committee
of which only four were for a First-Class Award; Laktionov for the painting Pismo s fronta (A Letter from the Front, 1947); and Iraklii Toidze for
the painting Vystuplenie I. V. Stalina na torzhestvennom sobranii, posviashchennom XXIV godovshchine Velikoi Oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Stalins
Speech on the 24th Anniversary of the October Revolution, 1947), neither
of whom had been under consideration by the Committee.40
Such interventions were common, came from a variety of sources, and
served a variety of interests. The fate of a candidate could swing wildly
from success to failure and back again based on the endorsement or rejection of the bureaucratic bodies that participated in the selection process. In 1947 the KPDI rejected a proposed Second-Class award for Viktor
Oreshnikovs painting V. I. Lenin na ekzamene v universitete (V. I. Lenin at a
University Exam, 1947) on the basis that it was not sufciently outstanding
(vydaiushchiisia) and proposed Toidze for an award based on his detailed
but awed ceremonial painting of Stalin. Meanwhile the UPA declared
Oreshnikovs canvas to be one of the most signicant works of 1947
and recommended it for a First-Class award. In contrast they considered
Toidzes work to be weak (slabym) and requested that it be dropped from
the list.41 Dmitrii Shepilov, deputy director of the UPA and Zhdanovs protg, was likely inuenced by the Russian nationalist agenda of his patron
in his rejection of a Georgian artists work. Meanwhile Politkarp Lebedev,
head of the KPDI, was a close associate of Aleksandr Gerasimov and his
inner circle, which included Toidze in its number.
In light of the often contradictory recommendations from which
the list of nominees was compiled, it is clear that the nal stage of the
decision-making processthe consideration of the Politburo and Stalin
himselfwas the point at which the buck stopped. Since Politburo members (with the exception of Zhdanov) were not in the habit of visiting the
annual All-Union Art Exhibitions, a special exhibit of works nominated
for the Stalin Prize was held in the Ekaterinskii Hall of the Kremlin. Shepilov has recounted Stalins extensive preparation for the nal discussion of
the Stalin Prize roll of honor, during which he was prone to put forward
works that were unfamiliar to his colleagues and that had not been dis39. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 28, l. 33.
40. For an examination of the convoluted process by which Laktionov became the
surprise recipient of a Stalin Prize in 1948, see Oliver Johnson, A Premonition of Victory:
A Letter from the Front, Russian Review 68, no. 3 ( July 2009): 408 28.
41. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 587, ll. 25, 64 66.
Table 1
Stalin Prize Committee Recommendations versus
Stalin Prize Laureates, 1947.
1947
Stalin Prize Committee Recommendations
Votes
I Class
40 (I: 33, II: 7)
III Class
Melikhov, G. S., Molodoi Taras Shevchenko v masterskoi u

K. P. Briullova (The Young Taras Shevchenko in the
Studio of Karl Briullov)
Bubnov, A. P., Utro na Kulikovom pole (Morning on
Kulikov Field)
Oreshnikov, V. M., V. I. Lenin na ekzamene v universitete
(V. I. Lenin at a University Exam)
Chuikov, S. A., Utro (Morning), Polden (Midday)
Fedorovskii, F. F., Boris Godunov
Serebrianyi, I. A., Na piatom londonskom sezde RSDRP
(At the Fifth London Congress of the RSDRP)
N/A
1947
Stalin Prize Laureates
Votes
I Class
Serov, V. A., V. I. Lenin provozglashaet sovetskuiu vlast

(V. I. Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power)
Laktionov, A. I., Pismo s fronta (A Letter from the Front)
Toidze, I. M., Vystuplenie I. V. Stalina na torzhestvennom sobranii, posviashchennom XXIV godovshchine Velikoi
Oktiabrskoi sotsialisticheskoi revoliutsii (Stalins Speech on
the 24th Anniversary of the October Revolution)
Khmelko, M. I., Za velikii russkii narod! (Toast to the
Great Russian People)
Bubnov, A. P., Utro na Kulikovom pole (Morning on
Kulikov Field)
Romas, Ia. D., Na plotu (On a Raft)
Iar-Kravchenko, A. N., Gorkii chitaet t.t. Stalinu, Molotovu
i Voroshilovu svoiu skazku Devushka i smert (Gorkii
Reads His Fairytale A Girl and Death to Stalin,
Molotov, and Voroshilov)
Kotov, P. I., Portret akademika Zelinskogo (Portrait of the
Academic Zelinskii)
Puzyrkov, B. G., Chernomortsy (Black Sea Sailors)
Melikhov, G. S., Molodoi Taras Shevchenko v masterskoi u
K. P. Briullova (The Young Taras Shevchenko in the
Studio of Karl Briullov)
Efanov, V. P., Portret Stanislavskogo (Portrait of
Stanislavskii)
Oreshnikov, V. M., V. I. Lenin na ekzamene v universitete
(V. I. Lenin at a University Exam)
11 (I: 4, II: 7)
II Class
II Class
III Class
39 (I: 26, II: 13)

38 (I: 16, II: 22)
31 (I: 12, 2: 19)
25 (I: 10, II: 15)
25 (I: 5, II: 20)
(n/a)
(n/a)
(n/a)
39 (I: 26, II: 13)
(n/a)
(n/a)
23 (I: 5, II: 18)

(n/a)
40 (I: 33, II: 7)
(n/a)
38 (I: 16, II: 22)
833
cussed by the Stalin Prize Committee. According to Shepilov, Stalin would

sometimes attend these meetings with a copy of the popular lifestyle magazine Ogonek, in which he would point out a reproduction of a canvas that
had been overlooked. Here in Ogonek there is a portrait by the Stanislav
artist Ulianov. Can we give him a prize? . . . It was really impossible to
predict what new suggestions Stalin would make, or what corrections he
would make to the UPA recommendations. 42 After scrutiny, adjustment,
and readjustment at so many levels of state bureaucracy, the concluding
list of Stalin Prize laureates often bore little resemblance to the initial recommendations put forward by the Stalin Prize Committee.43
Contributions to the leader cult enjoyed a privileged status in the annual Stalin Prize competition and were often granted an award in spite of
signicant artistic shortcomings. Over their thirteen-year history, roughly
half of the Stalin Prizes in the eld of painting were awarded to works
celebrating the leader cult. Several such works, including Toidzes 1947
ceremonial painting of Stalin, Dmitrii Nalbandians Portret Stalina (Portrait
of Stalin, 1945) and Mikhail Khmelkos Za velikii russkii narod! (Toast to
the Great Russian People, 1947) were not considered by the Stalin Prize
Committee and were instead put forward by either the KPDI or the Politburo, demonstrating that the portrayal of Stalin or other prominent
party members in a work of art could be a means by which to circumvent considerations of aesthetic quality. Works that did come under the
scrutiny of the Stalin Prize Committee were often recommended in spite
of their questionable artistic merit, as the discussion of Vasilii Efanovs
monumental brigade painting Peredovye liudi Moskvy v Kremle (Leading the
People of Moscow in the Kremlin, 1949) demonstrates (see gure 3). The
work of Efanov, Stepan Dudnik, Iurii Kugach, Konstantin Maksimov, and
Viktor Tsiplakov depicts a 1947 ceremony in which the Order of Lenin
was presented to the city of Moscow in commemoration of its 800-year
anniversary. Although absent from the painting, Stalin is nonetheless
present in the form of an enormous bust that towers over the gathered
crowds and dominates the composition. This monumental and ambitious
representation of an award ceremony is also self-consciously formal and
somewhat workmanlike in its execution. Fadeev described the work as
too ceremonial [slishkom paradnaia], as if it was drawn especially for an
award. 44 Although he did not disagree with Fadeevs judgment, Aleksandr Gerasimov reminded his fellow committee members of Ilia Repins
renowned 1903 painting Torzhestvennoe zasedanie Gosudarstvennogo soveta
(Ceremonial Meeting of the State Council) and emphasized that Efanovs
canvas represented serious, good-quality labor. Mukhina responded
with a statement that is still more revealing of the problematic nature of
42. Iz vospominanii D. T. Shepilova: Stalin i inzhenery chelovecheskikh dush, Voprosy istorii, 1998, nos. 3 7, taken from Svinin and Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii, 603.
43. In 1947, just 50 percent of the Stalin Prize Committees recommendations received an award, none of them in the correct category, while in 1949, 62 percent received
an award, three of them in the correct category. See RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 28, l. 33 for the
1947 round of voting, and RGASPI, f. 82, op. 2, d. 467, l. 71 for the 1949 round of voting.
44. RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 35, ll. 198 99.
834
Slavic Review
leader cult works for the Stalin Prize Committee: If we are being terribly
strict then we should reject [Efanovs work]. But we are not always very
strict; the theme is necessary and important, and we need to put this work
forward for a First-Class [award]. 45 Where works of the leader cult were
concerned, considerations other than artistic skill or technical accomplishment often took precedence. In particular the signicance of the
theme and the expenditure of time and labor were understood to represent the main criteria of merit. In keeping with traditional academic hierarchy of genre, large-scale leader portraits and group portraits including
the leader were granted a privileged status in the evaluation process, an
approach mirrored by the pricing policies of the state order mechanism.46
Judging by the language used by the Stalin Prize Committee in its discussions, however, works of the leader cult were often deemed to be less
than successful in terms of execution but were put forward nonetheless
on the strength of their theme.47 In this sense, the Stalin Prize Committee functioned as part of the formula of what Jan Plamper has described
as Stalins immodest modesty, whereby the vainglorious mechanisms of
cult management were attributed to an independent panel of specialists,
casting the leader himself as a passive or even reluctant beneciary of
spontaneous artistic celebration.48
In spite of the convoluted behind-the-scenes machinations with which
the awards were decided, the Stalin Prize Committee was represented in
the Soviet press as the dominant body behind the awards process. For instance in 1951 Pravda published a regular series of short articles entitled
Inside the Stalin Prize Committee that kept the public updated on the
selection process and were presumably intended to build interest in the
run up to the announcement of the awards. The purpose of the Stalin
Prize Committee was to legitimize the awards process in public and professional eyes as a peer-review system informed by expert opinion. It was a
face of authority in the Soviet art world that was frequently abused in the
service of personal loyalties, but it was a hollow authority that extended
only to the initial stages of the selection process, beyond which the nal
roll of honor was vetted, edited, and nalized by the Central Committee. The Stalin Prize awards were symptomatic of what Leonid Heller has
compared to Werner Heisenbergs Uncertainty Principle in relation to
the erratic functioning of the Soviet state in its development of cultural
policy.49 The unpredictability of the Stalin Prize roll of honor, even to the
panel of state-selected experts on the Stalin Prize Committee, suggests
45. Ibid.
46. Yankovskaya, The Economic Dimensions of Art, 790.
47. For a further examination of the responses of the Stalin Prize Committee to works
of the leader cult, see ibid., 785 86.
48. Jan Plamper has analyzed the oxymoronic nature of a Bolshevik personality cult
and demonstrated that a meticulous process of orchestration was carried out by Stalin and
other leaders in order to conceal the articial nature of cult promotion and development.
Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti: Kult Stalina v izobrazitelnom iskusstve (Moscow, 2010), 190 208.
49. Leonid Heller, A World of Prettiness: Socialist Realism and Its Aesthetic Categories, in Thomas Lahusen and Evgeny Dobrenko, eds., Socialist Realism without Shores
(Durham, 1997), 58.
835
Figure 3. Vasilii Efanov, Stepan Dudnik, Iurii Kugach, Konstantin Maksimov, and
Viktor Tsiplakov, Peredovye liudi Moskvy v Kremle (Leading the People of Moscow
in the Kremlin, 1949). Current whereabouts unknown. Mir nagrad: sait rossiskikh
kollektsionerov, at www.mirnagrad.ru/cgi-bin/exinform.cgi?page=27&ppage=4
(last accessed 1 September 2011).
that there was a serious rupture between the elds of political power and
creative authority in the postwar Soviet art world. Yet it also hints at a more
fundamental crisis at the heart of the postwar cultural establishment: in
lieu of a reliable and effective model for the development of socialist realist art, the Stalin Prize evaluation process was subject to the competing
and often contradictory agendas of interested parties at all levels of state
bureaucracy. In short, for all the expertise and authority of the selection
committee, the prevailing measures for the success or failure of a Stalin
Prize candidate appear to have been the allegiances, personal tastes, and
whims of nonspecialist members of the Politburo.
Responses to the Awards
The annual announcement of the Stalin Prizes was met with a great fanfare
in the Soviet media. The rst round of awards in 1941 was celebrated with
a radio concert and a lavish ceremony at the Maksim Gorkii Art Theater
at which certicates and medals were presented to the new laureates.50 As
though it were a Soviet Oscars ceremony, recipients were invited to give a
short speech, but they thanked, not their friends, family, and nanciers,
50. Radiokontsert posviashchennyi laureatom Stalinskogo premii, Pravda, 17 March
1941, and Vruchenie diplomov deiateliam iskusstvalaureatom Stalinskikh premii,
Pravda, 22 April 1941, taken from Svinin and Oseev, Staliniskie premii, 66 68.
836
Slavic Review
but the Bolshevik Party, the people, and of course their wise leader Stalin.51
In 1943, during the war, Pravda printed a series of telegrams from the new
Stalin Prize laureates to Stalin in which they pledged their winnings to the
Soviet war effort in the form of a donation to the Red Army.52 This was a
practice that the quadruple-laureate Aleksandr Gerasimov continued in
peacetime, although it is important to note that as a close friend of Red
Army Chief Kliment Voroshilov, the artist stood to gain considerably more
than the nancial benet of his awards from the propagation of a close
relationship with this inuential patron of the arts.53 A number of new
laureates participated in public events such as Celebration Evenings or
meetings with fans and admirers.54 It was common practice for Stalin Prize
winners to attract a urry of attention in the press and to have their work
reproduced widely in newspapers, journals, and Ogonek. In short, a Stalin
Prize represented a signicant step up the ladder of fame and fortune in
the strictly hierarchical system of Soviet celebrity.
What did a Stalin Prizewinning work look like? Just as Boime detected uniformity and suspension of imagination in the work of the Prix
de Rome laureates, so too can a distinct homogeneity be observed in
the prize-winning canvases, sculptures, and graphic works of the Stalin
Prize laureates.55 The feature uniting the majority of painting winning
the Stalin Prize is Academicism; or rather, a simulation of traditional Academic painting allied with a number of features specic to Soviet socialist
realism: atness of nish, evenness of detail, and brightness of color. A
vast majority of First-Class works fall into the category of the thematic
kartinathat is a large-scale complex composition in oil on canvasand
most are based on multigural portraits of historical scenes. Second- and
Third-Class awards were most often given to portraits of Soviet notables,
to war painting (prior to 1947), and to agricultural scenes. Exceptions
to these broad categories were rare and carried particular signicance,
inevitably resulting in a rash of imitations. From 1947 onwards, the genre,
or everyday life painting (bytovaia zhivopis), rose to prominence following
awards to Laktionov in 1947 for A Letter from the Front, to Fedor Reshetnikov in 1948 for Pribyl na kanikuly (Home for the Holidays), and to Sergei
Grigorev in 1949 for Vratar (Goalkeeper). Likewise landscape painting
51. For a stenographic report from the ceremony for the 1948 awards held in March
1949, see RGALI, f. 2073, op. 1, d. 35, ll. 1729.
52. Svinin and Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii, 174 86.
53. For an anecdotal account of Gerasimovs generous donation of his prize money to
the Red Army, see Matthew Cullerne Bown, Aleksandr Gerasimov, in Matthew Cullerne
Bown and Brandon Taylor, eds., Art of the Soviets: Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture in a
One-Party State, 19171992 (Manchester, Eng., 1993), 133 34.
54. In 1949 the recently distinguished laureate Aleksandr Laktionov took part in such
an event at the Tretiakov Gallery in which he recited a potted biography and elded a
selective series of questions from the audience. Gosudarstvennaia Tretiakovskaia galereia
(GTG), f. 18, d. 295. Laktionov was introduced by Vera Gertsenberg, who placed great
emphasis on the nurturing inuence of the Soviet art establishment as a contributory factor to Laktionovs success.
55. Frolova-Walker has written of a similar phenomenon in her study of Soviet music
production, in which she argues that tedium, it would appear, was not an unfortunate
by-product of Socialist Realism, but a quality which was deliberately cultivated. FrolovaWalker, Stalin and the Art of Boredom, 103.
837
received a boost in 1950 following the awarding of Third-Class prizes to

Vasilii Meshkov, Aleksei Gritsai, Gregorii Nisskii, and Semen Chuikov for
their attempts to unite traditional landscape painting with specically Soviet features relating to construction and agriculture. An extremely limited number of awards were made to artists from the Soviet republics for
works that represented a symbolic, Sovietized version of indigenous national art, such as Chuikovs 1948 Second-Class award for a series of Kyrgyz
kolkhoz scenes, or to the Azerbaijani sculptor, Fuad Abdurakhmanov, in
1950 for his bronze statue Chaban (Shepherd).
The Stalin Prize awards were monitored by local artists unions as indicators of the prevailing currents of ofcial Soviet culture. As an important
point of contact between the upper echelons of Soviet power and the art
establishment, the Stalin Prizes provided a useful blueprint for the correct
fulllment of state commissions and a model for the pursuit of ofcial recognition. In the words of a 1948 Iskusstvo editorial describing this joyous
festival for all masters of Soviet art: This resolution [on the awarding of
Stalin Prizes] demonstrates which directions and tendencies correspond
to those directed by the party and the Soviet government and which to
those demanded by the people. The great, principled signicance of this
resolution correctly orients our creative workers and provides rich material for theoretical consideration and for the development of Soviet aesthetics.56 The article included not only a brief description of the work
of the new laureates and an afrmation of their particular contributions
to Soviet culture but also a polemic against those artists and critics who
had been inuenced by formalist tendencies, impressionist aesthetics, and
painterlinessmeaning an emphasis on color, light, and texture over the
technique of ne drawing. It provides an example of the process by which
the incentive system of the Stalin Prizes was transformed from a carrot into
a stick. Rather than afrming positive trends, it was often presented as a
repudiation of alternative interpretations of the socialist realist aesthetic.57
It was precisely such an article that Vladimir Pomerantsev might have
had in mind when he complained of the dampening effect of the Stalin
Prizes on principled criticism in his landmark 1953 article On Sincerity
in Art and Literature:
Its bad when what comes from the critic are not sounds but echoes.
Its bad when he doesnt suggest anything but himself awaits suggestion.
Its bad when he doesnt discover names but only popularizes those given
to him.
As a rule, among us, popularization occurs without a penetration
into the essence of the works themselves. Articles appearing after the
awarding of the Stalin Prizes usually turn out to be only enumerations,
not reviews of literature.58
56. Prazdnik sovetskogo iskusstvo, Iskusstvo, 1948, no. 3:3 4.
57. Plamper has argued that the striving for ubiquity and totalizing ambitions,
which characterized leader cult works in particular, as well as socialist realist art in general,
implied the end of art criticism as a eld. Plamper, Alkhimiia vlasti, 179.
58. Vladimir Pomerantsev, On Sincerity in Literature (1953), trans. Eric Konkol, at
www.sovlit.com/sincerity/ (last accessed 1 September 2011). First published in Novyi mir,
December 1953, 218.
838
Slavic Review
The stiing nature of the awards on criticism was an important factor in

strengthening existing hierarchies within the Soviet art establishment. It
simultaneously granted a small number of senior establishment gures
blanket coverage of their work in the Soviet press and placed them off
limits for ofcial criticism. It also contributed to the strengthening of a
generational divide; an issue of particular concern to the young cadres
of MOSSKh, who voiced their frustration with the restrictive aesthetic
program of the Academy, the Orgkom of the USSR Artists Union, and
the Stalin Prize institution at a stormy discussion of the 1949 All-Union
Exhibition. Having criticized a number of Stalin Prize laureates including Laktionov and Aleksandr Gerasimov, the young artist Poliakov declared: Stand aside; you are preventing Soviet art from developing to a
new stage. You have said your word, let us say ours, but dont try to impose
your authority upon us, because many of you have none. Another young
artist, Taezhnaia, concurred. Your time is up. Full stop. Give the young
and able their turn; ring in the changes. 59
Especially revealing in this regard is a letter sent by an anonymous
group of young sculptors to Zhdanov dated 20 June 1948.60 The authors
of this letter expressed their commitment to the principles of socialist
realism but complained that they were hamstrung in their efforts to play a
more active role in artistic life by a clique [kuchka] of old mastersthat
is, senior establishment gureswho held a monopoly over the means
of production, criticism, and reward. Among this clique the young sculptors identied the sculptors Merkurov, Mukhina, Matvei Manizer, Evgenii Vuchetich, and Nikolai Tomskii, and the artists Aleksandr Gerasimov,
Sergei Gerasimov, Konstantin Iuon, Vasilii Iakovlev, and Efanov, all of
whom were Stalin Prize laureates. The young sculptors claimed that this
group looked out for the interests of its own circle and worked actively
to obstruct the careers of others. As members of a younger generation of
Soviet artists, the group of sculptors argued that they were limited in their
development by an institutionalized conservatism that was both creatively
stiing and hypocritical in its ideology. As the letter scathingly observed,
this reactionary clique of establishment artists justied their dominance
through indiscriminate criticism of formalist tendencies regardless of the
fact that there are many [formalists] among the leading masters: Merkurov, Manizer, Boris Ioganson, Iuon, and so on. 61
In particular the young sculptors were critical of the way in which
members of this clique placed bureaucratic duties before matters of
artistic production. An anecdote from a recent discussion of MOSSKh
59. These events on the 24 and 25 November 1949 were reported to Mikhail Suslov
in a letter from Lebedev and Aleksandr Gerasimov dated 2 December 1949. RGASPI, f. 17,
op. 132, d. 245, l. 37. The two young artists concerned subsequently wrote letters of apology to Georgii Makenkov in which they expressed regret at the manner of their dissent,
but in both cases they also took the opportunity to reassert the existence of a damaging
generational inequality in the art establishment. See Taezhnaias letter, dated 21 December 1949, l. 35, and Poliakovs letter, dated 15 December 1949, l. 40.
60. RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 86, ll. 28 35.
61. Ibid.
839
concerning Aleksandr Gerasimov was used to highlight the complacency

with which these artists maintained their heavy burden of responsibilities. Someone from the oor asked Gerasimov how he managed to cope
with duties such as participating on the Stalin Prize Committee, and so
on. Gerasimovs answer was as follows: You know its like riding a bicycle;
while the wheels are spinning, while youre moving its impossible to stop
you, to knock you down. Thats how theyre all riding, while solid barriers
are placed in the path of us young cadres. 62 Assuming the veracity of the
anecdote, Gerasimovs glib response not only demonstrates a somewhat
ippant approach to his numerous inuential roles and duties but also reveals his attitude toward the mechanisms of the art establishment. To borrow Gerasimovs metaphor, the fulllment of bureaucratic responsibilities
such as participation on the Stalin Prize Committee was seen as a wheel
that needed to be kept in motion in order to propel the artist himself
forward. The thrust provided by this and other of the artists institutional
roles contributed to an unstoppable momentum that allowed Gerasimov
and his fellow artist-bureaucrats to monopolize the eld regardless of the
quality of their actual artistic outputs.
A further criticism was leveled at the sculptor Vuchetich, who the
young sculptors accused of contriving to win a Stalin Prize for the production of a monument on which he never laid a nger. 63 According to
the accusatory letter, both the preliminary sketches and the enlargement
of the design were completed by young members of the senior sculptors
studio. Regardless of whose work it was, the young letter writers speculated that Vuchetich had received the award, not as the fair outcome of a
principled selection process, but as the result of the close personal friendship he had nurtured with Aleksandr Gerasimov and Petr Sysoev, director
of the KPDI. These denunciations demonstrate that by the late 1940s the
Stalin Prizes had earned a reputation within MOSSKh as a closed system
of self-reward reserved for a small elite of establishment artists and sculptors. The declining symbolic capital of the Stalin Prize for the ne arts
was part of the process by which an emerging artistic intelligentsia began
to dene itself in the early 1950s in opposition to the elitist agenda of the
Academy and its privileged acolytes.64
A diminishing respect for the artistic credibility of Stalin Prize laureates was not limited to those who worked within the art establishment.
Comments made by visitors to the 1952 All-Union Art Exhibition demonstrate that far from being the stars of the show, award winners were in
many cases condemned by anonymous members of the public for their
outdated methods and irrelevant subject matter. Of Aleksandr Gerasimovs
landscape work Zelenia (Greenery), a visitor commented that such paintings only nd their way into an exhibition through a complete absence
62. Ibid., l. 28.
63. Ibid., l. 31.
64. For an examination of the conict between the incumbent arts bureaucracy and
an emergent intelligentsia in the 1950s, see Susan E. Reid, Destalinization and Taste,
1953 63, Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 180 82.
840
Slavic Review
of criticism or self-criticism. 65 Of Iogansons monumental brigade painting Nash mudryi vozhd, uchitel dorogoi (Our Wise Leader, Teacher of
the Path), a viewer remarked that it is reminiscent of a masquerade. 66
Of Toidzes new work an angry visitor wrote simply Shame on Toidze!
Shame! Shame! 67 The following rationalization of the problem written by
an anonymous teacher is indicative of the grassroots resentment some visitors to the exhibition experienced toward certain heavyweights of the art
establishment. It seems to me that the time has come when we dont have
to consider an artist as an authority and only include his works in an exhibition because of his past success. The last two works by NalbandianPortret
Mao Tzeduna [Portrait of Mao Tse-Tung] and Pered Batumskoi demonstratsiei
[Before the Batumi Demonstration] are abominable. Especially the latter. . . . Yet they exhibit it! And there are even friends of the artist who
comment on the painting in the press. 68 This selection of comments is by
no means a representative sample, and the wide variety of responses effusive, rehearsed, critical, abusive, illegiblepreclude attempts to draw
reliable statistical conclusions.69 Comment books taken as a whole, however, reveal a conict between two dominant groups of visitors: a passive majority who responded to the works on display according to and
often in the language of ofcial formulations; and a progressive minority
who were heavily critical of establishment works of art and considered
it their duty to correct the perceived ignorance of the former group. Yet
for all the criticism of former Stalin Prize laureates, both types of visitors
were inclined to speculate on the coming round of selections. One oftrepeated response written shortly after Stalins death in 1953 read, Who
should be awarded the Stalin Prize? Surely it can only be F. Reshetnikov:
he deserves it. 70
In March 1954, in lieu of a forthcoming announcement on the 1953
round of awards, an exhibition of works put forward for the Stalin Prize
was held at the State Tretiakov Gallery. In the context of a pre-award viewing of nominated works, visitors took the opportunity en masse to mention
their favorite candidate in the comment books.71 Popular works included
Sergei Gerasimovs landscape series Mozhaika and Grigorevs genre painting Vernulsia (He Has Returned), while a number of visitors objected to the
inclusion in the shortlist of Khmelkos large-scale historical kartina Naveki
s Moskvy (Forever Moscow): What sort of an art expert are you and what
do you know about art if you like trash like Khmelkos canvas? 72 Yet a signicant number of visitors took the opportunity to express a deep-rooted
65. GTG, f. 8.II, op. 2, d. 7, l. 2.
66. GTG, f. 8.II, op. 2, d. 8, l. 18.
67. GTG, f. 8.II, op. 2, d. 9, l. 17.
68. Ibid, l. 35.
69. For a discussion of the problematic use of Soviet comment books as a historical
source and the difculty of drawing statistical conclusions from their contents, see Susan
Emily Reid, In the Name of the People: The Mange Affair Revisited, Kritika 6, no. 4
(Fall 2005): 675 84.
70. GTG, f. 8.II, op. 2, d. 16, l. 30.
71. GTG, f. 8 II, op. 3, dd. 3 4.
72. GTG, f. 8 II, op. 3, d. 3, l. 8.
841
disillusionment with the meager achievements of the cream of the Soviet

art establishment: Its somehow sad when you consider that these twoand-a-half halls represent the sum total of two years of work. 73 Or, The
exhibition is poor. Two years and thats all? Its shameful. 74 It appears that
this unique opportunity for the Soviet public to encounter the nominated
works before the announcement of the awards highlighted for many the
limited and unrepresentative nature of the awards process in relation to
the diversity of the Soviet art world as a whole.
Visitors comments from both exhibitions offer insight into the active interest Soviet citizens took in the Stalin Prize awards. In spite of the
closed nature of the Stalin Prize competition, a signicant number of
visitors used the comment books as a means to record their preferences,
to berate the selection committee, or to speculate on the coming round
of selections. Such comments suggest that as late as 1953 the awards were
not obsolete as an institution and that there remained a degree of public engagement in the annual announcements. Perhaps this popular engagement with the Stalin Prize was amplied by Englishs concept of the
economy of contempt in relation to the selection process?75 Or perhaps a
common misapprehension remained that the selection process could be
inuenced by public opinion? On this occasion those who eagerly awaited
the annual presentation of the new Stalin Prize laureates would be disappointed; following the death of their namesake the award was discontinued. The 1952 round of prizes was never presented for the arts since Stalin
did not succeed in reviewing the recommendations before his death on
5 March 1953.76
The Fate of the Stalin Prize
Stalins death alone did not put a comprehensive end to the Stalin Prize
institution. The Stalin Prize committee continued to convene and in April
of 1954 presented its recommendations for 1952 1953 to the Central
Committee for the consideration of Nikita Khrushchev, who had by then
assumed leadership of the party. Khrushchev approved the selection of
prizewinners for the sciences but for an as yet undetermined reason failed
to approve those selected for awards in the arts.77 The Stalin Prize was
disbanded in 1954, although no ofcial explanation was forthcoming for
the change of policy. It is likely that not only the name but also the implications of the awards and their close association with the Stalinist personality cult were critical factors behind this development. By 1955 former
recipients of the awards were no longer referred to as Stalin Prize laureates but as State Prize laureates and the entry for the Stalin Prize had
73. Ibid., l. 4.
74. Ibid., l. 16.
75. English, Economy of Prestige, 18796.
76. Svinin and Oseev, eds., Stalinskie premii, 615. Stalin did, however, succeed in reviewing the recommendations for the Stalin Prizes in the sciences, and the 1952 round of
awards was made shortly after his death.
77. Ibid., 61718.
842
Slavic Review
been removed from the Bolshaia Sovetskaia Entsoklopediia.78 Not until 1956
was a revised form of the award, the Lenin Prize, instituted as a replacement honor.
By the time of the leaders death, the Stalin Prize for the ne arts had
entered a state of crisis from which its credibility could not be salvaged.
Several prominent Stalin Prize laureates, including the head of the artists
section of the Stalin Prize Committee, Aleksandr Gerasimov, had suffered
very prominent falls from grace.79 The artistic output of the nations most
acclaimed and heavily decorated artists, which had for several years been
dominated by the representation of Stalin and other leaders, came to be
derided in increasingly outspoken liberal circles of the artistic intelligentsia as inartistic hack work or toadying.80 Following Khrushchevs so-called
Secret Speech of 1956, the concept of the leader cult gained widespread
currency as a condemnation of a certain branch of socialist realism that
privileged the gure of Stalin over and above considerations of artistic
quality. Making explicit reference to the Stalin Prize institution, Khrushchev objected that not even the Tsars created prizes which they named
after themselves. 81 In light of these revised criteria of merit, a signicant
proportion of Stalin Prizewinning works underwent a critical reappraisal
that saw them removed from the ofcial cultural canon.82
Although it was instituted as a positive incentive system designed to
bestow status and authority upon its laureates, the Stalin Prize for the ne
arts came to represent a mark of aesthetic conservatism associated with
political and bureaucratic, rather than artistic, accomplishment. Its Selection Committee was intended to act as an arbiter of artistic merit and as
an intermediary between policymakers and art world professionals, but
its inuence was undermined by the incompatibility of these two tasks.
The degree of incongruity between the ballot of the Stalin Prize Committee and the nal roll of honor reveals that the committees authority was
largely symbolic and that the committee was not always on message, in
particular when it came to the strategic promotion of ideologically signicant works of art. The Stalin Prize selection process became dominated
by Aleksandr Gerasimov and his circle, who attempted to mold the roll
78. Ibid., 618.
79. In November 1949 the Academy of the Arts came under investigation by Goskontrol. As a result of their inquiry, Aleksandr Gerasimov was indicted for his involvement in
a number of the organizations transgressions including the awarding of extra pay to its
presidium and the installation of his personal friends in prominent positions within the
Academy. See RGASPI, f. 17, op. 132, d. 245, ll. 142 48.
80. The most prominent published accounts of this phenomenon can be found in
Pomerantsev, On Sincerity in Literature, and Ilia Erenburg, The Thaw (1954), both of
which address the issue of cynical hack artists and their lack of creative individuality.
81. Nikita Khrushchev, Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, delivered 24 25 February 1956. Full text available at www.marxists.org/archive/khrushchev/
1956/02/24.htm (last accessed 1 September 2011).
82. Reid has described the process by which the institutions and mechanisms of the
Stalin cult came to be criticized and dismantled by reformists within the art establishment
in the 1950s. See Reid, Destalinization and Taste, 177 87, and Susan E. Reid, Masters
of the Earth: Gender and Destalinisation in Soviet Reformist Painting of the Khrushchev
Thaw, Gender and History 11, no. 2 ( July 1999): 276 312.
843
of honor for ne art according to a narrow Academic agenda, contributing to the growing hegemony of the newly formed All-Union Academy in
the Soviet art world. The consequence of this institutional bias was that
the Stalin Prize for the ne arts garnered a reputation among a younger
generation of artists within MOSSKh as a closed system of internal reward
and self-aggrandizement, less a form of meritocracy than a form of statesanctioned nepotism. The Stalin Prize for the ne arts lost its luster as a
symbol of artistic achievement and became tarnished by its association
with a restrictive and outdated aesthetic agenda, which remained poorly
dened and frequently misinterpreted even by those specialists responsible for its implementation. The institution of the Stalin Prize for the
ne arts was both a victim of, and a contributory factor to, the process
of de-Stalinization in this period. The problematic debates of the Stalin
Prize Committee and unrehearsed responses to the awards and their laureates are indicative of the often tenuous degree of control exerted over
the Soviet ne art establishment even at the height of state intervention
in the late 1940s.

The Stalin Prize and The Soviet Artist

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The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist:

Status Symbol or Stigma?

The Stalin Prize and the Soviet Artist:

seventeenth-century France, so too did the Stalin Prize seek to promote

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

that a number of features were common to Stalin Prize institutions across

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

that accompanied them. 14 Yet while the honors structure functioned as a

of painting and sculpture, the specialist committee proved to be a weak

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

RGASPI, f. 17, op. 125, d. 587, l. 8.

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

Opinions within the committee tended to be most sharply divided when

Figure 1. Petr Konchalovskii, Na poldni (Midday, 1947) held by

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

Figure 2. Sergei Konenkov, Osvobozhdennyi chelovek (Liberated Man,

bers of the committee including Mukhina, Goldenveizer, and Grabar

As Fadeevs somewhat pompous response emphasizes, the committee was

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

Stalin Prize Committee Recommendations

40 (I: 33, II: 7)

Melikhov, G. S., Molodoi Taras Shevchenko v masterskoi u

Stalin Prize Laureates

Serov, V. A., V. I. Lenin provozglashaet sovetskuiu vlast

39 (I: 26, II: 13)

23 (I: 5, II: 18)

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

cussed by the Stalin Prize Committee. According to Shepilov, Stalin would

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

received a boost in 1950 following the awarding of Third-Class prizes to

The stiing nature of the awards on criticism was an important factor in

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

concerning Aleksandr Gerasimov was used to highlight the complacency

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

disillusionment with the meager achievements of the cream of the Soviet

Stalin Prize and Soviet Artist: Status Symbol or Stigma?

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