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Ross-Wolfe-Stalinism STALINISM IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE, OR,... Ross Wolfe “STALINISM IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE, OR, THE FIRST POSTMODERN STYLE” Book Review: Boris Groys’ Total Artwork of Stalinism and Vladimir Paperny’s Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two ast year, the English translations of two major works of art and architectural criticism from the late Soviet period were rereleased with Lapparently unplanned synchronicity. A fresh printing of Vladimir Paperny’s Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (2002, [Культура Два, 1985]) was made available in June 2011 by Cambridge University Press. Verso Books, having bought the rights to the Princeton University Press translation of Boris Groys’ Total Art of Stalinism (1993 [Gesamtkunstwerk Stalin, 1988]), republished the work in a new edition. This hit the shelves shortly thereafter, only two months after Paperny’s book was reissued. Each book represents an attempt, just prior to the Soviet Union’s collapse, to come to grips with the legacy of its artistic and architectural avant-garde of the 1920s, as well as the problematic character of the transition to Socialist Realism and neoclassicism in the mid-1930s, lasting up until Stalin’s death in 1953. Not only do Paperny’s and Groys’ writings follow a similar trajectory, they intersect biographically as well. The two authors collaborated closely with one another, reading and revising each other’s manuscripts as they went. But their arguments should not for that reason be thought identical. Paperny began his research much earlier, in the late 1970s, and Groys’ own argument is clearly framed in part as a polemical response to his colleague’s claims. Both can be seen to constitute a reaction, moreover, to the dull intellectual climate of offi cial academic discourse on the subject during the Brezhnev era. In his introduction to the English version of Paperny’s book, Groys recalls the “background of almost total theoretical paralysis” against which it fi rst appeared in 1979. “[I]t felt like breathing fresh air in the stale intellectual 1 Groys, Boris. “Introduction.” Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two. Translated by John Hill, Roann Barris, and Vladimir Paperny. (Cambridge University Press. New York, NY: 2011). Pgs. xv-xvi. SITUATIONS, VOL. V, NO. 1 101 Ross Wolfe atmosphere [of Moscow] at the time,” he wrote.1 Indeed, Eastern Marxism’s most talented aesthetic theorists after Trotskii was expelled were by and large conservatives—the repentant Georg Lukács or his equally repentant protégé Mikhail Lifshitz, each an apologist for the Zhdanovshchina and hostile to modernism. After destalinization commenced in 1956, following Khrushchev’s “secret speech,” the tables were turned. Socialist realism and neoclassicism were out; the heroic avant-garde movements of the 1920s were back in (albeit in the diluted, vulgarized form typical of Khrushchev). With the rise of Brezhnev in the mid-1960s, the thaw came to a close. But full-fl edged Stalinism was not reinstated, at least not in the realms of art or architecture. Now neither alternative—modernism nor Stalinism—appeared in a particularly favorable light. That they had existed was accepted on a purely factual basis, as part of the historical record. Expressing an opinion on either, however, much less an interpretation, was generally considered unwise. “In the Soviet Union today, the art of the Stalin period is offi cially no less taboo than the art of the avant-garde,” Groys thus remarked upon the release of his book in 1988. His friend Paperny had learned this the hard way eight years earlier, before Gorbachev introduced гласность, when the young architectural historian found himself unable to defend his dissertation “for political reasons.” Upon his immigration to the United States in 1981, the documents comprising his dissertation самиздат drifted in limbo before being eventually picked up and assembled by Ann Arbor Press in 1985.2 Needless to say, his daring reassessment of the Soviet avant-garde and the Stalinist aftermath had found few champions among the aging professorial elite of Moscow. A «культурология» Groys’ Total Art of Stalinism likewise caused something of a stir when it was published in the GDR toward the end of the decade, though for decidedly different reasons. In 1988 the East German government had more pressing matters to attend to than scandalizing works of art criticism. The Total Art of Stalinism instead drew the ire of liberal and social-democratic circles in the West, whom Groys mocked for their belief in “the myth of the innocent avant-garde.”3 Certainly, the contributions of Groys and Paperny provided welcome relief from the atheoretical morass of Soviet scholarship in the 1970s. Compared with the dull, fact-mongering account of early Soviet architecture delivered 2 Cooke, Catherine. “Review of Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two.” The Slavonic and East European Review. (Vol. 81, № 3: July, 2003). Pg. 572. 3 Groys, Boris. The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond. Translated by Charles Rougle. (Verso Books. New York, NY: 2011). Pg. 6. 102 STALINISM IN ART AND ARCHITECTURE, OR,... Stalinism in Art and Architecture, or,... by his mentor, Selim Khan-Magomedov, Paperny’s Culture Two is a sweeping and grandiose work. Groys’ presentation of modernist, Stalinist, and post- Stalinist aesthetics in the USSR in The Total Art of Stalinism similarly proves an entertaining read, while it is perhaps a bit more formal in style. The sense of excitement that pervades these works is palpable; each page positively drips with discovery. More interesting than these stylistic considerations, however, is the substance of Groys’ and Paperny’s arguments. Finding little in the way of homegrown theoretical models to work with in Brezhnev’s USSR—where even the old-fashioned dogmas of Marxism-Leninism had fallen by the wayside—the two authors looked West for new ways of approaching their subject. In so doing, however, Groys and Paperny wrote almost as if in a vacuum. They borrowed their categories only secondhand, by hearsay, from discourses in which neither of them could actively participate. The objects under investigation were of a very different order, as well. It was altogether unclear whether ideas imported from the other side of the Iron Curtain could adequately grasp the realities of “actually-existing socialism.” Paperny, for his part, adopted a loosely structuralist framework for his exposition of Culture Two, a trend of thought that held some currency among Soviet dissidents at the time. But he added a twist, applying this mode of analysis to Russian culture itself, a topic generally understood to be off- limits. At the outset of the book, Paperny thus posits as a heuristic device two dominant cultural tendencies at work within the Russian nation, the oscillation of which allegedly shaped the entire course of its history.4 True to the Weberian spirit of Wertfreiheit, he dubs the fi rst of these “Culture One” and the second “Culture Two.” The former corresponds to the architectural avant-garde of the 1920s, the latter to the monumentalist gigantism and neoclassicism of the Stalin period (though he suggests the existence of both cultures stretches back even further). As Groys notes, Paperny appeals to the authority of none other than Lenin in establishing this division, citing his famous quip that “[t]here are two national cultures in every national culture.”5 Using this internal divergence in Russian culture as his basis, Paperny unfolds a breathtaking series of binary oppositions which he claims cover the entire 4 “[I]t must be conceded that Culture One and Culture Two do not exist in reality. They were invented by the author. Although this disclaimer may appear to be a truism, I make it all the same in order to avoid many misunderstandings. The concept of Culture One is constructed here primarily based on materials from the 1920s, whereas Culture Two is based on materials from the 1930s to 1950s, and at a certain point the reader may get the impression that Culture Two is really what happened between the years 1932 and 1954. Culture Two (like Culture One) is an artifi cial construction.” Paperny, Vladimir. Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Pg. xxiii. 5 Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich. Critical Remarks on the National Question. Translated by Bernard Isaacs and Joe Fineberg. Collected Works, Vol. 20: 1913-1914. (Progress Publishers. Moscow, USSR: 1976). Pg. 32 SITUATIONS, VOL. V, NO. 1 103 Ross Wolfe range of features that distinguish the two cultures.6 For instance, while the modernists (Culture One) were oriented toward futurity and mortality, seeing themselves as ushering in a new and unprecedented epoch, the Stalinists (Culture Two) were oriented toward eternity and immortality, seeing themselves as the sum of all past epochs: Culture One wanted to burn its limbs [Shklovskii (1919)], wash memory from its soul, kill its old [Maiakovskii (1915)], and eat its children—all this as an attempt to free itself from the ballast that was interfering with its surge into the future. In Culture Two, the future was postponed indefi nitely. The future became even more beautiful and desirable [the architect Krasin (1937)], and the movement forward was even more joyous [state prosecutor Vyshinskii (1938)], but there did not seem to be an end in sight to that movement—the movement had become an end in itself. [Stalinism’s] movement “forward, ever forward” changed nothing: The sun went on shining as before; the goal was still the same; therefore, there was no way to determine whether this was movement or rest — there was nothing to relate to it. Movement in Culture Two became tantamount to immobility, and the future to eternity…The history of the building of the Lenin Mausoleum is a good example of how culture’s idea of the longevity…changed.
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