NAVIGATING ‘NATIONAL FORM’ AND ‘SOCIALIST CONTENT’ IN THE GREAT LEADER’S HOMELAND: GEORGIAN PAINTING AND NATIONAL POLITICS UNDER STALIN, 1921-39 Jennifer Ellen Brewin Pembroke College Department of History of Art University of Cambridge This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 30 April 2018 Navigating ‘National form’ and ‘socialist content’ in the Great Leader’s homeland: Georgian painting and national politics under Stalin, 1921-39 Jennifer Ellen Brewin, Pembroke College PhD Thesis, 2018 Abstract This thesis examines the interaction of Georgian painting and national politics in the first two decades of Soviet power in Georgia, 1921-1939, focussing in particular on the period following the consolidation of Stalin’s power at the helm of the Communist Party in 1926-7. In the Stalin era, Georgians enjoyed special status among Soviet nations thanks to Georgia’s prestige as the place of Stalin’s birth. However, Georgians’ advanced sense of their national sovereignty and initial hostility towards Bolshevik control following Georgia’s Sovietisation in 1921 also resulted in Georgia’s uniquely fraught relationship with Soviet power in Moscow in the decades that followed. In light of these circumstances, this thesis explores how and why the experience and activities of Georgian painters between 1926 and 1939 differed from those of other Soviet artists. One of its central arguments is that the experiences of Georgian artists and critics in this period not only differed significantly from those of artists and critics of other republics, but that the uniqueness of their experience was precipitated by a complex network of factors resulting from the interaction of various political imperatives and practical circumstances, including those relating to Soviet national politics. Chapter one of this thesis introduces the key institutions and individuals involved in producing, evaluating and setting the direction of Georgian painting in the 1920s and early 1930s. Chapters two and three show that artists and critics in Georgia as well as commentators in Moscow in the 1920s and 30s were actively engaged in efforts to interpret the Party’s demand for ‘national form’ in Soviet culture and to suggest what that form might entail as regards Georgian painting. However, contradictions inherent in Soviet nationalities policy, which both demanded the active cultivation of cultural difference between Soviet nationalities and eagerly anticipated a time when national distinctions in all spheres would naturally disappear, made it impossible for an appropriate interpretation of ‘national form’ to be identified. Chapter three, moreover, demonstrates how frequent shifts in Soviet cultural and nationalities policies presented Moscow institutions with a range of practical challenges which ultimately prevented them from reflecting in their exhibitions and publications the contemporary artistic activity taking place in the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. A key finding of chapters four and five concerns the uniquely significant role that Lavrenty Beria, Stalin’s ruthless deputy and the head of the Georgian and Transcaucasian Party organisations, played in differentiating Georgian painters’ experiences from those of Soviet artists of other nationalities. Beginning in 1934, Beria employed Georgian painters to produce an exhibition of monumental paintings, opening at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1937, depicting episodes from his own falsified history of Stalin’s role in the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia. As this thesis shows, the production of the exhibition introduced an unprecedented degree of direct Party supervision over Georgian painting as Beria personally critiqued works by Georgian painters produced on prescribed narrative subjects in a centralised collective studio. As well as representing a major contribution to Stalin’s personality cult, the exhibition, which conferred on Georgian painters special responsibility for representing Stalin and his activities, was also a public statement of the special status that the Georgians were now to enjoy, second only to that of the Russians. However, this special status involved both special privileges and special responsibilities. Georgians would enjoy special access to opportunities in Moscow and a special degree of autonomy in local governance, but in return they were required to lead the way in declaring allegiance to the Stalin regime. Chapter six returns to the debate about ‘national form’ in Georgian painting by examining how the pre-Revolutionary self-taught Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmani, was discussed by cultural commentators in Georgia and Moscow in the 1920s and 30s as a source informing a Soviet or Soviet Georgian canon of painting. It shows that, in addition to presenting views on the suitability of Pirosmani’s painting either in terms of its formal or class content, commentators perpetuated and developed a cult of Pirosmani steeped in stereotypes of a Georgian ‘national character.’ Further, the establishment of this cult during the late 1920s and early 1930s seems to have been a primary reason for the painter’s subsequent canonisation in the second half of the 1930s as a ‘Great Tradition’ of Soviet Georgian culture. It helped to articulate a version of Georgian national identity that was at once familiar and gratifying for Georgians and useful for the Soviet regime. The combined impression of cultural sovereignty embodied in this and other ‘Great Traditions’ of Soviet Georgian culture and the special status articulated through the 1937 exhibition allowed Georgian nationalism to be aligned, for a time, with support for Stalin and the Soviet regime. Declaration This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except where specifically indicated in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted or is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma, or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University of similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. The dissertation does not exceed the prescribed word limit for the relevant Degree Committee. A version of chapter six of this thesis was published as ‘The Appropriation and Adaption of Niko Pirosmani in Soviet Art History in the 1920s and 1930s’ in Pirosmani and Georgian Culture: Proceedings, International Interdisciplinary Conference, Tbilisi, Georgia, 5th-7th November 2013 (Tbilisi, s. n., 2014), pp. 42-50. Certain ideas presented in thesis were published in the book chapter ‘Ucha Japaridze, Lado Gudiashvili, and the Spiritual in Georgian Painting’ in Louise Hardiman and Nicola Kozicharow (eds), Modernism and the Spiritual in Russian Art (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2017), pp. 229-63. The dissertation is 79,938 words in length, including footnotes, but excluding captions, appendices, and bibliography. Jennifer Ellen Brewin Pembroke College, Cambridge 30 April 2018 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 1 Conventions and Abbreviations 3 Introduction 13 Literature Review Painting in the non-Russian Republics 16 National Politics in Stalin’s Soviet Union 26 Methodology National Politics and National Culture 31 Imagining the Georgian nation 37 Chapter outlines 46 Chapter 1. The Battle for Soviet Painting in Georgia in the 1920s and 30s 49 Soviet Painting, Socialist Realism and the Georgian Case 52 The Old and New Guards: In search of Georgian Proletarian Painting 61 Institutional Structures Before and After the April 1932 Decree 66 Proletkult in Georgia 69 Keeping up with Moscow: Georgian Arts Periodicals in the 1920s and 30s 72 Khelovneba (‘Art’) 73 Other Periodicals 77 Chapter 2. Representing ‘National Art’: Moscow Institutions and the Art of the Soviet East in 81 the 1920s and 30s (Not) Representing National Art at the Soviet Centre: The All-Soviet Scholarly 82 Association of Oriental Studies (VNAV) and the Museum of Oriental Cultures (GMVK) The Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia (AKhRR) and the Department 94 for the Study of the Art of the Nationalities of the USSR at the State Academy of Artistic Sciences (GAKhN) The Class War on National Form, 1931-32: The Case of Lazar Rempel 107 Chapter 3. Proletarian in Form, Proletarian in Content?: Georgian Painting and the National 113 Question during the Cultural Revolution Georgia and the Cultural Revolution 114 Proletarian in Form, Proletarian in Content?: Negotiating the Theory and Practice 119 of Soviet Nationalities Policy in Georgia during the Cultural Revolution Chapter 4. Georgian Artists, Beria and the Exhibition of Painting, Sculpture and Graphics of 143 the Georgian SSR in Moscow in 1937 Beria and The Arts in Georgia 147 Producing the 1937 exhibition 149 The Georgian exhibition as a Stalinist Gesamtkunstwerk 154 Chapter 5. The Great Terror and 1937 Exhibition as a Statement of Georgian Submission 165 under the ‘Friendship of the Peoples’ ‘Despite a Series of Substantial Insufficiencies’: Reception of the Exhibition and its 165 Significance Controlling Georgia: the 1937 Exhibition and the Demise of Duduchava 171 ‘The responsibility for depicting Stalin belongs completely to Georgian