Leniniana

In the basement of Moscow’s State Historical Museum, hundreds of tiny Lenins gather dust on shelves. They are red, white, yellow and black. They clutch their lapels and point towards the future; they frown in concentration and grip their pens.

Their author was Nikolai Andreyev, a Soviet sculptor who spent six years perfecting his design for a statue that would never be realized. Andreyev was one of dozens of artists who labored to create the iconic image of the Leader – and whose efforts often ended up on history’s ash heap.

Andreyev’s figurines are among 100,000 pieces of “Leniniana” hidden for decades in the bowels of what was once called the Lenin Museum. Now, some of them are on display for the first time in “Myth of the Beloved Leader,” an exhibition running through January 2015.

Rejected for looking “demonic” or mundane, for having a rumpled suit or a pensive frown, the early Lenins are fascinating postcards from an era when artists competed to shape history.

On January 28, 1924, a week after Lenin’s death, the literary critic Ivanov-Razumnik composed a letter to his friend Andrei Bely. “How interesting it is to live in the origins of the myth,” he wrote. “It doesn’t matter who Lenin was in life. History will remember Lenin’s legend.”

The leader’s passing initiated not only a brutal struggle for succession, but also a race to fix his image for posterity. Artist Yakov Tugendkhold later recalled: “When Lenin died, we all felt that we’d missed something, that we temporarily needed to forget all the ‘isms’ and preserve his actual appearance for our descendants. The desire to depict Ilyich united every faction.”

The state funeral committee granted dozens of artists permission to document Lenin’s internment at the Hall of Columns, which lasted for 72 hours. They waited in bitter cold alongside hundreds of thousands of other citizens to catch sight of the tomb.

“Our line is by the Manezh. We’ve already been waiting for five hours,” remembered one artist. “The appalling frost is burning our faces, ears and legs. We can see our breath. Our legs are weak. Death is in the air.”

While the artists hunched over their sketchbooks to capture the stiff body under the brilliant electric lights, the most important prize had already been claimed. Sculptor Sergei Merkurov had gotten the call to visit Lenin on his deathbed at the estate of Gorky, where he cast a plaster death mask of the leader’s face (see Russian Life, Sept/Oct 2013).

Sculptor Ivan Shadr, perhaps feeling snubbed, criticized Merkurov’s mask as capturing merely “the agony of death, rather than the man’s true face.” Shadr set out to create his own, superior sculpture of Lenin’s lifeless head, working for 46 hours without pause in the House of Columns. (The long-faced visage in the sculpture bears little resemblance to its inspiration).

Out of over 80 artworks, a committee headed by NKVD chief Felix Dzerzhinsky selected only a handful for mass reproduction. The feared Chekist proved a harsh critic: “It’s hardly worth buying some rubbish that’s worthy of a 5-10 year jail sentence,” he wrote.

The rejected deathbed portraits went into the collection of a new museum founded to house items from the funeral, including the death mask. Soon, its mission expanded to collecting all Lenin-related items. The newly christened Lenin Museum was allotted quarters in the old City Duma building by Red Square, just around the corner from Lenin’s mausoleum.

The months after Lenin’s funeral saw a national drive to immortalize his image. Across the Soviet Union, towns produced everything from obelisks and memorial shrubbery to candy wrappers and cigars. This profusion of sentiment ended in April, when a commission formed to control the dissemination of Lenin’s image. Again, it was put under the direction of Dzerzhinsky’s secret police (now the OGPU), which confiscated unauthorized tributes.

Cracking down on Lenin’s representation was relatively simple. Creating it, however, would be a different matter.

Naum Aronson, Lenin, 1927 (marble version 1933). The old Bolshevik Sergei Gusev complained it was “half demon, half parrot.” The plaster original was destroyed in the 1930s.

Sergei Konyonkov, wooden Lenin sculpture, 1947.

After the Bolsheviks came to power, there was a real need to disseminate Lenin’s image among the masses: after moving into the Kremlin in 1918, the revolutionary was stopped by security guards who had no idea what the new leader looked like. Soon, an agitational poster campaign began spreading his visage to the country’s remote regions.

Following Lenin’s death, his image served an ever more important role in instilling loyalty to the fragile Soviet state. Within a week after the funeral, a new committee began planning the mass construction of Lenin statues across the Soviet Union. But what they should look like became a matter of heated debate.

The first camp, the realists, argued for the need to portray Lenin as he was in life. “Any stylization concerning Vladimir Ilyich is absolutely unacceptable,” wrote Leonid Krasin, the old Bolshevik who led the effort to build a mausoleum. “It’s preferable to simply have an obelisk or a plaque with the inscription ‘Lenin’ than a figure or bust that provokes insurmountable disgust and disbelief in anyone who had even a passing degree of contact with Vladimir Ilyich.”

The second camp called for an idealized representation that would capture “Lenin’s legend.” As the painter and mystic Nikolai Roerich put it, “The leader cannot be ordinary. The ordinary is the grave of triumph (Обычность – могила подвига).”

In the 1920s, the realists won out. Many artists portrayed Lenin in a naturalistic, occasionally irreverent style. Emil Wiesel showed Lenin standing in front of a cabaret poster on a Berlin street corner, while Mikhail Avilov painted a comic scene of Lenin, accompanied by Trotsky, disguised in a facial bandage and glasses on the eve of the October Revolution. Mayakovsky’s onetime lover Maria Denisova-Shchadenko, who inspired the poem “A Cloud in Trousers,” made a small bronze sculpture showing “Ilyich in a Cap” with squinty eyes and a wry smile.

Some early Leniniana sought to capture Lenin’s fiery oratory, such as a red marble bust created in 1927 by Naum Aronson. Though Lenin’s widow expressed her approval, the old Bolshevik Sergei Gusev excoriated the sculpture as “half demon, half parrot.”

Others artists offered a reflective take. A 1923 portrait by Ilya Grinman, a student of master Ilya Repin, shows a moonlit Lenin gazing past the viewer, the Kremlin bells visible through his office window. The painting’s cool colors and pensive mood are clear descendants of the nineteenth century realist school.

There was also the occasional bit of heroic fantasy: a bronze sculpture by Matvei Manizer had Lenin pointing to the future, while balancing on the hood of an armored car.

During Lenin’s lifetime, the avant-garde titan Nathan Altman and post-Impressionist painter Leonid Pasternak are among the artists who made informal sketches of him in his office. But with Lenin stiff in the mausoleum, artists could no longer rely on direct observation in their quest for documentary accuracy.

Many turned to photographs, film clips and copies of the death mask. For his Lenin painting, Igor Grabar went a step further, sculpting a lifelike mold of Lenin’s head that captured his yellow pallor and dark undereye circles. Grabar agonized over how to strike the right note: “At best, it looks like a made-to-order official work, and at worst, a plausible painted photograph.” Several years later, Grabar’s finished work received hearty praise.

Plaster version of a statue by Ivan Shadr, 1925-1927. Mocked by a prominent critic, the statue found an appropriate home at the intersection of two rivers in Georgia.

The difficulty of finding the right portrayal was compounded by Lenin’s features, which were notoriously difficult to depict. His contemporaries noted that he was constantly in motion. “Ilyich is as similar to his portrait as a quickly flowing stream is to water in a bucket,” said one of his early associates in a magazine interview.

His face seemed forever in flux: “Here he’s an upstanding European, and then suddenly he’s a Mongol with slanted eyes. Here it’s an unattractive face, and suddenly it’s beautiful,” marveled Grabar.

Lenin’s body also posed problems. The sculptor Andreyev noted that while he stood only 1.65 meters (5 feet 4 inches), he had the proportions of a taller man, with a small head, short torso and long legs.

Perhaps it is Lenin’s unusual proportions that helps explain the abundance of somewhat extraterrestrial-looking heads atop early Lenin statues. Examples include work by Alexander Matveyev, who had a tendency to place Lenin’s eyes on opposite sides of his head, shark-like, and Freidrich Lekht, whose model for a 1924 Lenin statue featured a protruding forehead and gaping round eyes.

No one strived harder than Andreyev to perfect his portrayal, but he would not enjoy Grabar’s good reviews. Andreyev’s relationship with officialdom got off to a bumpy start in 1922, when he made a sketch of Stalin that included his pockmarks and large ears. Stalin wrote a comment on the drawing criticizing the artist’s “clear misunderstanding of anatomy.”

In 1924, Andreyev received a commission to create a statue of Lenin for the hall of the Council of People’s Commissars. The assignment called for Lenin to appear as down-to-earth “Ilyich” – the man as he was in life. Andreyev reveled in the importance of his task: “A monument to the greatest genius in his place of work is a task of great responsibility before history,” he wrote.

Andreyev sought to distinguish his own statue from what he saw as the flood of sub-par work around him: “Beyond the danger of creating a gloomy, peevish ‘secret agent’ (for there are many of these) or a demonic hero (there are also artworks of this type) with a furrowed brow and a nude chest thrust forwards ‘as if casting off his chains,’ in short, a cheap operatic-demonic bit of camp, there is another, opposing danger: falling into grotesque simplification and caricature.”

For six years, Andreyev worked obsessively on the monument that was to be his masterpiece. Withdrawing from his wife and friends, he spent most of his time in his studio, casting study after study in plaster and bronze as he experimented with different poses. The figures numbered 92 in all.

By spring of 1930, when Andreyev’s studies went up for review, the informal Ilyich had exited the stage; now, Soviet art was moving towards a monumental style that depicted Lenin and Stalin, his rightful heir, as shining gods among men. A committee composed of Stalin and the sculptor Sergei Merkurov pronounced Andreyev’s work unacceptable.

The artist lived for only two more years after his work was rejected, dying at age 59. According to Historical Museum researcher Olga Grankina, his wife said he never recovered from the disappointment: “He lost the will to live.”

Another artist marginalized by the emerging monumental style was Shadr. Early in the sculptor’s career, his dramatic poses won official favor. A 1924 sculpture with Lenin pointing downward, which critic Alexei Sidorov said looked as if he was “commanding someone to sit on his lap,” found a home at the intersection of two rivers near Tbilisi, Lenin’s odd gesture serving to highlight the landscape.

A decade later, Shadr received a commission to create a marble statue for the Kremlin palace. Writing off most Lenin sculptures as “intolerable hackery,” he settled on a more psychologically penetrating portrayal of Lenin giving a speech.

His extravagant style, however, had gone out of fashion. The reviews were harsh: the statue was criticized for having a worried gaze, a rumpled suit and a popped collar. It was quickly removed, and the replacement commission awarded to Merkurov, the master of the new idiom. Merkurov’s Lenins and Stalins were sleek, simple and strong, their imposing overcoats barely containing their awesome power.

As Stalin’s cult of personality took shape, there was little of the confusion that surrounded early portrayals of Lenin. From the mid-1930s, artists depicted Stalin in a style heralded by Alexander Gerasimov as “the simplicity of greatness”: static pose, wise eyes and slightly upturned lips, kindly grandfather turned Generalissimo. There were to be no cabaret posters, no rumpled suits and certainly no pockmarks; the time for documentation was over.

As Stalin’s purges swept the country, the Lenin Museum was charged with censoring Leniniana that did not adhere to the new style. Lenin on a street corner, Lenin daydreaming in a pool of moonlight, Lenin with a rakish smile – they all had to go. Worst of all were works that included revolutionaries unmasked as “enemies of the people,” such as Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev and Nikolai Bukharin. The pressures of the time proved too much for the museum’s director, who shot himself in his office in 1935.

Some of the censored Leniniana were sent to the spetsfondy, the closed-off special storage collections, while the most aberrant works were sentenced to burning or shredding. However, thanks to the museum’s workers, some of them survive.

Lenin at a tram stop, by Ivan Simakov, 1917. The original drawing was destroyed in the 1950s; it was recreated in 1989, thanks to a preserved negative.

Mikhail Manizer, “Lenin on an Armoured Car,” 1924.

According to Grankina, bold workers hid small paintings in dark corners, while large ones were rolled up with several other paintings put on top. For example, this was how the painting of Lenin in disguise with Trotsky was preserved.

“Of course it was a big risk,” Grankina said, “but to get to the painting, you’d have to drag out everything else. And since there were tens of thousands of items, you’d have needed to assemble a whole army to dig something up.”

When Khrushchev dismantled Stalin’s cult of personality in the 1950s, it was time for another chistka (cleaning house) – only now, Stalin’s image joined that of his foe Trotsky in the spetsfondy. Some of these works also received secret protection, such as a gleaming Stalin vase that was wrapped inside a rug.

Today, the museum is starting to reassess the complicated, contradictory collection that the older generation struggled to preserve. While the basement storage rooms are currently closed for renovation, there has been a proposal to open them up to visitors, shedding light on the dark corners where the work of Andreyev and so many others long dwelled.

While the era of experimentation ended, some of the creative energy surrounding Lenin’s image persisted in the form of the thousands of gifts given to Lenin and Stalin. They typically honored the anniversary of the October Revolution and other events, including Stalin’s 70th birthday celebrations in 1949.

Citizens around the Soviet Union crafted Lenin portraits out of every material imaginable: straw, fur, lentils, mammoth ivory. Lenin’s features morphed yet again as they were reimagined by gift-givers from Cuba, India, China and other socialist-friendly nations.

In the twilight of Soviet power, Lenin’s image opened up to new kinds of legends. The folksy figure in a cap, the fiery orator, the glowering statesman – the old conventions reappeared, but they were now infused with new meanings.

In Tatiana Elenok’s rainbow-hued 1982 painting “140,000 Suns,” which honored Soviet electrification, the familiar figure appears atop a dam. He is accompanied not by revolutionaries, but by Grandfather Frost and a neon cosmonaut in lipstick and sunglasses, arms outstretched toward the sun. RL

Tatiana Elenok’s 1982 painting "140,000 Suns,” honoring Soviet electrification.