All Stalin's women: Gender and power in Soviet art of the 1930s

Slavic Review

Volumn 57, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 133-173

  Reid, Susan E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0040507887     PISSN: 00376779     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2502056     Document Type: Article

References (253)

1. The representation of women in Soviet visual culture has been the subject of several studies including Elizabeth Waters, "The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917-32," in B. E. Clements, B. A. Engel, and C. D. Worobec, eds., Russia's Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Berkeley, 1991): 225-42;
2. Victoria E. Bonnell, "The Representation of Women in Early Soviet Political Art," Russian Review 50 (July 1991): 267-88;
3. Victoria E. Bonnell, "The Peasant Woman in Stalinist Political Art of the 1930s," American Historical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): 55-82;
4. Margarita Tupitsyn, After Perestroika: Kitchenmaids or Stateswomen (New York, 1993);
5. and Alison Hilton, "Feminism and Gender Values in Soviet Art," Slavica Tamperensia, 1993, 99-116.
6. With the exception of Hilton, they concentrate primarily on posters and other mass-produced imagery in the period from the revolution to the first Five-Year Plan. On gender difference as a means of articulating power relations, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), chap. 2. Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998)
7. Industry of Socialism opened 18 March 1939 in the Permanent Construction Exhibition Pavilion on Frunzenskaia naberezhnaia. It included 1,015 works by 479 artists. G. Bandalin, ed., Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka "Industriia sotsializma": Katalog (Moscow and Leningrad, 1939).
8. Accounts vary as to which works were finally displayed, perhaps because it was rehung within the first year and remained open into 1940. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI), f. 962 (Arts Committee), op. 6, ed. khr. 694 (stenographer's report of meeting with head of Fine Art Directorate of Arts Committee concerning rehanging of Industry of Socialism, 20 February 1940).
9. Piatakov was purged along with Karl Radek in the second show trial, January-February 1937. Slavinskii was one of the original members of the presidium of the committee appointed to organize Industry of Socialism. On the purge of Slavinskii and Vsekokhudozhnik, see RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 196 (on the work of Vsekokhudozhnik, April 1937); and RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126 (meeting of board of Moscow Regional Artists' Union [MOSSKh], 19 September 1937).
10. The powerful Aleksandr Gerasimov, formerly of AKhRR, claimed the exhibition demonstrated the triumph of the thematic method. A. Gerasimov, "Pafos boev za industrial," Industriia sotsializma (single-issue broadsheet, published by the exhibition and printed by the press of the newspaper Industriia), June 1939.
11. The term Great Retreat was coined by Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1946).
12. It lies beyond the scope of this article to engage with the scholarly debates regarding the pervasiveness of the Great Retreat and whether it was a matter of deliberate regime policy or of forces "from below." See, for example, Roberta T. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II, 1935-1940,"
13. in Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women (Oxford, 1992), 222-26.
14. A translation of the articles can be found in W. P. Coates and Zelda K. Coates, eds., Scenes from Soviet Life (London, 1936).
15. Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941 (London, 1986), 144-47;
16. and Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 206-35.
17. The Zhenotdel (Zhenskii otdel), the Women's Department of the Communist Party, was founded in 1919. See Barbara Evans Clements, "The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel," Slavic Review 51, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 485-96.
18. The so-called woman question in the 1920s and 1930s has been the subject of extensive research in recent decades; see, among others, Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, 1978);
19. Farnsworth and Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women;
20. Clements, Engel, and Worobec, eds., Russia's Women;
21. and Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren, eds., Russia-Women-Culture (Bloomington, 1996).
22. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, 103.
23. See also Urie Bronfenbrenner, "The Changing Soviet Family," in Donald R. Brown, ed., The Role and Status of Women in the Soviet Union (New York, 1968), 98-125;
24. and Robert W. Thurston, "The Soviet Family during the Great Terror, 1935-1941," Soviet Studies 43, no. 3 (1991): 553-74.
25. Waters, "Female Form," 238, 242;
26. Bonnell, "Representation of Women," 282;
27. Bonnell, "Peasant Woman," 65;
28. and Lynne Viola, "Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest during Collectivization," in Farnsworth and Viola, eds., Russian Peasant Women, 189-205.
29. A 1939 publication on the family cited a remark Stalin allegedly made in 1923: "The female workers and peasants are mothers, the educators [vospitatel'nitsami] of our youth - the future of our country. They can cripple the soul of a child or can give us youth healthy in spirit, capable of moving our country forward." V. I. Svetlov, Brak i sem'ia pri kapitalizme i sotsializme (Moscow, 1939), 136;
30. cited in translation by Thurston, "The Soviet Family," 562.
31. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 211-12, fig. 11.3.
32. The conflation of the "woman question" with that of the "backward nationalities of the Russian empire" had roots in tsarist ethnography. See Catherine Clay, "Russian Ethnographers in the Service of Empire, 1856-1862," Slavic Review 54, no. 1 (Spring 1995): 45-61;
33. and M. Neuberger, "Difference Unveiled: Bulgarian National Imperatives and the Re-Dressing of Muslim Women, 1878-1989," Nationalities Papers 25, no. 1 (1997): 171.
34. Induslriia sotsializma: Tematicheskii plan vsesoiuznoi khudozhestvennoi vystavki (Moscow, 1935), 48, 52.
35. On the motif of a shining path in Stalinist painting, see A. I. Morozov, Konets ulopii: Iz istorii iskusstva v SSSK 1930-kh godav (Moscow, 1995), chap. 2.
36. Industriia sotsializma, June 1939, 6.
37. S. A. Zombe, comp., "Tekst besedy obzornoi ekskursii po vystavke Ìndustriia sotsializma,'" RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 45 (publicity materials and scripts of guided tours for Industry of Socialism).
38. S. A. Zombe, comp., "Tekst besedy obzornoi ekskursii po vystavke Ìndustriia sotsializma,'" RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 45 (publicity materials and scripts of guided tours for Industry of Socialism). Ibid., I. 33. Kotov had a solo exhibition in spring 1937. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 137 (exhibition of Petr Kotov).
39. Lebedeva's Miner was reproduced in Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 6:7.
40. Emphasis also shifted away from such anonymous figures or collective achievements to exceptional, named individuals. See Victoria E. Bonnell, "The Iconography of the Worker in Soviet Political Art," in Lewis H. Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny, eds., Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca, 1994), 362.
41. On the achievements of women metro constructors, see M. Nevolina, "Pervomaiskii podarok," Rabotnitsa, 1938, no. 14 (May): 10-11.
42. Compare Bonnell "Peasant Woman," 75;
43. and Bonnell, "Iconography of the Worker," 372.
44. Industriia sotsializma: Tematicheskii plan, 65.
45. For classic analyses of the gendered power relations invested in looking, see Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1976): 6-18;
46. and John Berger's formulation, "men act, women appear," Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1972), 45.
47. Script of guided tour, "Pod'em narodnoi kul'tury i narodnogo blagosostoianiia," RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 70; and Editorial, "Iskusstvo v strane sotsializma," Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:7 (reproduction) and 31. This suggests that a distinction was drawn between lay and specialist audiences. Korotkova's painting was not discussed or reproduced in the 1939 reviews of Industry of Socialism, although it was featured on at least one tour itinerary: S. Fomina, comp., "Metod razrabotki, 'Pod'em narodnoi kul'tury i narodnogo blagosostoianiia,'" RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 70.
48. Valentina Kulagina designed a poster of a woman miner drilling (c. 1933) reproduced in M. L'vovich, "Khudozhnitsy sovetskogo plakata," Tvorchestvo, 1934, no. 8:6.
49. Compare also Aleksandr Deineka's At the Construction Site of a New Plant (1926), depicting two barefoot women, one dragging a heavy wagon. Like Pravda, the working women's magazine Rabotnitsa still regularly printed photographs of women working in factories, as well as in a range of other roles, in the period 1936-39.
50. The proletariat was invariably represented as male in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century socialist imagery. See Eric Hobsbawm, "Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography," History Workshop Journal (Autumn 1978): 121-38.
51. Waters, "Female Form," 235;
52. and Bonnell, "Representation of Women," 269, 282.
53. This stereotype persisted through and beyond the Stalin period. In 1949 Sergei Gerasimov was compelled to repaint the face of his Partisan's Mother because it departed too radically from conventional notions of female beauty. See Matthew Cullerne Bown, Art under Stalin (Oxford, 1991), 216.
54. Similarly, in 1959 Gelii Korzhev's painting Lovers was criticized for the lack of "charm" in the image of the woman, although the war-ravaged features of her male partner were praised as signs of strength and honesty. B. Ioganson, "Novaia kartina," Khudozhnik, 1959, no. 8:41.
55. G. Revzin argues that the perceived awkwardness of such work as Samokhvalov's Metro Constructor did not simply consist in giving female characters traditionally masculine roles and attributes but in the essentially masculine nature of the Nietzschean Superman on whom the ideal of the new Soviet person was based, and in the artistic contradiction that resulted from the artists' appropriation of classical male iconography (such as the kouros pose of antique sculpture) for their strongwomen. G. Revzin, "Devushka moei mechty," Iskusstvo, 1990, no. 3:40.
56. Revzin cites Vera Gertsenberg on Serafima Riangina's depiction of a muscular woman mounting an electricity pylon, Ever Higher (1934):
57. "The heroes of this picture combine in the oddest way something of Michelangelo's power with the sweetness of an old image on a chocolate box." V. Gertsenberg, "S. V. Riangina: 'Vse vyshe,' 'Podstantsiia na Suramskom perevale,'" Iskusstvo, 1934, no. 4:145.
58. In 1959 Kozlova painted After the Shift, and on her death in 1966 she was at work on a painting of Moscow women construction workers. "Pamiati tovarishcha," Moskovskii khudozhnik, 25 November 1966, no. 47:4.
59. On Kozlova, see E. S. Zernova, Vospominaniia monumentalista (Moscow, 1985).
60. Editorial, "Iskusstvo v strane sotsializma," 31.
61. Melanie Ilič, "Women Workers in the Soviet Mining Industry: A Case-Study of Labour Protection," Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 8 (1996): 1387-401.
62. Varvara Zubkova, "Zhenshchiny prishli na shakhty," Industriia, 26 June 1939 (emphasis mine).
63. Zubkova refers mostly to women's employment in surface jobs such as sorting and quality control, and to their acquisition of technical skills and employment as mashinistki. I am indebted to Melanie Ilič for sharing this source with me. Another article by Zubkova in Rabotnitsa is more explicit that "miners' wives" were to see themselves as a reserve workforce to be called up when needed. V. A. Zubkova, "Pomozhem nashim muzh'iam," Rabotnitsa, 1939, no. 16 (June): 7.
64. To this end a press campaign was launched later in 1939. Filtzer, Soviet Workers, 145-46.
65. Low attendance was blamed on a misconception that Industry of Socialism was an exhibition of machinery or on the prejudice that pictures of industry must be "boring." It was therefore found necessary to intersperse such works with landscapes and still lifes, while promotional material for the exhibition stressed the theme of abundance and the rise in the standard of living and culture: KGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948. Shifting priorities were reflected in plans discussed in February 1940 to rehang the exhibition, de-emphasizing the industrial theme in favor of agriculture. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 694, ll. 6-16.
66. N. Shchekotov, "Vystavka 'Industriia sotsializma': Zhivopis'," Iskusstvo, 1939, no. 4:59-84.
67. An antinaturalistic line emphasizing aesthetic quality predominated in the broadsheet Industriia sotsializma, June 1939.
68. Mikoian's proposal to include a food industry section in Industry of Socialism was announced June 1937. Originally this section was due to open after the main display, in January 1938, but its opening was also delayed. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, l. 8 (protocol of MOSSKh board meeting, 22 June 1937). In the final Food Industry exhibition, 98 artists showed 149 works. An illustrated catalogue was published: Iu. Lobanova, comp., Vsesoiuznaia khudozhestvennaia vystavka Pishchevaia industriia. Otdel vystavki "Industriia sotsializma": Katalog (Moscow, 1939).
69. Mikoian saw to the publication of the first Soviet government-sponsored cookery book, Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche, whose guiding principle was to encourage consumption of Soviet conserves and processed foods. Under the second Five-Year Plan of 1933-37, Mikoian introduced new processes and improvements in refrigeration, canning, sugar production, baking, and the manufacture of confectionery; see Roy Medvedev, All Stalin's Men, trans. Harold Shukman (Garden City, N.Y., 1985), 37.
70. Other means to educate the consumer included model department stores, expositions of commodities, press reports, and advertisements. On the official turn to consumerism and the campaign for cultured trade, see Julie Hessler, "Culture of Shortages: A Social History of Soviet Trade, 1917-1953" (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1996), chap. 6;
71. Sheila Fitzpatrick, "'Middle-Class Values' and Soviet Life in the 1930s," in T. Thompson and R. Sheldon, eds., Soviet Society and Culture: Essays in Honor of Vera S. Dunham (Boulder, Colo., 1988), 20-38;
72. A. Gudilov, "Malen'kii fel'eton," Za industrializalsiiu, 26 September 1935, no. 222;
73. and Karen Kettering, "'Ever More Cosy and Comfortable': Stalinism and the Soviet Domestic Interior, 1928-1938," in Susan E. Reid, ed., Design, Stalin and the Thaw, special issue of Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 119-35.
74. On supply and consumption up to 1935, see E. A. Osokina, Ierarkhiia potrebleniia: O zhizni liudei v usloviiakh stalinskogo snabzlieniia, 1928-1935 gg. (Moscow, 1993).
75. Jack Chen, Soviet Art and Artists (London, 1944), 36-37.
76. For a discussion of product advertising as a means to educate the consumer, see Hessler, "Culture of Shortages," 341-43.
77. "Tretii piatiletnii plan razvitiia narodnogo khoziaistva SSSR (1938-1942)," Pravda, 21 March 1939.
78. On "democratic luxury," see Jukka Gronow, The Sociology of Taste (London, 1997), 49;
79. Fitzpatrick, '"Middle-Class Values,'" 25-26;
80. Hessler, "Culture of Shortages";
81. and for Trotskii's indictment of Mikoian's emphasis on luxury goods for the elite, see Leon Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed: What Is the Soviet Union and Where Is It Going? (New York, 1970), 118.
82. As Pravda reported: "Our country will be completely saturated with consumer goods, we will have an abundance of foodstuffs . . . the USSR will become a land of plenty!" Pravda, 19 March 1939. For details of the plan and the realities of the Soviet economy in the years 1938-41, see Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R., rev. ed. (Harmondsworth, Eng., 1982), 256-64.
83. The theme of abundance received more sustained treatment in the pavilions of the All-Union Agricultural Exhibition from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Mukhina's Worker and Collective Farmer was installed at its entrance, and in 1952 Ekaterina Zernova produced a mural for the "Conserves" pavilion.
84. Dorokhov's painting transposes into the conditions of socialist industry the traditional role of women in the Russian domestic economy to preserve foods and lay in stores. See Darra Goldstein, "Domestic Porkbarreling in Nineteenth-Century Russia, or Who Holds the Keys to the Larder?" in Goscilo and Holmgren, eds., Russia-Women-Culture, 125-51.
85. Goldstein also discusses the 1953 edition of Mikoian's cookery book, I. K. Sivolap, et al., Kniga o vkusnoi i zdorovoi pishche (Moscow, 1953).
86. See, for example, Gudilov, "Malen'kii fel'eton."
87. A reproduction of this work, produced either for Industry of Socialism or for Food Industry, can be found in M. Banks, ed., The Aesthetic Arsenal: Socialist Realism under Stalin (New York, 1993), color pl. 19.
88. A photograph of the same factory is featured on the front cover of Rabotnitsa, 1932, no. 28 (October).
89. Ol'ga Dmitrievna Ianovskaia, born 1900, studied with Il'ia Mashkov, joined the Association of Artists of the Revolution (AKhR) in 1929 and taught painting at the Surikov Institute, Moscow, in the 1930s.
90. See Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York, 1969).
91. The gendered address of the discourse of cultured consumerism should not be overstated, at least in regard to the early 1930s. See Kettering, "'Ever More Cosy.'"
92. However, as Fitzpatrick has argued, by the late 1930s, concern with material possessions, still respectable for women of the new "middle-class," grew suspect for their husbands. Fitzpatrick, "'Middle-Class Values,'" 31.
93. When Food Industry closed, some of the works were incorporated into Industry of Socialism. Pimenov's In the Shop was hung near his New Moscow, discussed above, which likewise uses the figure of a woman to represent the gratification of the Soviet people. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 45.
94. Fitzpatrick, "'Middle-Class Values,'" 25-26;
95. and Hessler, "Culture of Shortages."
96. Osip Beskin, "Sredi obrazov izobiliia i radosti," Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 9:16.
97. Renoir's work could still be seen at the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow. On Pimenov's "French" feminine types of the "new Soviet woman" and the influence of Renoir on Soviet artists of the 1930s, see Morozov, Kernets utopii, 184.
98. By the time the exhibition opened, Impressionism was beginning to be treated more favorably once more. See the discussion of the Russian debt to French Impressionism and Paul Cézanne by painter Aron Rzheznikov, "O zhivopisnykh traditsiiakh frantsuzskogo peizazha," Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 7: back cover;
99. and L. Rozental', "Vystavka frantsuzskogo peizazha v Muzee novogo zapadnogo iskusstva," Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 7:
100. inside front and back cover, and important discussions of Impressionist "painterliness," RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 1170 (stenographic record of conference on the culture of painting, 22 April 1940). On the significance of French Impressionism in Soviet art, see also my "Destalinization and the Remodernization of Soviet Art: The Search for a Contemporary Realism" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1996).
101. For the identification of Impressionist style with feminine qualities, see Norma Broude, Impressionism: A Feminist Reading (New York, 1991).
102. Lewis H. Siegelbaum cites a Stakhanovite praising his wife as "a real Mikoian" on account of her able management of the family's food budget. Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1988), 239.
103. On control over the larder as a source of female power in nineteenth-century Russia, see Goldstein, "Domestic Porkbarreling," 125-51.
104. Nove, Economic History, 227-29.
105. This is noted by a later Soviet account that contrasts the man's powerful gesture to the woman's "more feminine" stance. R. Ia. Abolina, Sovetskoe iskusstvo perioda razvernutogo stroitel'stva sotsializma (1933-1941) (Moscow, 1964), 52.
106. Waters, "Female Form," 240-41.
107. See also Bonnell, "Peasant Woman," 79-81.
108. Collectivization deprived males of their traditional status as "master" of the rural household and provided the catalyst for a disproportionate outmigration by men to industrial jobs in the city. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 211-14.
109. Hilton asserts that Mukhina's monument and other images "affirm a feminist presence in Soviet society and art," although she goes on to acknowledge the ambivalence of the monument's treatment of women. Hilton, "Feminism and Gender Values," 99. An adequate account of the significance of Mukhina's pair should locate them within the entire program of the exterior decoration of Iofan's pavilion, which served as the sculpture's pedestal.
110. Manning has argued that, notwithstanding measures to strengthen the family and increase the birthrate, photographs of women involved in nontraditional pursuits far outnumbered those portraying women primarily as mothers and wives. Manning's useful table quantifying the types of images of women published in Pravda in 1936 lists 13 photographs of women as aviators and 99 of women Stakhanovites, but only 15 of women figuring primarily as mothers. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 211-12, fig. 11.3.
111. The proportion of women in village soviets had grown between 1926 and 1934, but was declining by 1937 when a press campaign was launched to promote women to responsible posts. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 224.
112. I. L. Belakhov, "Kul'tura tela i gigiena." Rabotnitsa, 1937, no. 2 (January).
113. Compare Nadezhda Azhgikhina and Helena Goscilo, "Getting under Their Skin: The Beauty Salon in Russian Women's Lives," in Goscilo and Holmgren, eds., Russia-Women-Culture, 98.
114. While I agree with their assertion that "the Soviet ideological machine . . . dictated even the 'correct' form of female beauty," they overstate the hostility toward perfume and cosmetics under Stalin. While makeup may indeed have been a sign of bourgeois decadence, beauty products aiding cleanliness and the preservation of a youthful appearance were still promoted. Women's magazines in the 1930s regularly carried advertisements for perfume and toiletries produced by TEZHE. One such advertisement in Rabotnitsa points to the sexual connotations of the leadership's concern with the intimacies of women's toilet. A young peasant woman flirtatiously calls her sweetheart to buy her not ribbons but creams and toothpowder. Rabotnitsa, 1939, no. 4 (February)
115. : inside back cover. The script of the guided tour, "Pod'em narodnoi kul'tury i narodnogo blagosostoianiia," emphasized the youth of Pimenov's delegates, citing a letter from Krupskaia to Pioneers calling on them to "be helpers of adult obshchestvenniki." RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 67. Attractive young women agricultural Stakhanovites were more often photographed to promote the campaign than were older, less attractive ones. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 216.
116. "V knige otzyvov," Industriia sotsializma, June 1939, 6. Responses to Pimenov's and Deineka's paintings reflect concerns in the mid to late 1930s about the legitimacy of "modishness," which was almost synonymous with "western" or "bourgeois" styles. To counteract the tendency to identify cultured dressing with bourgeois chic, professional debates were initiated in 1935-36 to define a "Soviet style" of dress. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 55 (stenographic report of meeting of representatives of textile industry with artists, 25 June 1935); and RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 89 (stenographic report of joint meeting of Moscow artists with workers of light industry on questions of textiles and everyday dress, 14 January 1936).
117. Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside," 216.
118. Describing his conception of the painting, Shegal' related how he saw "Stalin, [as] a simple Soviet person." G. Shegal', "Istochnik nashego vdokhnoveniia," Industriia sotsializma, June 1939, 2.
119. Compare H. Gassner and E. Gillen, "From Utopian Designs for the New Order to the Ideology of Reconciliation," in Banks, ed., Aesthetic Arsenal, 184.
120. S. Razumovskaia, "Tvorchestvo G. M. Shegalia," Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 7:12;
121. Mark Neiman, "Na vystavke 'Stalin i Iiudi Sovetskoi strany v izobrazitel'nom iskusstve,'" Tvorchestvo, 1940, no. 2:6.
122. According to Shchekotov, Shegal's painting expresses the idea of Stalin as the continuator of Lenin's teaching and deeds. N. Shchekotov, "K otkrytiiu vystavki 'Industriia sotsializma,'" Tvorchestvo, 1937, no. 11-12:9-10. Press reports also referred to Shegal''s painting under the alternative title. Comrade Stalin in the Presidium of the Congress of Kolkhoz Shock Workers.
123. Beginning with the second Five-Year Plan, mass-produced imagery began "the process of subordination of women's desires, which are invested in labor, to Stalin's authority," as Tupitsyn argues. She cites Hélène Cixious: "When a woman is asked to take part in this representation she is, of course, asked to represent man's desire." Margarita Tupitsyn, "From the Politics of Montage to the Montage of Politics: Soviet Practice 1919 through 1937," in Matthew Teitelbaum, ed., Montage and Modern Life, 1919-1942 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 20;
124. and Tupitsyn, After Perestroika, 11.
125. F. G. Tret'iakov, "Domashniaia khoziaika," Rabotnitsa, 1939, no. 15 (May): 16.
126. See also the self-effacing statements by three wives of outstanding pilots, O. Chkalova, Evgeniia Baidiukova, and Antonina Beliakova, about how they support their husbands in their work by encouraging them to rest, cooking them nourishing meals, etc. Pravda, 24 July 1936, 4. And see James von Geldern, "The Centre and the Periphery: Cultural and Social Geography in the Mass Culture of the 1930s," in Stephen White, ed., New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, Eng., 1992), 74.
127. Industriia sotsializma: Tematicheskii plan, 12.
128. As Vera S. Dunham observed in regard to the revaluation of domestic happiness under Stalin, "wherever possible, private values were converted into public values." Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, Eng., 1976), 18.
129. On Obshchestvennitsa, see Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 241-42;
130. Fitzpatrick, "'Middle-Class Values,'" 20-38;
131. and Mary Buckley, "The Untold Story of the Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s," Europe-Asia Studies 48, no. 4 (1996): 569-86.
132. For the diverse activities of the Red Army Wives, see Rabotnitsa, 1937, no. 1 (January).
133. Mark Neiman, "Novye portrety tovarishcha Stalina," Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:65;
134. A. I. Zotov, "Khudozhestvennaia vystavka 'Industriia sotsializma,'" RGALI, f. 902, op. 6, ed. khr. 624, l. 2 (draft of article, 1939); and RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 72.
135. The Conference of Wives is recorded in Soveshchanie zhen khoziaistvennikov i inzhenernotekhnicheskikh rabotnikov tiazheloi promyshlennosti (Moscow, 1936).
136. Compare Sarah Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin's Russia: Terror, Propaganda, and Dissent, 1934-1941 (Cambridge, Eng., 1997), 150.
137. The guide quoted from Comrade Shvernik's speech to the Conference of Wives of Managers of Heavy Industry on 10 May 1936. Thanks to the party's concern for her, "the free and happy woman of the Land of the Soviets is included more and more in the ranks of the active constructors of socialist society. In this lies the fundamental difference between the situation of working women in the Soviet land from that of women in capitalist countries." RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, ll. 71-72.
138. On the Leninist dialectics of historical development through the conflict between forces of spontaneity and consciousness, see Katerina Clark, "Utopian Anthropology as a Context for Stalinist Literature," in Robert C. Tucker, ed., Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York, 1977), 188.
139. For the Bolshevik association of women with the spontaneous, subrational, unconscious, and elemental, see Viola, "Bab'i bunty," 190.
140. For the identification of stikhiinost' with stereotypically feminine qualities, such as sentimentality, which must be overcome, see Robert A. Feldmesser in discussion of Mark G. Field, "Workers (and Mothers): Soviet Women Today," in Brown, ed., Role and Status of Women, 55.
141. Krupskaia voiced concern at the conference that the obshchestvennitsy would become divorced from working women's concerns. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 242.
142. Clark, "Utopian Anthropology," 187.
143. A. G. Stakhanov, Rasskaz o moei zhizni (Moscow, 1937);
144. cited by 'Hubertus Gassner and Eckhart Gillen, "Sozdaniia utopicheskogo poriadka k ideologii umirotvoreniia v svete esteticheskoi deistvitel'nosti," in N. Shabalina, ed., Agitatsiia za shchast'e: Savetskoe iskusstvo stalinshoi epokhi (St. Petersburg, 1994), 55.
145. Also cited in English translation in Gassner and Gillen, "From Utopian Designs," 184.
146. I. Gudov, Put' stakhanovtsa: Rasskaz o moei zhizni (Moscow, 1938), 59;
147. cited by Clark, "Utopian Anthropology," 187.
148. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 72.
149. Clark, "Utopian Anthropology," 180-87.
150. Gassner and Gillen, "From Utopian Designs," 184.
151. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 72; and Mark Neiman, "Novye portrety tovarishcha Stalina," Iskusstvo, 1937, no. 6:64.
152. A connubial and erotic subtext is suggested by Dragan Kunjundzič's description of the abundant flowers in Efanov's painting as a "libidinal frame to the scene." Dragan Kunjundzič, "The Ghost of Representation, or the Masque of the Red Death," Art Journal 49, no. 1 (Spring 1990): 54. The tour guide noted how the crimson bouquet conveys the festive atmosphere. Script of tour "Pod'em narodnoi kul'tury i narodnogo blagosostoianiia," RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, ll. 71-72.
153. Aleksandr Balashov, "O nekotorykh osobennostiakh kompozitsii proizvedeniia V. P. Efanova 'Nezabyvaemaia vstrecha,'" Tvorchestvo, 1991, no. 10:31-33. Perhaps inadvertently, the artist has even made a pun that points to the nuptial subtext: the arched hands "crown" her Stalin's consort (the Russian venchat' means both "to crown" and "to marry").
154. Efanov recalls the tradition of representing the relationship between heaven and earth as the marriage between Christ and his church. As Margarita Tupitsyn notes in regard to posters at this time, "women's place vis-à-vis the leader took on a similarity to the position, in the Christian tradition, of women as Christ's brides." Tupitsyn, After Perestroika, 11.
155. The restoration of traditional gender roles applied primarily to the higher strata of Soviet society. Working and peasant women were still encouraged to engage in productive, paid labor and addressed with the message of women's emancipation. See issues of Rabotnitsa for this period; and Fitzpatrick, "'Middle-Class Values,'" 33-34.
156. Although the painting section was the largest, only one woman painter, Ianovskaia, was included. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva was the sole female graphic artist. Women sculptors were best represented, including, in addition to Mukhina, Sarra Lebedeva, Ol'ga Kvinikhidze, Beatris Iu. Sandomirskaia, and A. Lavrova. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 154, ll. 49-52. In addition, Mukhina's two assistants were women: N. Zelenskaia and Z. Ivanova. Dariia Shpirkan, "Skul'ptor s mirovoi slavoi," Rabotnitsa, 1937, no. 30 (October): 30.
157. Ekaterina Sergeevna Zernova, born 1900, was an associate of Aleksandr Deineka and Iurii Pimenov and a member of OST from 1928. For an account of her komandirovki to the Donbass and Magnitogorsk for Industry of Socialism, see her memoirs: Zernova, Vospominaniia monumentalista, 77-84;
158. and see I. Abramskii, "Vystavka 'Industriia sotsializma,'" Iskusstvo, 1962, no. 7:26. With only two exceptions, all the prizes went to men: Mukhina received a prize for her allegory of fertility in the inevitable female form. Bread, shown in the Food Industry branch, and Ianovskaia was given an award for In the Shock Workers' Box at the Bolshoi Theatre, discussed below.
159. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, l. 16. According to a different account, 63 out of 816 commissions for Industry of Socialism went to women, whereas for the 1938 Exhibition of the Red Army and Fleet they received only 18 out of 270 commissions. KGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 14 (plan for jubilee exhibition for 8 March, MOSSKh, 1937-38). The final number of female exhibitors at Industry of Socialism expanded slightly over that for the Paris Exposition and included the painters Ianovskaia, Zernova, Korotkova, Kozlova, Serafima Riangina (Lumberjacks [People of Soviet Karelia], 1937) ,
160. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva, Evgeniia Georgieva, Kseniia Kupetsio, Aleksandra Petrova, Liudmila Protopopova, Vera Orlova, Zinaida Rakitina; the sculptors Antonina Romodanovskaia, Marina Ryndziunskaia, Tat'iana Smotrova, Sarra Shor; the ceramicist Natal'ia Dan'ko; and others. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 513 (annual accounts for exhibition Industry of Socialism, 1939);
161. and V. G. Azarkovich, et al., Vystavki sovetskogo izobrazitel'nogo iskusstva, vol. 2, 1933-1940 gg. (Moscow, 1966), 280.
162. An article published the year before the exhibition opened included Lidiia Litvinenko among the exhibitors. D[ariia] Sh[pirkan], "Khudozhnitsy," Rabotnitsa, 1938, no. 5-6 (February): 21. Female participants in the Food Industry branch, in addition to those whose works are discussed in the text, included the painters Irina Efimovna Vilkovir (b. 1903), Ol'ga Sergeevna Zhurochko (b. 1892, who showed still lifes), Ol'ga Sergeevna Maliutina (b. 1894, who showed still lifes), and the porcelain artist Natal'ia Dan'ko. Mukhina showed Bread .
163. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, l. 25.
164. On the idea of art as the transformation of raw, "feminine" nature or matter into a higher "male" state of order, transcendent beauty, and Apollonian reason, see David Summers, "Form and Gender," in N. Bryson, M. A. Holly, and K. Moxey, eds., Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations (London, 1994), 381-412.
165. The literature on the identification of creativity with the masculine, nature with the feminine is too extensive to list in a footnote. Landmarks include Sherry B. Ortner, "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere, eds., Woman, Culture and Society (Stanford, 1974, 67-88;
166. Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender (Cambridge, Eng., 1980);
167. and R. Parker and G. Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London, 1981).
168. Cited by I. Abramskii, "Vystavka 'Industriia sotsializma,'" Iskusstvo, 1962, no. 7:25 (emphasis mine).
169. Compare the way the paradigmatic romantic genius of Honoré de Balzac's The Unknown Masterpiece (1831) describes the artist's relationship to his work as that of "father, lover, God, towards a beloved woman."
170. See Lynda Nead, "Seductive Canvases: Visual Mythologies of the Artist and Artistic Creativity," Oxford Art Journal 118, no. 2, (1995): 59-69.
171. In 1938 the number of female members in each section of MOSSKh was as follows: painting, 51; graphics, 42; textiles, 19; designers, 15; decorators, 5; poster artists, 5. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 14. For complaints about tokenism, see RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, ll. 22-23 (stenographic report of meeting of artists of MOSSKh and Vsekokhudozhnik to discuss exhibition of women artists for 8 March 1938, 31 March 1938). For an example of how these artists were cited as evidence of the opportunities for women artists under socialism, see Sh[pirkan], "Khudozhnitsy," 20-21;
172. and Shpirkan, "Skul'ptor s mirovoi slavoi," 30-31.
173. A contemporary critic contrasted Mukhina's "masculine" treatment of monumental sculpture to Sarra Lebedeva's "delicate" and "feminine" small-scale figures: Paul Ettinger, "Three Women Sculptors," in The Studio 113, no. 528 (March 1937): 171-72.
174. See also Hilton, "Feminism and Gender Values," 102.
175. "Obrashchenie k zhenam sovetskikh khudozhnikov i skul'ptorov," [1936], RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 75 (documents of general meeting of Moscow artists in connection with acceptance of USSR Constitution).
176. "Obrashchenie k zhenam sovetskikh khudozhnikov i skul'ptorov," Ibid., ll. 10, 12, 21.
177. "Obrashchenie k zhenam sovetskikh khudozhnikov i skul'ptorov," Ibid., l. 1.
178. I. Lavrova, "Vstrecha-vystavka," Rabotnitsa, 1937, no. 26 (September): 12.
179. A. Ashmarina, "Vystavka talantlivykh rabot," Rabotnitsa, 1937, no. 1 (January): 19.
180. "Perevybory pravleniia MOSSKh," Iskusstvo, 1938, no. 4:178.
181. For information on Nazarevskaia, a graduate of the Vysshii gosudarstvennyi khudozhestvenno-tekhnicheskii institut (VKhUTEIN), and for examples of her work, see Charlotte Douglas, "Russian Fabric Design," in The Great Utopia (New York, 1992): 635-48;
182. and I. Yasinskaya, Soviet Textile Design of the Revolutionary Period (London, 1983). For strife over allocation of studios etc., see RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 76 (protocol of closed meeting of MOSSKh board, 11 January 1936).
183. On the Stalinist retreat from the domestic sphere, see Victor Buchli, "Khrushchev, Modernism, and the Fight against Pelit-bourgeois Consciousness in the Soviet Home," in Susan E. Reid, ed., Design, Stalin and the Thaw, special issue of Journal of Design History 10, no. 2 (1997): 165-66, 174;
184. Thurston, "The Soviet Family," 563;
185. and Beth Holmgren, Women's Works in Stalin's Time (Bloomington, 1993), 2, 9-10.
186. RGALI, f. 2943. op. 1. ed. khr. 173, l. 17.
187. Lomonosovets, 21 March 1935, no. 12:1. I am indebted to Karen Kettering for alerting me to this source and to Ordzhonikidze's support of the Lomonosov Porcelain Factory. Personal communication, May 1995. Even concerning the inclusion of the porcelain section, no final decision had been announced as late as June 1937: RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, l. 26.
188. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, ll. 10-11, 21-22.
189. Ibid., ll. 10-11.
190. Georgieva showed a lithograph portrait of N. S. Khrushchev (1937). RGALI, f. 962, op. 6. ed. khr. 513, l. 34.
191. On Oktiabr', see Hubertus Gassner and Eckhart Gillen, eds., Zwischen Revolutionskunst und Sozialistischen Realismus: Dokumente und Kommentare (Cologne, 1979). On the purge of Oktiabr' and Vsekokhudozhnik, see RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 200-5 (records of meeting of MOSSKh, 5-19 May 1937); and RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126.
192. M. L'vovich, "Khudozhnitsy sovetskogo plakata: K nature, k zhivopisi," Tvorchestvo, 1934, no. 8:8.
193. M. Tupitsyn, "From Factography to Mythography: The Final Phase of the Soviet Photographic Avant-Garde," in Banks, ed., Aesthetic Arsenal, 110-11.
194. Photomontage enjoyed its heyday around 1931. The shift followed the centralization of poster production in 1931 under IZOGIZ (State Publishing House), which was directly responsible to the Central Committee. On the restoration of the cult of painting, see Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "From Faktura to Factography," October, no. 30 (Fall 1984): 83-119;
195. and Margarita Tupitsyn, The Soviet Photograph, 1924-1937 (New Haven, 1996), chap. 5.
196. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124, ll. 11-12; and RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126, ll. 70-73. Exhibition administrator Abramskii accused Favorskii of failing to manifest the perseverance required of a true Soviet artist. Pressure was also put on Lev Bruni who, according to Favorskii, found himself in the same position.
197. Zernova, Vospominaniia monumentalista, 85-87. It is notable that although women were numerically equal in Pimenov's brigade, which was based on the former OST, the AKhRR-based brigade under Efanov, which produced a panneau The Best People of the Soviet Union for the same exhibition, consisted entirely of men.
198. Further research is required on the extent to which the division between public, exhibition genres and "chamber" work was gendered through the association of the latter with the feminine domain of the home. Holmgren argues that the Stalinist state never fully colonized the domestic sphere: the home and the chamber genres of writing associated with it remained a potential site of resistance to official values. Holmgren, Women's Works, 2, 9-10.
199. Miuda Iablonskaia, likewise, suggests that the "intimate" or chamber painting of Nadezhda Udal'tsova, Antonina Sofronova, and others represented a "counter-movement" to the "general trend towards Socialist Realism." M. N. Yablonskaya, Women Artists of Russia's New Age (London, 1990), 171, 174.
200. RGALI. f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, l. 12.
201. Ibid., l. 22; RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 1163 (Petitions to MOSSKh); RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 14; reports by N. Dcnisovskii and A. Gerasimov, RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126, ll. 21-23; and N. Nikolaev, "Kontraktatsiia khudozhnikov 1935 g.," Tvorchestvo, 1936, no. 7:6-19. Discontents over kontraktatsiia fuelled the campaign to discredit and purge the leadership of Vsekokhudozhnik in 1936-37.
202. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 127, ll. 34-38 (protocol of MOSSKh board meeting, 22 September 1937).
203. Tvorchestvo tried to counter this view of lakusheva by insisting that she was more interested in kartiny than in still lifes and by publishing a photograph of her at work on a kartina. Kuril'tseva, "Smena," Tvorchestvo, 1934, no. 8:10.
204. See Elena Aleksandrova, comp., A. Iakusheva. Zhivopis', grafika: Katalog vystavki (Moscow, 1986).
205. For seminal analyses of the causes of women's exclusion from the history of art, see Linda Nochlin, "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" in T. B. Hess and E. C. Baker, eds., Art and Sexual Politics (New York, 1971);
206. Germaine Greer, The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and Sculptors from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (Montclair, N.J., 1978);
207. and Parker and Pollock, Old Mistresses.
208. RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 14.
209. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, l. 22.
210. Ibid., ll. 23-24, 58.
211. Ibid., l. 47.
212. Ibid., ll. 30-31.
213. Ibid., ll. 9-10, 23-24.
214. Ibid., l. 43, and RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 14. Both seem to refer to the same exhibition of 1937 in the Arts Committee's "klub KOR."
215. A letter invited "women workers in fine art abroad" to participate: RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172; and RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 302, l. 7 (estimated budget for planned 1938 exhibition of women artists).
216. RGALI, f. 962, op., 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 8.
217. Ibid.; and RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 302.
218. The exhibition, consisting of 357 works of painting, graphics, and sculpture by 196 artists, opened 8 March 1938 in the gallery of Vsekokhudozhnik. It is not clear whether "graphics" included posters, book illustrations, etc. or solely "easel graphics." The original plans did envisage posters by Kulagina, Pinus, and others. KGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172, l. 7. Kulagina was not listed among participants in the catalogue (not surprisingly, since her husband Klutsis had been shot the month before), but Pinus was listed as a painter, as was the designer Magidson. L. V. Rozental', comp., 8 Maria: Katalog vystavki zhivopisi, grqfiki i skul'ptury (Moscow and Leningrad, 1938).
219. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, ll. 12-13.
220. Edel'son, who succeeded the purged Slavinskii as leader of Vsekokhudozhnik in 1937, was himself purged almost immediately. See RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124; and RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 126.
221. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, l. 62.
222. Ibid., ll. 9, 16, 57.
223. Ibid., l. 59; "Plan iubileinoi vystavki 8-e marta," RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172; L. Rozental', "Vystavka zhenskogo tvorchestva," Tvorchestvo, 1938, no. 6:15-18;
224. and [Serafima] Riangina, "Pervaia vystavka zhenshchin-khudozhnits, " Rabotnitsa, 1938, no. 10 (April): 17.
225. Riangina did not participate, according to the catalogue, although she was included in the original plan and was a member of the "Aktiv of Women Artists of MOSSKh." Rozental', comp., 8 Marta: Katalog vystavki.
226. This "democratic" selection policy was allegedly adopted under "pressure from the women's committees." RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, l. 35.
227. Ibid., l. 2; RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 172; and Riangina, "Pervaia vystavka," 17.
228. Ibid., ll. 23-24, 33.
229. Ibid., ll. 75-76.
230. Andrei Zhdanov criticized Platon Kerzhentsev's leadership of the Arts Committee in January 1938. Banks, ed., Aesthetic Arsenal, 226. Similar problems apparently beset preparations for Industry of Socialism, which all but collapsed into chaos. See, for example, RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 124.
231. RGALI, f. 2943, op. 1, ed. khr. 173, ll. 3, 24, 33.
232. N. Baburin, "Uluchshit' organizatsiiu vystavok,"
233. and list of exhibitors, "Khronika moskovskikh vystavok," both in Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 6:back cover.
234. One of the few works shown at the 1939 exhibition to tackle the prestigious genre of state portraiture, Anna Motornaia's Voting (1938),
235. was illustrated in a different context. "Vpered k kommunizmu," Tvorchestvo, 1939, no. 4:5.
236. Azarkovich, et al., Vystavki, 350.
237. After a lapse during the war, Moscow women's exhibitions were held annually from 1948 to 1953. Exhibits in 1953 included E. Pribylovskaia, In the Pioneer Camp,
238. and L. Rybchenkova, Little Sisters.
239. "Vystavka rabot zhenshchin-khudozhnits," Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 22 April 1953.
240. Perhaps surprisingly, only one women's exhibition was held in the Khrushchev period, in 1960. A further women's show was held in 1968. Zernova, Vospominaniia monumentalista, 131-33.
241. Kuril'tseva, "Smena," 8.
242. Stalin, Report to Eighteenth Party Congress, as cited in script of tour, "Pod'em narodnoi kul'tury i narodnogo blagosostoianiia," RGALI, f. 962, op. 6, ed. khr. 948, l. 66; and Sh[pirkan], "Khudozhnitsy," 20.
243. On efforts to "make Stakhanovites cultured" (and on the involvement of obshchestvennitsy in this project), see Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism, 223-42.
244. It was illustrated under this title in Rozental', "Vystavka zhenskogo Ivorchestva," 17.
245. Its position can be seen in the installation view in Riangina, "Pervaia vystavka," 17. The title is given there as "Listening to a Report." Riangina confirms that it is a study for In the Shock Workers' Box.
246. The central place the Stalin cult occupied among all the available means of social integration may be explained by considering the way the public was gendered. Conversely, the feminization of spectatorship might account for the striking rarity of the female nude in Stalinist painting, an important topic beyond the scope of this article. On the genre of the nude as alien to the Russian tradition, see V. S., "'Nadia v shubke,' ili kratkaia entsiklopedia sovetskogo 'niu,'" Moskavskii khudozhnik, 1965, no. 11-12 (22 March 1995).
247. To claim that women were the target audience is to take issue with Beth Holmgren's thesis that women's unacknowledged secondary status in Stalinist society exempted them to some extent from the party's regime of approval or censure. Holmgren, Women's Works, 10.
248. There may be a case that, rather than paying less attention to the control of women, the party adopted a differentiated approach to male and female regulation and persuasion. Regarding women as politically underdeveloped, it aimed at bonding them to it emotionally. Compare Davies, Popular Opinion, 61, 150.
249. Sh[pirkan], "Khudozhnitsy," 21.
250. For discussion of art reproductions in Obshchestvennitsa, see Kettering, "'Ever More Cosy,'" 130-31;
251. and K. Kravchenko, "O kartinakh i reproduktsiakh," Obshchestvennitsa, 1937, no. 15:17-19. A thorough comparative study of the art coverage in these and other magazines addressed to both women and men would be enlightening.
252. Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, "Les femmes et la traversé du fascisme," Eléments pour une analyse du fascisme (Paris, 1976), 1:157;
253. cited in translation in Barbara Spackman, "The Fascist Rhetoric of Virility," Stanford Italian Review 8, no. 1-2 (1990): 83.