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Stalin employed a stable of court painters to produce hundreds of official portraits, some of which were of immense size and painted by brigades of artists working under production-line conditions. The financial rewards and privileges for favoured artists could be substantial, but painting Stalin was a dangerous occupation. Those who worked closely with him, such as his political colleagues, secretaries, interpreters, and bodyguards, had a tendency to "disappear," to be arrested, executed, or secretly murdered according to his paranoid whims. In reality, Stalin was short, fat, and bandy-legged with a pock-marked face, narrow forehead, and withered left arm. But an official artist would have been unwise to depict his physical appearance with any degree of accuracy.
As a young man at the time of the October Revolution, Stalin had played no more than a peripheral part in the Bolshevik uprising. This potentially embarrassing fact was glossed over by fctional biographies, which exaggerated the revolutionary adventures of his youth, and descibed his warm friendship with Lenin. Evidence in fact suggests that Lenin viewed him with distrust and personal dislike. Stalin, in turn, came to fear all the "Old Bolsheviks" and anyone who had been involved in the original revolutionary movement. From the mid-1930s, he set about purging the Party leadership and armed forces in waves of show trials and mass-executions. Among those caught up was the Constructivist artist Gustav Klucis, who died in a prison camp in 1944, where he was interned for having fought for the Bolsheviks in the Ninth Regiment of Latvian Rifles in 1917. For Socialist Realist history painters, the depiction of the October uprising had to be approached with caution. The historical insurrection had to be recounted in a manner which stressed that the rebellion had been contained, like the continuing revolutionary process under Stalin, by strict obedience, self-discipline, and respect for authority.
This conservation revision is seen in The Winter Palace is Taken by Vladimir Serov (1910-68), which was completed a year after Stalin's death.
Two battle-weary soldiers stand in the hall of the captured palace. Spent cartridges at their feet suggest the fading echoes of gunfire. Their victory, rewarded with a quiet cigarette break, marks the pivotal event of Russian history. But it is a sombre scene with an air of order and harmony enhanced by the symmetrical composition and the laborious academic style. Ostensibly, the painting's purpose is to venerate the Workers' State by dignifying its moment of origin, though its effect is to reconstruct that moment as one of the grim stasis, drained the rebellious energy.
After Stalin's death in 1953 there was some relaxation of cultural regulations. In February 1956 the new leader, Nikita Khrushchev, formally denounced Stalin at a closed sesson of the Party Congress, and subsequiently thousands of works of art of the Stalinist period, especially those which depiected him, were destrpyed or hidden and disappeared from the art history books. Although the excesses of Stalin's personality cult were not repeated by his successors, the heroization of Soviet workers continued as the principal theme of Socialist Realism.
Builders of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station by Viktor Popkov lines up the stock characters and assigns to them their required qualities; even while taking a work-break they look sober, industrious, and vigilant. But during the 1960s and 1970s nonconformist and dissident art groups were increasingly active. Technically, it had never been illegal for an artist to work in unorthodox styles, but attempts to exhibit outside the official framework frequently met with police harassment. In the 1970s numerous small exhibitions were held in defiance of Party regulations and were duly closed down, sometimes within hours of opening. In Moscow in September 1974, an open-air exhibition on a patch of suburban wasteland was broken up by bulldozers and water cannons. The "Bulldozer Exhibition" was widely reported in the Western press.
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