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 Papernys 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
apparently unplanned synchronicity. A fresh printing of Vladimir
Papernys Architecture in the Age of Stalin: Culture Two (2002, [ ,
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 Papernys book was reissued.
Each book represents an attempt, just prior to the Soviet Unions 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 Stalins death in
1953. Not only do Papernys and Groys writings follow a similar trajectory,
they intersect biographically as well. The two authors collaborated closely
with one another, reading and revising each others 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 colleagues claims.
Both can be seen to constitute a reaction, moreover, to the dull intellectual
climate of official academic discourse on the subject during the Brezhnev era.
In his introduction to the English version of Papernys book, Groys recalls
the background of almost total theoretical paralysis against which it first
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.

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atmosphere [of Moscow] at the time, he wrote.1 Indeed, Eastern Marxisms

most talented aesthetic theorists after Trotskii was expelled were by and
large conservativesthe repentant Georg Lukcs or his equally repentant
protg Mikhail Lifshitz, each an apologist for the Zhdanovshchina and
hostile to modernism. After destalinization commenced in 1956, following
Khrushchevs 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-fledged Stalinism was not reinstated, at least not in the realms of art or
architecture. Now neither alternativemodernism nor Stalinismappeared
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 officially 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 , 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 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 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.

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by his mentor, Selim Khan-Magomedov, Papernys Culture Two is a sweeping

and grandiose work. Groys presentation of modernist, Stalinist, and postStalinist 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 Papernys arguments. Finding little in the way
of homegrown theoretical models to work with in Brezhnevs USSRwhere
even the old-fashioned dogmas of Marxism-Leninism had fallen by the
waysidethe 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 offlimits. 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 first 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 artificial
construction. Paperny, Vladimir. Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Pg. xxiii.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. 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

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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 childrenall 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 indefinitely. 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 movementthe movement had become an end in itself.
[Stalinisms] 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 eternityThe history of the building of the Lenin Mausoleum is
a good example of how cultures idea of the longevitychanged.
In Culture One, the idea of a mausoleum evoked a temporary
structure, one that was needed in order to grant all those who
wish to, and who cannot come to Moscow for the day of the
funeral, a chance to bid farewell to their beloved leader. Culture
Two had no intention of bidding farewell to the beloved leader.
The temporary wooden mausoleum erected in 1924 was replaced
first by a more solid wooden structure [six months later], and then,
in 1930, by one of stone built to last.7

Papernys schematization allows for a number of dazzling rhetorical flourishes

such as this. And yet he is able to deploy this somewhat rigid conceptual
apparatus in order to discern subtler layers of tension within Culture One and
Culture Two. In a later chapter, he details the differences between individual
avant-garde groups like the formalist members of the Association of
New Architects [, (1923-1930)] and their functionalist rivals
in the Society of Modern Architects [, (1926-1931)]. Paperny explains

Papernys categories are as follows: A. MELTING-HARDENING: 1. Beginning-Ending, 2.

Movement-Immobility, 3. Horizontal-Vertical, 4. Uniform-Hierarchical; B. MECHANISM-HUMAN:
5. Collective-Individual, 6. Mechanical-Living, 7. Abstraction-Name, 8. Good-Evil; C. LYRIC-EPIC: 9.
Mutism-Word, 10. Improvisation-Notation, 11. Efficacious-Artistic, 12. Realism-Myth, 13. BusinessMiracle.

Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Pgs. 15-17.

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this bifurcation within the architectural avant-garde as mirroring the prior

split within the spheres of visual media between Malevichs Suprematism
and Tatlins Constructivism. Whereas Malevich strove to erase all traces of
verisimilitude or lifelike depiction from his paintings through a process of
complete formal abstraction (i.e., non-objectivity []),
Tatlin aimed to embed his constructions within everyday life though their
concrete materiality (i.e., life-building []). The Suprematists
sought to liberate art from its heteronomous condition by removing its slavish
dependence on the outside world. The Constructivists, by contrast, sought to
tear down the wall separating art from life and thus render the whole world
artificial. This diremption within Culture One between the efficacious and
artistic, Paperny argues, was exactly inverted with the onset of Culture
Twos call for Socialist Realism. Having rejected both [non-objectivity] and
[life-building], he explains, Culture Two began to affirm, on the one hand,
the separation of art from lifethe stage curtain and footlightsand, on
the other hand, the necessity for an absolute similarity of art to life. [With
Socialist Realism,] art and life now had to be partitioned by an impenetrable
barrier, but the same thing had to exist on each side.8
After Paperny left the country in 1981, Groys took what seemed to be the
next logical step in positive theoretical development, delving into poststructuralism. He began reading authors like Derrida, Barthes, Deleuze, and
Guattari, who had played such a decisive role in displacing structuralism as
the predominant ideological tendency in the human sciences of the West.
The Total Art of Stalinism clearly reflects their influence, though Groys retains
a clarity of expression that only Barthes among them ever achieved. Unlike
Paperny, Groys is not interested in reifying the cultural opposition between
early Soviet modernism and the Stalinism that succeeded it. Rather, his
provocative argumentwhich sparked a great deal of outrage at the time
was premised on the idea that a direct line of continuity existed between the
totalizing ambitions of the classical Soviet avant-garde and the accomplished
totalizing ambitions of the classical Soviet avant-garde and the accomplished
totalitarianism (or aesthetic dictatorship) of Socialist Realism, unfortunately
titled sots-art. According to Groys, in a specious sublation, Stalinist art was
at once the culmination as well as the negation of the Soviet avant-garde.9

Ibid., pgs. 207-211.

[T]he art of Socialist Realism represents not only the organic continuation of the avant-garde
but also its culmination and in some sense its completion. Groys, Boris. Stalinism as Aesthetic
Phenomenon. Translated by Alla Efimova and Lev Manovich. Tekstura: Russian Essays on Visual
Culture. (University of Chicago Press. Chicago, IL: 1993). Pg. 120.

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Socialist realism was not created by the masses but was formulated in their
name by well-educated and experienced elites who had assimilated the
experience of the avant-garde and been brought to socialist realism by the
internal logic of the avant-garde method itself, Groys casually reports.
Under Stalin the dream of the avant-garde was in fact fulfilled and the life
of society was organized in monolithic artistic forms, though of course not
those that the avant-garde itself had favored.10 Contrary to popular opinion
in both East and West, Stalinist aesthetics represented the logical outcome
of modernism in art and architecture. For Groys, the total art of Stalinism
alluded to in the title of his book was thus hardly some alien force that
descended to crush the avant-garde from without. Modernism already carried
the germ of totalitarianism within itself.
Relying on the standard post-structuralist procedure of deconstructing
apparent opposites and revealing their hidden unities, Groys locates points
where Stalinist and modernist aesthetics overlap and converge, the boundaryzones at which one bleeds into the other.11 This should not be taken to mean,
however, that every difference between them is therefore collapsed into the
undifferentiated space of Derridean undecidability.12 Groys is quite clear
as to his decision concerning the question of artistic modernism versus that
of Stalinism. At least when it comes to an historical evaluation, he rules
unmistakably in favor of Stalinism. Groys even goes so far as to claim that
Socialist Realism surpassed the early Soviet avant-garde. And not merely at
an ideologico-political level, either, but from an aesthetico-formal standpoint
as well. Viewed from the perspective of the avant-gardes theoretical selfinterpretation, Groys maintains, Stalinist culture both radicalizes and
formally overcomes the avant-garde; it is, so to speak, a laying bare of
the avant-garde device and not merely a negation of it.13 In the end, he
concludes, both the modernist and Stalinist projects in art were forms of
utopianismand as such ultimately irrational. Groys greater estimation
of Stalinism as an aesthetic phenomenon owes simply to the fact that its
irrationality attained to a higher degree of perfection.14

10

Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Pg. 9.

11

Groys therefore claims Stalinist poetics is the immediate heir to constructivist poetics. Ibid.,
pg. 36.In essence, Stalin was the only artist of the Stalin era; in this sense, he was a successor of
Malevich or Tatlin to a much greater degree than the later museum stylizations of the avant-garde.
Groys, Stalinism as Aesthetic Phenomenon. Pg. 127.

12
I.e., neither one [thing] nor the other and both at once, undecidable. Derrida, Jacques.
Dissemination. Translated by Barbara Johnson. (The Athlone Press. London, UK: 1981). Pg. 259.
13

Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Pg. 44.

14

Ibid., pgs. 64-65.

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Though Groys passes on to describe the varieties of postutopian art that

emerged in the Eastern Bloc following Stalins death, this cannot help but
feel like an afterthought when measured against the overall scope and thrust
of his argument. Indeed, none of Groys subsequent work has been nearly
as important or groundbreaking as The Total Art of Stalinism. The text is not
without its problems, however. For one, Groys thesis that the totalizing
vision of the Soviet avant-garde somehow anticipated (or perhaps even
directly inspired) the totalitarianism of the Stalinist regime is extravagant.
At the same time, compared with his other insights, it seems intellectually
lazy and clichd. While it may still have possessed a modicum of ingenuity
in the late 1980s, the tired postmodern complaint regarding the modernists
totalitarian claims seems far too tendentious and convenient today.15 Once
the initial shock of his argument linking the art of the Soviet avant-garde to
Socialist Realism wears off, moreover, it becomes evident that Groys is taking
a certain perverse pleasure in this petty act of iconoclasm.
But the kernel of truth contained in his assertion should not be occluded
on this account. Undeniably, Stalinism did absorb the experience of the
lessons taught it by the avant-garde. But it was Paperny, and not Groys, who
stressed this point most emphatically. Stalinist architecture, whatever else
one may say of it, was decidedly not simply a return to the traditionalist
eclecticism of prerevolutionary building practices. To the architects of
Stalinism, modernism itselfwhich had understood itself as abolishing all
previous stylesappeared as simply on more style alongside all the others.
The Stalinist architect, Paperny explained,
had to take everything, but nothing was to be left in its pure form.
One had to melt the old forms, to imbue them with new ideological
contentThe content of the epoch was the completion of all
traditions and the end of history[I]n its built environment, all
forms and all traditions had to be blended together[Stalinism]
wanted to include in itself not only all traditions but also the
anti-traditionality of the preceding culture [modernism]. We
can learn a lot from Zholtovskii as the livingbearer of the classical
legacy, wrote architect [Arkadii] Mordvinov. There are significant
achievements of the Vesnins, of [Moisei] Ginzburgthese
achievements of contemporaneity we must also assimilate.16

15

Ibid., pg. 11.

16

Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Pg. 247.

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The representative buildings of Stalinist architecturethe wedding-cake

skyscrapers of the Seven Sisters in Moscow, for instancewere far more
monstrous than any of the traditionalist amalgams that preceded them. These
colossal structures featured Dorian columns and towering heroic statuary cast
in ferroconcrete. (Paperny even speculates that Stalin personally intervened
in designing the infamous proposal for the Palace of the Soviets. Arguing
that no trained architect could have produced such an abomination, he
suggests the authors listed were incapable of such powerful barbarism, such
neophyte courage in dealing with form, function, and surface).17 Despite
its considerable explanatory power, however, Papernys conceptual schemas
in Culture Two also have their shortcomings. Groys ascertained many of
these in his criticisms of the book.18 Paperny is doubtless guilty of elevating
specific historical determinations that manifested during the periods 19131933 and 1934-1954 to the status of general transhistorical determinants.
The dynamics that were responsible for avant-garde and Stalinist cultural
tendencies extended well beyond the borders of Russia.
Nevertheless, Groys and Papernys independent efforts to grapple with
Western discourses like structuralism and poststructuralism prior to the fall
of the Soviet Union produced far more interesting results than those that
transpired afterwards, when such philosophical ambassadors as Jrgen
Habermas, Jacques Derrida, and Jean-Luc Nancy graced Moscow campuses
with their presence.19 Whether by sheer confusion or creative misprision,
Groys and Paperny managed to transplant concepts from outside the narrow
ambit of the USSR while composing highly incisive, original studies on Soviet
history. Having already settled their scores with Western thought, they were
thus spared the high-minded condescensions of European scholars arriving
to reeducate the Russian masses. After 1989, delegates were dispatched from
France, Germany, and the US to emancipate the misguided Soviet youth from
their adherence to the supposedly anachronistic tenets of Marxism, catching
them up to speed in the latest theories of Foucault.
If the progress of theoretical innovation in the Soviet Union lagged behind
that of the West, this was probably because the intelligentsiastraitjacketed
by repressive state censorshipfailed to keep up with the accelerated pace at

17

Paperny, Vladimir. Destruction and Modern Architecture. Ruins of Modernity. (Duke University
Press. Durham, NC: 2010). Pg. 50.

18

Stalinist culturefalls outside the entire historical process. Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Pg. 64

19

Buck-Morss, Susan. Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West.
(MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 2002). Pgs. 220-223.

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which reality had taken place. Compared with Europe and the United States
between the early 1920s and mid 1930s, the USSR experienced immense
historical transformations within an extremely abbreviated timespan. But this
effusive output was followed by a long spell of stagnation. Ironically, then,
it can be noted that Papernys appropriation of French structuralism was in
many respects a reappropriation. After all, apart from the influence of Saussure
in Geneva, structuralism reached France largely by way of Prague, primarily
through the work of the Russian migrs. Formalist critics like Jakobson and
Trubetskoi, both closely tied to the Soviet avant-garde, fled westward in the
early 1930s in order to escape persecution at the hands of Stalin. When Paperny
chose to utilize a loosely structuralist methodology for his Culture Two, he was
tapping into a stream of thought that originated in the midst of the October
Revolution but was subsequently forced to develop abroad, in France.
Even more than in the realm of aesthetic theory, it was the Soviet Unions
extraordinary rate of artistic and cultural development itself that far outstripped
that of its Western counterparts after the revolution. The successive patterns
of artistic and architectural growth in the twentieth century in the West were
played out in microcosm during first few decades of the USSR. Only later
would they be recapitulated elsewhere. Charles Jenks called the explosions
that took place on 15 July 1972, in St. Louis, Missouri the end of Modern
Architecture. Paperny wryly observes, In Russia, attempts to end modern
architecture took place much earlier.20
Indeed, both Groys and Paperny seem to recognize that Stalinism in art
and architecture was not simply part of some antimodern reaction. It was
also significant sense postmodern, somehow existing after the fact but
still bound up with modernity. Groys states this in unambiguous terms:
[B]eginning with the Stalin years, at least, official Soviet culture, Soviet art,
and Soviet ideology become eclectic, citational, postmodern.21 Students
during the Brezhnev era like Groys and Paperny may have suffered from
a rather backwards intellectual climate, but it took Europe and the US
decades before they arrived at the postmodern conditionan outcome the
Soviet Union had already reached in 1930s under Stalin.22 The avant-garde

20

Paperny, Architecture in the Age of Stalin. Pg. 1.

21

Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism. Pg. 108.

More recently, Groys has taken this notion even further concerning Stalinist revivalism in Russia
today: [T]he revival of Soviet Stalinist aesthetics [is] an effect of postmodern taste. Groys, Boris.
Beyond Diversity. Art Power. (MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 2008). Pg. 163
22

Paperny, Interview with Evgenii Fiks. Art Margins. (MIT Press. Cambridge, MA: 2005).

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movements that participated in the project able to pose the question of

modernism most radical possible form. When they were answered in 1934
with resounding defeat, this allowed traits that would later become associated
with postmodernism to appear in the USSR before surfacing in the West.
The ongoing social and political crisis of society after the millennium has cast
doubt upon the adequacy of the postmodern response. Modernist excesses
created postmodernism in architecture, a distant relative of postmodernism
in philosophy, that cousin who was not very bright and died young, Paperny
caustically remarks.23 But the real problem reaches back further: Might the
death of modernism and the emergence of postmodernism in the West (which
Jencks dates to 1972) owed in fact to the prior defeat of modernism and the
emergence of Stalinism in the East (around 1934)? And might the defeat of
the artistic and architectural avant-gardes in the East not in turn attest to the
prior failure of world revolution after World War I? What if modernism itself
was merely a symptom of the unfinished task of emancipation?
It is quite possible, of course, that Henri Lefebvre was right in his 1962
reflections on modernity: [M]odernity is like a shell to hide the absence
of praxis in the Marxist sense, and its failureModernity reveals this lack.
Modernity will be the shadow cast on bourgeois society by the thwarted
possibility of revolution, a parody of revolution.24 Modernity reveals this
lack. Modernity will be the shadow cast on bourgeois society by the thwarted
possibility of revolution, a parody of revolution. Modernit, a neologism
Baudelaire coined around the revolutions of 1848, was nothing other than
bourgeois society in distress. When the revolutions of 1917-1923 failed to
resolve this impasse, modernity itself was thrown into crisis. The residual
utopianism of the avant-garde carried modernism through into the 1930s in
the East and into the 1960s in the West. After this point, however, its program
stalled out. Like the ghost of the Revolution which never happened over here
[the West], like the ghost of the Revolution which was never completed over
there [the East], modernity is in permanent crisis, Lefebvre continued. It is
riven with contradictions, and in the absence of the radically revolutionary
negativity whichaccording to the initial Marxist projectwould have
transformed life, these contradictions are wreaking havoc. 25

23

Practically no architect whose name has been associated with postmodernism wants to admit
the relation. Paperny, Modernism and Destruction in Architecture. Pg. 55.
24

Lefebvre, Henri. What is Modernity? Translated by John Moore. Introduction to Modernity:

Twelve Preludes. (Verso Books. New York, NY: 1995). Pg. 173.
25

Ibid., pg. 236.

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Groys Total Art of Stalinism and Papernys Culture Two, in their own ways,
attempt to understand a world that exists after modernism, in which these
contradictions remain unresolved but where they have in the meantime
been suppressed. Insofar as the crisis of modernity and modernism were
experienced in the Soviet Union both earlier and in a more acute (because
more political) form than in the West, the authors bold analyses of Stalinism
in art and architecturethe first postmodern styleshed light on the
present. Today, as postmodernism itself enters into crisis, the modernist
antagonisms it sought to bury beneath the soil now threaten to reemerge
from their subterranean depths, where they have continued to seethe quietly
all these years.

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