Offering some prime examples of totalitarian kitsch, the Kremlin Museums unveil their collection of gifts to Soviet leaders.
In 1948, a Ukrainian man sent Josef Stalin a bottle of Yuzhny cologne for his 70th birthday, enclosing a badly spelled message of congratulations. The perfume was a cheap kind, sold in every department store, but it was the thought that counted. Or at least someone must have thought so, because the bottle was carefully stored in a museum archive, and makes a new appearance this week at an exhibition of gifts to Soviet leaders.
The exhibition was conceived by a Cambridge anthropologist, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, and an art historian working at the Kremlin Museums, Olga Sosnina. Together, the two curators searched archives and interviewed museum workers to compile the histories of 500 objects that were given to Soviet leaders from Vladimir Lenin to Mikhail Gorbachev, some of them elaborate official offerings, others deeply personal and somewhat naive.
Titled "Gifts to Soviet Leaders", the exhibition opened at Novy Manezh on Thursday. It displays the gifts themselves – from a portrait of Lenin carved on a lentil to a hammer-and-sickle telephone – along with photographs from the era and archival film footage of the gift-giving ceremonies.
Many of the items come from the collection of the Kremlin Museums and have never been shown to the public before. "This is the first exhibition devoted to the Soviet epoch to be shown by our museums", Sosnina said in an interview last week.
In a way, though, the exhibition is completing a long-planned project for the Kremlin Museums. Back in the early 1960s, there was a plan to open a museum of gifts to the Soviet Union within the Kremlin walls, but this never materialized.
The gift museum would have displayed a collection of more than 6,000 items. But while Sosnina has researched the history of the project, she doesn't know the exact reason why the museum's opening, planned for 1961, was postponed and postponed and finally annulled with a brief decree after five years. "It's a mysterious story – it's a detective story", she said.
Sosnina's research uncovered a document in which an official commission said of the soon-to-open museum that "everything is fine, we just need overshoes for the visitors", she said. They had even decided on a ticket price for the museum – 10 kopeks. But the doors never opened.
One possible reason was that the idea of a museum displaying gifts was too strongly associated with the Stalin era. In 1949, the Old Masters were ruthlessly cleared out of the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts for an exhibition of gifts sent to the leader on his 70th birthday. Not only did it take up 17 halls of the museum, it also spilled over into the Polytechnical Museum and the Museum of the Revolution.
The exhibition lasted around four years, closing only after Stalin's death. Some of the exhibits continue to be displayed to this day – such as a working model of an excavator at the Polytechnical Museum – but the labels on them make no reference to the Stalin jubilee, Sosnina said.
The new exhibition is not tied to any anniversary. Rather, "Gifts to Soviet Leaders" is part of a five-year-old research project by Ssorin-Chaikov and Sosnina into Soviet gift-giving and what it says about the society of the time. The project will eventually turn into several books, Ssorin-Chaikov said, speaking by telephone from Cambridge last week.
Ssorin-Chaikov studied ethnology at Moscow State University, then went to Stanford for his PhD, and has taught at Cambridge for the last five years. Previously, he has studied the lives of the Evenki people in northern Siberia.
As an anthropologist, he said, he wants to know how the gifts – which can seem peculiar or even ironic to a modern audience – were seen by those who gave them. He believes the gift-givers did not see anything funny about what they were doing. "We didn't come across any kind of irony on the minds of the gift-givers at the time. Maybe there was some. Of course, you can't exclude that completely", Ssorin-Chaikov said.
Diplomatic gift-giving is nothing new. Indeed, the Kremlin Museums have often displayed such gifts from the 15th to 17th centuries. Some of the gifts in the new exhibition are clearly diplomatic ones, such as the sword given to Stalin by Winston Churchill at the Tehran Conference – an exhibit that comes from the Battle of Stalingrad museum in Volgograd.
"It's striking how similar this stuff is to ... traditions of giving gifts to tsars, so there's a kind of historical continuity", Ssorin-Chaikov said. He added that many of the gifts are "not that different from the stuff that the royal family gets in Britain".
Nevertheless, there are specific characteristics shared by many Soviet-era gifts. Many reflect the Soviet idea of creating a new world – for instance, the hammer-and-sickle telephone made by Polish aviation workers has a base in the shape of a globe, as does a table-top clock, while a carpet made in Dagestan for Nikita Khrushchev shows Sputniks orbiting around his bald head.
Some of the exhibits resemble works of Sots-Art, the dissident art movement of the 1970s that played with Soviet imagery to make an ironic point. But Sots-Art was about "introspection", while these works are "absolutely the opposite", Sosnina said.
She tried to find a term to describe them: "It's not naive realism ... because it's art that is ideological in its essence". Official Soviet art was "boring and sludgy", but these exhibits are "a burst of energy", she said, proposing an unofficial name for their genre: "socialist surrealism".
The gift-makers often chose idiosyncratic materials for their creations. The exhibits include a portrait of Stalin made of nails – appropriately enough, since his name meant "man of steel" – and a portrait of Leonid Brezhnev made of sugar. Such choices often reflected the giver's identity, Ssorin-Chaikov said, citing the example of workers at a cigarette factory who created a portrait of Lenin using tobacco leaves.
Sosnina said she had been particularly intrigued by the bottle of Yuzhny, or Southern, cologne sent to Stalin in 1949 by a resident of Kherson province in Ukraine. Now dried up to a thick sediment, but still fragrant when opened, the perfume was carefully stored in the Russian Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg. It was sent to Stalin with a message full of spelling mistakes, written with a sort of ink pencil that had to be licked in order to keep writing.
Sosnina speculated that the giver must have thought that Stalin would like the perfume and "maybe he would dab some on".
She also expressed amazement at the way the humble present was treated by museum workers. "They didn't burn it, they didn't throw it away. They preserved it all these years", she said.
So why did people send gifts to a faraway leader? "There are very few things that you could say were made under orders", Ssorin-Chaikov said. "They are voluntary gifts, on the one hand. On the other hand, a lot of people were specifically thinking about a return gift".
Among the gift-givers who had self-interested motives, few were as blatant as one Moscow hairdresser named Grigory Borukhov. In the early 1930s, Borukhov collected hair from his clients and used it to make a portrait of Lenin. After donating it to the Institute of Marx, Engels and Lenin, he began corresponding with Kliment Voroshilov, a member of the Party's Central Committee, about his invention of portraiture using human hair.
"He was saying that basically 'I'm very proud to be ... the creator of this genre of art, and I have already started working on several large screens in which I would like to depict pictures from the history of the Russian Civil War'", Ssorin-Chaikov said. In return, Borkhov expected better conditions. He asked to have a separate apartment and to be attached to the hairdresser's salon in the Kremlin.
Ssorin-Chaikov conceded that many other gift-givers hoped to get such privileges. But most of the presents – some of which must have taken months to make – represented more than simple self-interest, he said. "You can't say that this wasn't part of the story, but I don't think it's the whole story".
"Gifts to Soviet Leaders" (Dary Vozhdyam) runs to Nov. 26 at Novy Manezh, located at 3 Georgiyevsky Pereulok. Metro Teatralnaya.
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