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Socialist victory ends the class struggle and wipes out the old "capitalist" contradiction between beauty and truth. We in 1994 may get a hoot from Ekaterina Zernova's 1937 painting of collective farmers greeting a tank in a country lane with bouquets, or Aleksandr Deineka's solemn image of Lenin (who was childless) on a country spin in an open car with seven children, thus signifying his fatherhood of Russia. Why do we laugh? Because we do not grasp how, in the words of Towards a Theory of Art by an apparatchik named G. Nedoshivin, once "the basis in reality of this contradiction between poetry and truth is itself destroyed, then the truth of the social order itself appears deeply poetic . . . This is realized in socialist society."
But once one does grasp this inspiring process, everything falls into place. One sees how Socialist Realism transcends history, with Stalin (who in 1917 was the editor of Pravda but had no role in planning the October Revolution) being painted into the very heart of the first Bolshevik conclaves cheek by jowl with Lenin. One sees Stalin protecting the motherland from the Kremlin ramparts, towering over generals or members of the Politburo who in biological life were considerably taller than he. There he is conducting the defense of Stalingrad (though in fact he prudently avoided going anywhere near a battle), encouraging collective farmers and listening to Maxim Gorky read.
But most of all he is busy being himself: God. Fyodor Shurpin's Morning of Our Motherland, 1946-48, is a portrait of Stalin in the literal form of the Pantocrator, contemplating a new world he has brought into being. He wears a white coat of radiant purity and is bathed in the light of an early spring morning. Behind him stretch the green pastures of a transfigured Russia, Poussin (as it were) with tractors and electricity pylons, and shy plumes of smoke rising to greet the socialist dawn from far-off factories. As Dante wrote, in God's will is our peace. No future Chernobyls here.