This thesis examines the interaction of Georgian painting and national politics in the first two decades of Soviet power in Georgia, 1921-1939, focussing in particular on the period following the consolidation of Stalin's power at the helm of the Communist Party in 1926-7. In the Stalin era, Georgians enjoyed special status among Soviet nations thanks to Georgia's prestige as the place of Stalin's birth. However, Georgians' advanced sense of their national sovereignty and initial hostility towards Bolshevik control following Georgia's Sovietisation in 1921 also resulted in Georgia's uniquely fraught relationship with Soviet power in Moscow in the decades that followed. In light of these circumstances, this thesis explores how and why the experience and activities of Georgian painters between 1926 and 1939 differed from those of other Soviet artists. One of its central arguments is that the experiences of Georgian artists and critics in this period not only differed significantly from those of artists and critics of other republics, but that the uniqueness of their experience was precipitated by a complex network of factors resulting from the interaction of various political imperatives and practical circumstances, including those relating to Soviet national politics. Chapter one of this thesis introduces the key institutions and individuals involved in producing, evaluating and setting the direction of Georgian painting in the 1920s and early 1930s. Chapters two and three show that artists and critics in Georgia as well as commentators in Moscow in the 1920s and 30s were actively engaged in efforts to interpret the Party's demand for 'national form' in Soviet culture and to suggest what that form might entail as regards Georgian painting. However, contradictions inherent in Soviet nationalities policy, which both demanded the active cultivation of cultural difference between Soviet nationalities and eagerly anticipated a time when national distinctions in all spheres would naturally disappear, made it impossible for an appropriate interpretation of 'national form' to be identified. Chapter three, moreover, demonstrates how frequent shifts in Soviet cultural and nationalities policies presented Moscow institutions with a range of practical challenges which ultimately prevented them from reflecting in their exhibitions and publications the contemporary artistic activity taking place in the republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. A key finding of chapters four and five concerns the uniquely significant role that Lavrenty Beria, Stalin's ruthless deputy and the head of the Georgian and Transcaucasian Party organisations, played in differentiating Georgian painters' experiences from those of Soviet artists of other nationalities. Beginning in 1934, Beria employed Georgian painters to produce an exhibition of monumental paintings, opening at the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow in 1937, depicting episodes from his own falsified history of Stalin's role in the revolutionary movement in Transcaucasia. As this thesis shows, the production of the exhibition introduced an unprecedented degree of direct Party supervision over Georgian painting as Beria personally critiqued works by Georgian painters produced on prescribed narrative subjects in a centralised collective studio. As well as representing a major contribution to Stalin's personality cult, the exhibition, which conferred on Georgian painters special responsibility for representing Stalin and his activities, was also a public statement of the special status that the Georgians were now to enjoy, second only to that of the Russians. However, this special status involved both special privileges and special responsibilities. Georgians would enjoy special access to opportunities in Moscow and a special degree of autonomy in local governance, but in return they were required to lead the way in declaring allegiance to the Stalin regime. Chapter six returns to the debate about 'national form' in Georgian painting by examining how the pre-Revolutionary self-taught Georgian painter, Niko Pirosmani, was discussed by cultural commentators in Georgia and Moscow in the 1920s and 30s as a source informing a Soviet or Soviet Georgian canon of painting. It shows that, in addition to presenting views on the suitability of Pirosmani's painting either in terms of its formal or class content, commentators perpetuated and developed a cult of Pirosmani steeped in stereotypes of a Georgian 'national character.' Further, the establishment of this cult during the late 1920s and early 1930s seems to have been a primary reason for the painter's subsequent canonisation in the second half of the 1930s as a 'Great Tradition' of Soviet Georgian culture. It helped to articulate a version of Georgian national identity that was at once familiar and gratifying for Georgians and useful for the Soviet regime. The combined impression of cultural sovereignty embodied in this and other 'Great Traditions' of Soviet Georgian culture and the special status articulated through the 1937 exhibition allowed Georgian nationalism to be aligned, for a time, with support for Stalin and the Soviet regime.

Объектом данного исследования является сталинская культура. Целью работы было выявление специфики влияния макросоциального процесса модернизации на становление сталинской культуры Основная гипотеза заключается в том, что, по нашему мнению, советская культура 30-50-х и все, что с ней связано, является результатом сталинской модернизации и не могла существовать вне этого макросоциального процесса. Благодаря тому, что этот процесс был неполноценным относительно европейской модернизации (и ее продуктов), весомую роль в ней играло искусство (соцреализм), которое одновременно являлось таким же средством модернизации, как и индустриализация. Искусство оказалось средством формирования системы представления о мире, являлось способом трансляции ценностей, что говорит о нем как способе воспроизводства сталинской культуры. В ходе работы удалось выяснить, что сталинская модернизация как макросоциальный процесс обладает признаками западной модернизации, но ее инструментарий наследует много из того, что было в отечественной истории. Советская модернизация обладала своим собственным преобразовательным пафосом в отношении переустройства человеческой жизни. Проект модернизации был направлен на достижение определенной социальной утопии, где большую роль играл бы труд как воспитательный механизм. Само существование человека в этой системе несло онтологический характер, труд – воспитательный. Соответственно реальность, в т.ч. трудовая, подменялась синтетическим образом желаемой действительности, которая примирялась с окружающим миром за счет дерализации. Искусство в такой ситуации становится реальным рычагом модернизации и способом построения определенной картины мира, который дополняет прочие рычаги: политический и экономический. / The object of this study is the Stalinist culture. The aim of the work was to determine the specificity of the effect of macro-modernization process on the development of Stalinist culture The main hypothesis is that, in our opinion, the Soviet culture 30-50th and everything connected with it, is the result of Stalin's modernization and could not exist outside of this macro-process. Due to the fact that the process was defective with respect to the modernization of the European (and its products), a significant role in it played an art (the Socialist Realism) that is both the same means of modernization, as well as industrialization. Art was a means of forming a system of beliefs about the world, it is a method of translation of values, which speaks of it as a method of reproduction of the Stalinist culture. During the work we found out that Stalin's modernization as the macro-process has signs of Western modernization, but it inherits many of the tools that have been in the country's history. Soviet modernization has its own transformative fervor against reorganization of human life. The modernization project was aimed at achieving a particular social utopia, where he played a major role to work as an educational mechanism. The very existence of man in this system carried ontological character, work - educational. Accordingly reality, including labor, supplanted by synthetic way the desired effect, which is at peace with the world around them by deralization. The art in this situation becoming a real lever of modernization and a certain way to build a picture of the world that complements the other levers: political and economic.