Additional information for Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov's edited exhibit catalogue Dary Vozhdiam/Gifts to Soviet leaders. Moscow: Pinakotheke.

Ssorin-Chaikov, Nikolai (ed) 2006. Dary Vozhdiam/Gifts to Soviet leaders. Exhibition Catalogue. Moscow: Pinakotheke.
ISBN 5-98738-040-5

Soviet culture projected a unique vision of the world conceived at an historical crossroad between the “bourgeois” past and the “communist” future. This temporal vision defined, in turn, meanings of space: who in that world was politically near and who was distant; and what distinguished “friends” from “foes” and “us” from “them”. This catalogue of the exhibition, which was organized by Kremlin Museum in the Fall, 2006, offers an unusual view of these categories of belonging. They are explored through public gifts to Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev. This project offers an approach to these gifts as a map of symbolic markers of this “new world” in a cultural unity of time and space (the “new” and the “world”) in what is called here the Soviet chronotope.

Gifts to Soviet Leaders is not so much about the leaders as about the gift givers. It is about the gift as a language of relations between these givers and the political centre of the Soviet system. These offering ceremonies involved a huge number of people, both inside and outside the country, and operated on an unprecedented scale. Givers ranged from rank and file Soviet citizens and foreigners to other heads of states, world-famous scientists and cultural figures. The goal of the exhibition was to prompt the contemporary viewers to ask themselves what made such different people present gifts to Soviet leaders, and what relations these gifts created and maintained. The catalogue is introduced by the exhibition curators Olga Sosnina and Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov who, in the opening essay the Archaeology of Power/Anatomy of Love, discuss main theoretical themes that underscore this perspective, such as gift governmentality, gift aesthetics, and socialist chronotope.

The exhibition as well as in its catalogue is structured in accordance with the Soviet cultural categories of space and time. They comprise two major sections – “The Cartography of Power” and “The Chronography of Power”. The catalogue includes 382 entries reflecting over 500 objects that have been put on show – selected from a unique corpus of historical artefacts, which is now scattered around different museums across the former Soviet Union. In addition to the gifts themselves, it also shows relevant archival documents, photographs, documentary footage and oral historical materials. The ethnographic goal of this volume is to put forward the question of the social life of these gifts in its entirety — that is, to link the contexts in which these gifts were made and presented to those where were kept and exhibited after they were received – for example, at a grandiose public show for Stalin’s 70th birthday, or in the 1960s in the Museum of Gifts to the USSR, which was created but never opened in the Kremlin, and in the “private” show of gifts for Brezhnev for his 75th birthday in 1981 (pp. 311-16). In doing so, the catalogue explores and illustrates historical and anthropological concepts of state-socialist relations of power and Soviet subjectivity.

In 2007 the Exhibition and its Catalogue received the First Prize, “The Project of the Year Award”, at the annual Inter-Museum competition of the Russian Ministry of Culture.

Click here to see the Table of Contents as a pdf

Illustrations (links to view):

1. On the cover: Light bulb with filament in the shape of Lenin’s silhouette. A gift to 12th Congress of Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from the workers of the Moscow electric bulb factories, 1923

2. Telephone set in the form of the globe with the receiver as hammer and sickle
Gift to J.V.Stalin for his 70th birthday from workers of Lodz Aircraft Workshop, Poland, 1949

3. North American Indian chief head garment
A gift presented to J.V.Stalin from the Confederation of 27 Indian tribes of USA, Canada and Central America, on the occasion of his election “the honorary chief”, February 20, 1942

4. Portrait of Stalin made of aluminium rivets and aviation screws
A gift to J.V.Stalin for his 70th birthday from Aviation Factory workers, Gorky, USSR, 1949