"One thinking fool is worse then 10 enemies" *
Trebuchet
from: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/8423412.stm
An unprecedented exhibition opened in Moscow Friday of nude prints
with scrawled comments apparently written by former Soviet leader
Joseph Stalin that make ribald references to his party comrades.
Titled "Messages from the Great Leader: Stalin's Autographs," the week-
long exhibition shows prints of 19th- and 20th-century art works that
Stalin is said to have defaced with messages in colored pencil.
Some examples:
"Ginger bastard Radek, if he hadn't pissed against the wind, if he
hadn't been angry, he would be alive," he wrote across the leg of a
weighty male nude.
The macabre comment was an apparent reference to Karl Radek, the
former head of the international communist organisation, the
Comintern, believed to have been shot dead by Stalin's secret police
in 1939.
from: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iP77Tu3W9UHACDODDDkHFy1tNdew
Another comment refers to Marxist theorist Georgy Plekhanov, who
opposed the October Revolution. The writer scribbles on a drawing of a
nude man, "Plekhanov, why are you pointing backwards? Coward and enemy
of the people."
Other comments are simply coarse jokes about nudity. "Don't sit with a
bare arse on stones," Stalin writes on a drawing of a man sitting on a
pedestal. "Give the boy some pants."
The collection was preserved by people who worked in Stalin's security
service, said the organisers who include the popular online newspaper
gazeta.ru. But the owner of the collection wants to remain anonymous.
"We found them more than a year ago, and we decided first of all to
show them and then publish something (on Gazeta.ru)," said organizer
Yury Pankov, who heads a publishing house called Avtograf Veka.
The show is taking place at the Marat Guelman gallery in central
Moscow, one of post-Soviet Russia's first and best-known private art
galleries.
It opens ahead of the 130th anniversary of Stalin's official birthday
amid controversy about the popularity in Russia of the leader who led
Russia to victory in World War II but is also blamed for the deaths of
millions.
Rebutting any notion the jottings could be fake, the organisers
display a certificate signed by a expert from the interior ministry
who examined the handwriting and said it was genuine.
Most of the drawings are signed with a flamboyant "J Stalin".
The collection "was stored by family members, people who once worked
with Stalin, they were guards. It's the personal archives of workers
of KGB," said one of the exhibition's organisers, Viktor Turshatov.
The prints were issued in the late 1940s, meaning that Stalin wrote
the comments at around the age of 70, Turshatov said.
"Here there are just some flashes of his subconscious. Stalin is
talking with his former acquaintances, friends, partners, comrades in
the party, like a lot of old people talk to photographs, but here he
even corresponds with them."
At a Sotheby's auction in New York last week, a letter signed by
Stalin was sold for 12,500 dollars. But the exhibition organisers said
they had no idea how much the drawings could be worth.
"You can only find out the value at open auctions, and so far no one
knows, because it's a unique collection," Turshatov said. "There
hasn't been such a precedent with the name of Stalin.
Some reports on the exhibition have suggested that Stalin had
homosexual leanings, as most of the drawings are of nude men, and the
commentator twice makes jokes about masturbation.
"Stalin and naked guys: what was between them?" a story was headlined
in daily Komsomolskaya Pravda.
"We specially showed these works to psychologists. They didn't find
any expressions of homosexuality, although this material of course
does prompt you to have this thought," Turshatov said.