In Soviet iconography, capitalists are not sympathetic folk. They skulk among skyscrapers, loom ominously on the horizon, and sneer at honest working mothers. They’re depicted with cigars, big bellies, and fancy clothes: top hats, ties and bowties, pocket watches. Good proletarians, in contrast, are too busy tempering steel and raising children to skulk and loom. Scorning flashy tuxedos, they are generally depicted in sober, modest clothing.
The presentation may be primitive, but it’s hard to deny that sartorial choices have political significance. Iranian officials make a point of not wearing ties, symbols of the secular West. Depending on the occasion, Saudia Arabia’s Mohammad bin Salman might wear a traditional bisht (when meeting with, say, a head of state) or go Western (when charming Jeff Bezos).
Communist leaders, too, dressed deliberately, and a certain look came to be associated with the ideology: an untucked shirt with four pockets and a row of buttons down the center. Leaders going back to Lenin have worn garments of this sort. Today, the legacy is continued by North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and, on special occasions, China’s Xi Jinping. But what seems to be a single tradition is actually more complex, and if it’s supposed to underscore the distance between communism and capitalism, it’s not quite successful. Let’s take a closer look.
Protect your health, dear father!
The weather gets harsh here,
But you spend all fall and winter
In the same grey coat.
It was for stirring lines such as these that Alexander Yashin won the Stalin Prize (Second Degree) in 1950. The father is, of course, Uncle Joe, and the point is hard to miss: he’s too busy working for the common weal to worry about what he wears. The coat in question was his famous shinel’, a simple greatcoat with off-center buttons, perfect for Napoleonic posing. Modest but calculatedly so, it fit Stalin to a T, and it was an essential part of his image. (In Poems About the Chief, a collection of thirty pieces published by the magazine Ogonyok in 1949, the coat got four mentions; not an avalanche, to be sure, but his legendary moustache only merited two.)
Under this coat, you would invariably find the quadruple-breasted garment, usually but not always grey, that has come to be called the stalinka. If Yashin objected to Stalin’s using his shinel’ all fall and winter, we can only imagine how he felt about this tunic, which the Chief wore practically every day for decades. It was only when he had conquered Hitler that he agreed to switch to something more befitting a generalissimo, and his shirt, like Gandalf, turned from grey to white. (In The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore describes Stalin’s initial reaction when three possible versions of his new garment were brought to him: “‘I need something more modest…Do you want me to look like a doorman?’ Stalin finally accepted a white gilded high-collared tunic with black and red-striped trousers which made him look like a bandmaster, if not a Park Avenue doorman.”)
The stalinka, like the shinel’, symbolized many things: Stalin’s lack of pretension, his closeness to the people, his self-denial on their behalf, his distance from the foppish capitalists encircling the Soviet Union. The look probably also appealed to Stalin’s conception of himself as a military genius.
For the stalinka’s origins were, indeed, military. It evolved from the Imperial Russian garment known as the french, after a field marshal from England — who considered himself an Irishman. (Fear not, not all is confusion: he did fight in France.) The cut that French sported, open at the throat, was meant for officers, who would wear shirts and ties underneath. It was the closed-at-the-throat version worn by common soldiers that made its way into Russian officers’ wardrobes during the First World War.
Alexander Kerensky, the leader of the Provisional Government in 1917, and Lenin himself had frenches in their wardrobes, but both seemed to prefer Western suits. It was Stalin who truly made the look his own.
Among his underlings, there was not a strictly enforced dress code: they wore Western suits, peasant blouses, and various forms of military attire. Georgy Malenkov, who for a time seemed set to become the next leader of the Soviet Union, was the most eager to emulate the Chief. While Stalin was alive, Malenkov wore a tunic with a similar cut, but usually eschewed breast pockets. (In a photo taken of him as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, after Stalin’s death, we see them on full display; Georgy had finally grown a pair.) Soon, however, Malenkov was outmaneuvered by Khrushchev, who launched destalinization, burying the stalinka in the process. From then on, Soviet and European Communist leaders dressed like their capitalist rivals.
The story is a little different in Asia. When Xi Jinping dons a four-pocket shirt, he is declaring himself the heir of a separate tradition. The immediate allusion is to Mao, whom Xi in some respects takes for a model. (Last September, Xi presided over an immaculately executed parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of Mao’s founding of the modern Chinese state, and took care to dress like him. For me, the most impressive aspect isn’t Xi’s clothing, but his hair, which remains miraculously still as his car rolls down the road.) The trend seems to be trickling down: Chinese ambassadors who presented their credentials in recent months have been sporting black shirts like Xi’s.
In 1949, when Mao came to power, Stalin’s authority as the demigod of world Communism was still beyond dispute, and it would have been logical for Mao to follow Stalin’s lead in matters of dress. However, the similarity in their wardrobes was actually a case of convergent evolution, or convergent revolutions, with two dictators independently developing the same thorax covering.
Now, Soviet fashion did make its mark in China — sort of. The so-called “Lenin coat” with its two rows of buttons was a great hit, especially among women, until relations with the USSR went sour in 1956. (Despite the name, Lenin never seems to have championed this look, especially not with a belt pulled tight around his waist to accentuate his bosom.) According to one researcher, “typical wedding wear, especially in the cities, included a double-breasted Lenin jacket for the bride and a single-breasted Zhongshan suit for the groom, both in gray, blue, or other dark colors.”
But Mao’s inspiration came from closer to home: Sun Yat-sen, the first president of post-Imperial China. Sun designed the “Zhongshan suit” (the name was derived from his Japanese moniker) as a practical form of dress for his newly reborn nation. After Sun’s death in 1925, symbolic significance was ascribed to the shirt’s various elements: one of the four pockets, for instance, was said to represent a sense of shame. No wonder everyone wanted one.
So what came to be called the Mao suit wasn’t just a Soviet import with Chinese characteristics. It was popular in China in the 1920s and ‘30s, and Mao wasn’t the only member of the elite who wore it. When proclaiming the founding of People’s Republic in 1949, he was surrounded by comrades in similar dress.
Nor was it explicitly associated with Communism, as this picture of Mao and his Nationalist nemesis Chiang Kai-Shek makes clear.
Still, it’s difficult to imagine that the resemblance to Stalin escaped Mao’s attention entirely. As a cunning propagandist, he must have realized the benefits of simultaneously associating himself with Stalin and rooting himself in Chinese tradition. As a poet, he may have found some pleasure in exploiting this happy coincidence.
But perhaps to call it a coincidence is imprecise. The Zhongshan suit is said to have been inspired by the Norfolk jacket (perhaps via Japanese cadet uniforms), just as the Russian french was inspired by English military attire.
If this is the case, then the similarity between Stalin’s and Mao’s outfits could be due to the fact that they both had their roots in Britain, the capital of world capitalism. Ironic, but not surprising: Communism was, after all, a “Western” ideology that came to embody opposition to the West. That’s what Marx might call an internal contradiction.
