Stalin Prize

Creation and early rules

The Stalin Prize was created by the second of two Council of People's Commissars (SNK) decrees adopted on 20 December 1939, in commemoration of Stalin's sixtieth birthday. The decree established sixteen prizes (100,000 rubles each) awarded annually across sixteen fields of science and art, with separate prizes for the best invention (ten first, twenty second and thirty third prizes) and for military knowledge (three, five and ten). Four literature prizes were added by a decree of 1 February 1940, one each for poetry, prose, drama and literary criticism. A decree of 20 December 1940 revised the order of award and raised the number of prizes in science and art to three first prizes, of 100,000 rubles, and five second prizes, of 50,000 rubles.

Award procedure

The procedure was fixed by a decision approved at a meeting of the Politburo of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) on 20 March 1940. Prizes were conferred directly by the SNK, on candidates presented by two purpose-built committees: one for science, military knowledge and invention, and one for literature and art. The committees closed nominations by 15 October and submitted proposals by 1 December, and in principle only new work completed in the award year could compete. Awards were decided on the basis of submitted materials alone for science and military knowledge, but staged performances and screenings were used for theatre and cinema. The first laureates were announced in March 1941.

Character of the prize and wartime use

The prize was given for specific works and achievements rather than for a career, and laureates received privileges such as free travel and free higher education for their children. In 1942 and 1943 nearly all laureates, or all of them, donated their prize money to the Defence Fund; later donations continued, and in 1946 the surgeon and Orthodox bishop Luka (Voyno-Yasenetsky) gave his prize to help war orphans.

Some Russian literature holds that the prize fund came from Stalin's own royalties and salary. That account is contradicted by another version, according to which it is undocumented and Stalin never received publisher royalties.

Postwar scope and abolition

In 1949 the International Stalin Prize for the strengthening of peace among peoples was established as a separate award, alongside the existing prizes. The award decrees of 1953 to 1955 were not published, and some laureates are absent from the published lists. No prizes were awarded after 1955. The last known award decree is dated 24 February 1955, declassified in 2009, and covered engineers and designers involved in building the first Soviet hydrogen bomb.

Amid the campaign against Stalin's personality cult that followed the 20th Party Congress of 1956, the Lenin Prize was established and effectively replaced the Stalin Prize. Russian Wikipedia states that the prize was abolished in the campaign, while English reference material gives its award period as 1941 to 1956, which differs from the 1941-1954 span shown on this dictionary's card.

In scholarly, reference and educational literature the name was replaced by State Prize and information about the award and its laureates was limited. Under the lineage that runs from the USSR State Prize established in 1966, laureates could exchange their Stalin Prize diplomas and badges for those of the State Prize.

Laureates and repression

Several laureates were themselves repressed: Nikolai Voznesensky, Pyotr Meshik, Veniamin Zuskin and Lidiya Shtern were awarded the prize and repressed later, while the writers Anatoly Rybakov and Vasily Azhayev, the actors Mikhail Nazvanov and Aleksei Diky and the scholar Dmitry Likhachev had been repressed and had served their sentences before receiving it.

Scale of the award

The prize produced multiple winners. The aircraft designer Sergei Ilyushin holds the record with seven awards, while the film directors Ivan Pyryev and Yuli Raizman, the poet Konstantin Simonov and the composer Sergei Prokofiev are among those awarded six times.