Abstract
Leader cults rarely go quietly, fading into obscurity after the demise or removal of their central figure. The comprehensive claims which they make about their object’s authority, coupled with their dominance of the public sphere, characteristically undergo a difficult transition into the new era. Historically, however, societies experiencing the aftermath of such cults have tended to underestimate the difficulties of this transition, and have used inadequate methods to deal with the leader’s legacy. These have included a flat refusal to interrogate the past, de-mythologisation by fiat (N. S. Khrushchev’s ‘Secret Speech’), highly controlled forms of historical reassessment, also ‘from above’ (the moderate new history of Maoism authorised by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1970s), and relatively uncontrolled, often sensationalist, historical revelations released into a freer public sphere (the flood of revelations about Stalin, and then Lenin, in the glasnost’ and early post-Soviet period).1 It is clear that all of these methods, whilst they have their political uses, signposting the transition from one regime to another, signally fail to confront the enduring social and cultural legacies of the cult. A single historical narrative imposed ‘from above’, or even a multitude of stories of the past from above and below, cannot substitute for, or dispense with, the complex of mythologies propagated by leader cults.
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Notes
R. Thompson, ‘Reassessing Personality Cults: The Case of Stalin and Mao’, Studies in Comparative Communism, 21: 1(1988), pp. 99–128. On the revision of Stalinist, and later Leninist, history, see R. W. Davies, Soviet History in the Gorbachev Revolution (London, 1989).
A. Pyzhikov, ‘“XX s”ezd i obshchestvennoe mnenie’, Svobodnaya mysl’;, no. 8 (2000), pp. 76–85. Khrushchev, in his memoirs, emphasised the moral over the political motivations: N. S. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, trans. Strobe Talbott (London, 1971).
Term from S. Cohen, ‘The Stalin Question Since Stalin’ in id., Rethinking the Soviet Experience: Politics and History Since 1917 (New York, 1986), pp. 93–127.
J. Held (ed.) The Cult of Power: Dictators in the Twentieth Century (Boulder, New York, 1983);
G. Gill, ‘The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure of Leadership in the Soviet Union’, British Journal of Political Science, 10:2 (1980), pp. 167–86;
B. Ennker, ‘The Origins and Intentions of the Lenin Cult’ in Ian D. Thatcher (ed.) Regime and Society in Twentieth Century Russia (Basingstoke, London 1999), pp. 118–28;
J. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
Ennker, ‘Origins and Intentions’; also N. Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) and
O. Velikanova, Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin (Göttingen, 1996).
Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!; V. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, Cal., 1997).
Notably Tsarist paternalism — S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times — Soviet Russia in the 1930s (Oxford, 1999), p. 15;
E. Gromov, Stalin. Vlast’ i iskusstvo (Moscow, 1998), p. 172;
S. Davies, ‘The “Cult” of the Vozhd’: Representations in Letters from 1934 to 1941’, Russian History, 24: 1–2 (1997), pp. 131–47.
S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995); Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin; Davies, ‘The “Cult” of the Vozhd’’;
K. Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, Ind., 2000).
J. Hellbeck, ‘Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podlubnyi (1931–1939)’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas (1996), no. 3, pp. 344–73; see also I. Halfin, Language and Revolution: Making Modern Political Identities (London, 2002).
V. Naumov, ‘K istorii sekretnogo doklada N. S. Khrushcheva na XX s’’ezde KPSS’, Novaya i noveishaya istoriya, no. 4 (1996), pp. 147–68. On ‘anti-Soviet’ dissent see R. Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz: istoriya vlasti, 1945–91 (Moscow, 1998);
M. Gorshkov, O. Volobuev and V. Zhuravlev (eds), Vlast’ i oppozitsiya: Rossiiskii politicheskii protsess dvadtsatogo stoletiya (Moscow, 1995).
H. Salisbury, Moscow Journal: The End of Stalin (Chicago, 1961), pp. 335–55; Yu. Polyakov, ‘Pokhorony Stalina. Vzglyad istorika-ochevidtsa’, Novaya i noveishaya istoria, nos 4–5 (1994), pp. 195–207;
L. Alekseyeva and P. Goldberg, The Thaw Generation: Coming of Age in the Post-Stalin Era (Toronto, 1990).
Polly Jones, ‘From Stalinism to Post-Stalinism. De-Mythologising Stalin, 1953–56’ in H. Shukman (ed.) Redefining Stalinism (London, 2003), pp. 127–45.
A. Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton, NJ, 1993).
R. Service, ‘The Road to the Twentieth Congress’, Soviet Studies, no. 2 (1981), pp. 232–45; V. Saechnikov and G. Sagatelian, ‘Sovetskoe obshchestvo: politicheskie kampanii 50-kh godov’ in V. Lelchuk and G. Sagatelian (eds) Sovetskoe obshchestvo: budni kholodnoi voiny. Materialy ‘kruglogo stola’, Institut Rossiiskoi istorii. RAN 29 Marta 2000 g (Moscow-Arzamas, 2000), pp. 305–35.
M. Zezina, ‘Crisis in the Union of Soviet Writers in the Early 1950s’, Europe-Asia Studies, 46: 4 (1994), pp. 649–62.
A. Mikoyan, Tak bylo: Razmyshleniya o minuvshem (Moscow, 1999).
Gorshkov, Volobuev and Zhuravlev (eds) Vlast’ i oppozitsiya; Alekseyeva, and Goldberg, The Thaw Generation; c.f. E. Zubkova, Russia After the War: Hopes, Illusions and Disappointments, 1945–57 (Armonk, NY, 1998).
On intelligentsia dissent, see e.g. M. R. Zezina, Sovetskaya khudozhestvennya intelligentsiya i vlast’ v 1950–60-e gody (Moscow, 1999). On the resumption of repression of political dissent, see e.g. V. Naumov, ‘Diskussii i obsuzhdeniya — N. S. Khrushchev, lichnost’, vremya, reformy’, Svobodnaya mysl’;, no. 10 (1994), pp. 27–32; examples of punishment of anti-Soviet dissent can be found in Pikhoya, Sovetskii Soyuz,
and in P. Jones, ‘Strategies of De-Mythologisation in Post-Stalinism and Post-Leninism: A Comparison of De-Stalinisation and De-Leninisation’, DPhil. diss., University of Oxford, 2002, pp. 116–24.
Iurii Aksiutin in his ‘Popular responses to Khrushchev’ in A. Gleason, S. Khrushchev and W. Taubman, Nikita Khrushchev (New Haven, Conn., 2000), pp. 177–208, concludes that the Secret Speech was not well received or understood by the people, after so many years of exposure to the cult.
Term taken from R. Tucker, The Soviet Political Mind. Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change (London, 1972).
Davies, ‘The Cult of the vozhd’’. Concrete examples of letters to the authorities can be found in A. Livshin and I. Orlov (eds) Pis’ma vo vlast’ 1917–1927: zayavleniya, zhaloby, donosy, pis’ma v gosudarstvennye struktury i sovetskim vozhdyam (Moscow, 1998).
see M. Dobson, ‘Refashioning the Enemy: Popular Beliefs and the Rhetoric of De-Stalinisation, 1953–64’, PhD diss., School of Slavonic and East European Studies, London, 2003. Letters are mostly drawn from the following fondy/opisi: RGASPI, f.82 (Molotov); f. 83 (Malenkov); f.599 (Kommunist); RGANI, 5/30/140 (materials, including newspaper correspondence, dating from discussion of July resolution and other published materials on Stalin cult from 1956).
Materials on Georgia in V. Kozlov, Massovye besporiadki v SSSR pri Khrushcheve i Brezhneve (Novosibirsk, 1999), pp. 155–83 and e.g. RGANI, 5/30/140 52–68.
V. Kozlov and S. Mironenko (eds), 58–10. Nadzornye proizvodstva Prokuratury SSSR po delam ob antisovetskoi agitatsii i propagandy. Mart 1953–1991 (Moscow, 1999).
S. Fitzpatrick and R. Gellately (eds) Accusatory Practices: Denunciation in Modern European History, 1789–1989 (Chicago, 1997).
See, for example, Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous; B. Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship and Beyond (Princeton, NJ, 1992).
L. Kaganovich, Pamiatnye zapiski rabochego, kommunista-Bol’shevika, pro fsoiuznogo, partiinogo i sovetsko-gosudarstvennogo rabotnika (Moscow, 1996), pp. 429–527.
H. Achminow, ‘A Decade of de-Stalinization’, Studies on the Soviet Union, 5: 3 (1965), pp. 11–20.
Cohen, ‘The Stalin Question’; V. Zaslavsky, The Neo-Stalinist State: Class, Ethnicity and Consensus in Soviet Society (Brighton, 1982);
and N. Tumarkin, The Living and the Dead. The Rise and the Fall of the Cult of World War II in Russia (New York, 1994), which indicates the importance of stabilising Stalin’s image in order to stabilise the myth of the Second World War.
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© 2004 Polly Jones
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Jones, P. (2004). ‘I’ve Held, and I Still Hold, Stalin in the Highest Esteem’: Discourses and Strategies of Resistance to De-Stalinisation in the USSR, 1953–62. In: Apor, B., Behrends, J.C., Jones, P., Rees, E.A. (eds) The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230518216_13
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