Abstract
While the cult of the leader has been a distinctive feature of communist regimes since the time of Lenin, Stalin’s cult was a particularly striking example of the phenomenon.1 A recent study regards it as the defining theme of public culture in the Stalin era, symbolising the ‘moral economy’ of the USSR.2 Not surprisingly it has attracted considerable attention from scholars who have analysed its political, cultural and social dimensions.3 This chapter uses recently accessible sources to shed light on Stalin’s own analysis of the phenomenon and to consider how he shaped the making of the cult.4
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Notes
J. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ, 2000).
These include G. Gill, ‘Political Myth and Stalin’s Quest for Authority in the Party’ in T. Rigby, A. Brown and P. Reddaway (eds) Authority, Power and Policy in the USSR (London, 1980), pp. 98–117;
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;
Kh. Kobo (ed.) Osmyslit’ kul’t Stalina (Moscow, 1989);
J. Heizer, ‘The Cult of Stalin, 1929–1939’, University of Kentucky PhD diss., 1977;
B. Kiteme, ‘The Cult of Stalin: National Power and the Soviet Party State’, Columbia University PhD diss., 1989;
J. Plamper, ‘The Stalin Cult in the Visual Arts, 1929–1953’, University of California, Berkeley, PhD diss., 2001.
See Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin (London, 2002) and
L. Maksimenkov in ‘Kul’t. Zametki o slovakh-simvolakh v sovetskom politicheskom kul’ture’, Svobodnaya Mysl’, 11 (1993), pp. 26–43.
R. Medvedev, Let History Judge (Oxford, 1989), pp. 313–19. N. Tumarkin suggests that Lenin’s attitude to the cult may have been more ambivalent: in her Lenin Lives: The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), pp. 103–7. A problem with the conventional view of Lenin’s attitude is that it is based on far from impartial memoir sources.
R. Tucker Stalin in Power (New York, 1990), p. 3; ‘The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult’, American Historical Review, 1979, 84/2.
F. Chuev, Sto sorok besed s Molotovym (Moscow, 1991), p. 261.
S. Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (London, 2003), p. 4.
Many of the sources discussed are from RGASPI’s fond 558, the Stalin fond. This contains only a selective group of documents pertaining to Stalin’s life and activity. For one, perhaps overly sceptical, discussion of the possible limitations of the fond, see Z. and R. Medvedev The Unknown Stalin (London, 2003), pp. 57–94.
I. V. Stalin, Sochinenyia (Moscow, 1952–55, and Stanford, 1967), vol. 13, p. 255.
Stalin, Sochinenyia, vol. 3/14 (edited by R. H. McNeil) (Stanford, 1967), p. 56.
Robert Tucker paraphrases the speech quite faithfully in his Stalin in Power, pp. 482–6 and asserts (not entirely plausibly) that the speech reveals Stalin modelling himself on ivan Groznyi. Dimitrov’s record of the speech is reproduced in I. Banac (ed.) The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov, 1933–1949 (New Haven, 2003), pp. 65–7.
S. Davies, Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 169–70;
S. Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism (New York, 1999), pp. 30–1.
N. N. Maslov, ‘“Kratkii kurs istorii VKP(b)” — entsiklopediya kul’ta lichnosti Stalina’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 11 (1990), p. 57; M. V. Zelenov, ‘I. V. Stalin v rabote nad “Kratkim kursom istorii VKP(b)”’, Voprosy istorii, 11–12 (2002).
F. Miller, Folklore for Stalin: Russian Folklore and Pseudofolklore of the Stalin Era (Armonk, NY, 1990).
Diary of Maria Anisimovna Svanidze, Istochnik, 1 (1993), 18–20.
L. Feuchtwanger, Moscow 1937 (London, 1937).
S. V. Sukharev, ‘Litsedeistvo na poprishche istorii’, Voprosy istorii KPSS, 3 (1990), pp. 102–18. Recently, Arch Getty has rejected the idea of a struggle between two courses in this period, attributing the simultaneous pursuit of hard- and soft-line policies to leadership indecision and ad hoc responses.
J. Arch Getty and O. Naumov, The Road to Terror (New Haven, 1999), p. 102.
See also his toast at the reception of railway workers when he described Stalin as the ‘first engine-driver of the Soviet Union’, Pravda, 2 August 1935. For more evidence of Kaganovich as a major contributor to the Stalin cult, see R. W. Davies et al. (eds) The Stalin—Kaganovich Correspondence 1931–1936 (New Haven, Conn., 2003).
This was in line with Bolshevik tradition. See J. Brooks, ‘Revolutionary Lives: Public Identities in Pravda during the 1920s’ in S. White (ed.) New Directions in Soviet History (Cambridge, 1991), pp. 27–40.
On N. Lakoba’s role in promoting the cult in Georgia, see M. Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait (Budapest, 2003), pp. 47–51.
Both Miklós Kun and Evgenii Gromov refer to a similar example from 1950, when Stalin refused to allow the publication in Russian of P. Kapanadze’s Recollections of the Childhood and Youth of the Leader, on the basis that they contained fabricated and inaccurate information. The memoirs had previously been published in Georgian. See Kun, Stalin: An Unknown Portrait, p. 7 and E. Gromov, Stalin. Vlast’ i iskusstvo (Moscow, 1998), p. 23.
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Davies, S. (2004). Stalin and the Making of the Leader Cult in the 1930s. 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_2
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