This book has been in the making for years, and the list of debts to acknowledge has become quite long. It all started at Brandeis, where my undergraduate teacher, Gregory Freeze, assigned Michael Cherniavsky’s Tsar and People. Cherniavsky’s classic opened my eyes to the symbolic dimensions of power, Greg Freeze to the wonders of Russian history. Without Greg’s example and mentorship I would have never become a historian of Russia. In 1992 I read Ian Kershaw’s pioneering The “Hitler Myth” and began asking myself if there was something comparable on the Stalin cult. There wasn’t. A year later, during eighteen months of social work (in lieu of my German military service) for the anti-Stalinist grassroots organization Memorial, St. Petersburg, I began looking for documentation on the Stalin cult and made first forays into the Party archives of St. Petersburg and Moscow, which had just opened. Ever since this first extended stay in Petersburg, the Scientific and Information Center Memorial has been my logistical, intellectual, and emotional base in Russia. I am very grateful to its current director, Irina Flige. The first dedication of this book is to the memory of its founding director, the late Veniamin Iofe, from whom I learned so much hands-on history.
In 1995 I entered graduate school at Berkeley and embarked on a dissertation on the Stalin cult under the guidance of a committee of unique scholars and human beings. Yuri Slezkine, my main adviser, was an astute and erudite reader, who offered excellent suggestions. He saved me from my own megalomania by convincing me early on to focus on selected aspects, saying that a histoire totale of the Stalin cult was about as realistic as a single-volume history of the cult of Jesus Christ. The late Reginald Zelnik was my second reader. Reggie’s all-round qualities as teacher, scholar, mentor, homo politicus, and person were legendary long before I arrived at Berkeley; I feel extremely privileged to have experienced them all first-hand and the book’s second dedication is to his memory. Victoria Bonnell, one of my outside readers, gave crucial support at an early stage, and her book on Soviet political iconography has been an inspiration. A very special thanks must go to Irina Paperno, my other outside reader, who went beyond any call of duty in reading drafts and offering thorough, sharply intelligent criticism. When I got stuck in the process of revising the dissertation for publication, she gently prodded the book to completion. It is hard to put in words how much I value her intellectual and personal support over the years.
Thanks also to my other teachers at Berkeley, especially Carla Hesse, whose way of practicing history has left a deep imprint. And to my cohort of Berkeley graduate students, of whom I would like to single out Peter Blitstein, Chad Bryant, Victoria Frede, Brian Kassof, Ben Lazier, Zhenya Polissky, David Shneer, and Ilya Vinkovetsky. It was only after we all stopped being in one place that I realized how important informal communication with this group of people on a daily basis had been to me.
When I filed the Berkeley Ph.D. thesis in 2001 I was sure I would more likely end up teaching in Kamchatka than where I had gone to Gymnasium, Tübingen. But that was where I ended up. And for the better, it turned out. Dietrich Beyrau, the incomparable director of the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte and Landeskunde at the time, gave me all the freedom I needed. He was also very accommodating to my special challenge of trying to bridge two academic cultures, working on a Habilitation and teaching in Germany while at the same time publishing a first book in America. My wonderful colleagues and friends Klaus Gestwa, Katharina Kucher, and Ingrid Schierle deserve huge thanks. They had to witness at close distance the ups and downs of both the project and of a repatriate struggling to adapt to the German university system. I would further like to thank various Tübingen colleagues, some of them visiting professors or scholars, who helped in numerous ways: Michael Hochgeschwender, Oleg Khlevniuk, Yulia Khmelevskaia, Boris Kolonitskii, Anna Krylova, Alek-sandr Kupriianov, Svetlana Malysheva, Christoph Mick, Oksana Nagornaia, Igor Narsky, Olga Nikonova, Natali Stegmann, Yelena Vishlenkova, and Elena Zubkova. Our Slavic librarian Zuzana Křížovâ was exceptionally forthcoming. What is more, at Tübingen I was blessed with stunningly capable research assistants, several of whom have gone on to careers as professional historians: Marc Elie, Luminiţa Gătejel, Mark Keck-Szajbel, Regine Kramer, Ulrike Lunow, Jens-Peter Müller, and Katharina Uhl. Jannis Panagiotidis and Alexa von Winning deserve to be singled out: they helped in the frantic final stages of manuscript preparation and proofreading.
Several people read portions of the manuscript and made very useful suggestions for improvement: Dmitrij Belkin, Michael David-Fox, Jacqueline Friedlander, Igal Halfin, Oleg Khlevniuk, Katharina Kucher, Sonja Luehrmann, Susan Reid, Ilya Vinkovetsky, and Barbara Walker. Four people took it upon themselves to read an overlong version of the manuscript in its entirety and forced me to make cuts, to revise its structure, and to reframe some of its arguments: Olaf Bernau, Benno Ennker, Jochen Hellbeck, and Yuri Slezkine. I am enormously grateful to them.
A few extra words about Jochen Hellbeck are in order. Jochen took shefstvo over me at an early point and has been an exceptionally warm and good friend ever since. The dialogue with him has been essential to me, and I admire the boldness and sheer beauty of his own scholarship. Thank you, Jochen!
Jörg Baberowski, Oksana Bulgakowa, Laura Engelstein, Manfred Hildermeier, Peter Holquist, Catriona Kelly, Stephen Kotkin, and Karl Schlögel supported my work in various ways at one point or another. I received specific help from Ljudmilla Belkin and Sergiusz Michalski with art history; from Malte Rolf with Soviet holidays; from Julia Safronova with tsarist uniforms and decorations; from Irina Kremenetskaia with the graphs; from Nell Lundy with style editing; and from Irina Lukka of the Slavonic Division at Helsinki University Library with queries at the eleventh hour. I am grateful to them all.
The archivists at Moscow’s Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politicheskoi Istorii (RGASPI), Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury i Iskusstva (RGALI), Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Noveishei Istorii (RGANI), and Otdel Rukopisei Gosudarstvennaia Tret’iakovskaia Gallereia (OR GTG) as well as at St. Petersburg’s Muzei-kvartira I. I. Brodskogo (MBr) have been of considerable assistance. Galina Gorskaia and Larissa Rogovaia of RGASPI as well as the Tretyakov’s Lidia Iovleva, Tamara Kaftanova, and Irina Pronina must to be singled out for personal thanks.
I also wish to gratefully acknowledge the funding of research and writing by Berkeley’s History Department, Institute for International Studies (through Bendix, Sharlin, and Simpson grants), and Center for German and European Studies; by the Mellon Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the Center for Comparative History of Europe at the Free University, Berlin.
My art historian friends kept telling me that obtaining illustrations and the attendant copyrights was tantamount to writing another book. I didn’t believe them. They were right. Thanks to the Fritz Thyssen Foundation and the Universitätsbund Tübingen e.V. for offsetting the cost of reproductions. Thyssen also generously funded a two-month stay at Clare College, University of Cambridge, in 2004, where my friends Hubertus Jahn and Susan Morrissey took marvelous care of me.
I am very happy the book has found its home in the Yale-Hoover Series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War. Amir Weiner was pivotal in making this happen, and his sponsorship of my work first across San Francisco Bay, and later across the Atlantic, has been heartwarming. Thanks to series co-editor Paul Gregory for his support and comments, to co-editor Jonathan Brent, and to Vadim Staklo, to Margaret Otzel for expertly shepherding the book through the acquisition and production process, and to Gavin Lewis for superb copy-editing. The final revisions were done at Ute Frevert’s Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, where I received first-class help from my research assistants Stefanie Gert and Eva Sperschneider. Karola Rockmann did a heroic job in preparing the index.
A few sentences of Chapters 2 and Chapter 4 appeared in “Georgian Koba or Soviet ‘Father of Peoples’? The Stalin Cult and Ethnicity,” in The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, ed. Balázs Apor et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 123–140. Parts of Chapter 3 appeared in “The Spatial Poetics of the Personality Cult: Circles Around Stalin,” in The Landscape of Stalinism: The Art and Ideology of Soviet Space, ed. Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003), 19–50. I thank the publishers for permission to use this material here.
My mother Gudrun, my father Harald and his wife Evelyn, my brother Paul, my in-laws Victor and Yelena Mushkatin, and especially my mother-in-law Oxana Strizhevskaya jumped in at critical moments with childcare, money, and much more, for which I am very grateful. Finally, I should note that the writing of this book involved precious hours of pleasure, but also occasional suffering. The former I enjoyed in solitude, the latter I shared generously with my own family: Irina Kremenetskaia and our daughters Olga and Lisa. They deserve a public apology and my most heartfelt thanks.