CRITICISM OF STALIN’S rule has centered on the Stalin cult since the cult’s inception. The disjuncture between the Stalin cult and an ideology that propagated collectivism and professed to have radically broken with the past, including the cult of the tsar, appeared so outrageous that simply describing the lionization of Stalin in some detail seemed entirely sufficient. As Stalin’s archrival Leon Trotsky complained in January 1935, “The Stalinist bureaucracy has created a revolting cult of leaders (kul’t vozbdei), endowing them with divine attributes.”1 The habit of describing, not analyzing, the cult as sufficient evidence for the depravity of Stalinism continued in the West after the onset of the Cold War, even if the Stalin cult now symbolized Soviet-style communism and Marxism as a whole. As a result, in writings about the Stalin cult there is an imbalance between description and analysis, with the scales tilted in favor of the former.
Where scholarship has moved beyond description and analyzed the Stalin cult, this analysis has focused on the cult’s genesis, functions, and products. Its production or making have barely been discussed, and the second part of this book seeks to remedy this, while the first part adds to the analysis of the visual cult products.2 As for the genesis of the Stalin cult and the closely related question of its functions, some scholars have interpreted the cult as a peculiarly Russian phenomenon, viewing it as a relapse into eternal Russian mysticism-cum-authoritarianism, embodied in the twin institutions of the monarchy and the Russian Orthodox Church.3 Quite a few have located the origins of the cult in the dictator himself, seeing the cult as the outgrowth of Stalin’s (psychopatho-logical) personality.4 Other scholars find the question of Stalin’s personality irrelevant since a private cult of self-aggrandizement that is not disseminated to the populace would be futile. Instead they have pointed to the power dynamics of Stalin’s entourage, his closest comrades-in-arms, as the locus from which the cult sprang forth.5 In a similar vein, some have traced the origins of the cult to intra-Party “political culture.”6 Several authors see a wider society responsible for the beginning of the cult, viewing it as a concession to the peasant mentality of the social upstarts (vydvizhentsy) brought to power by Stalin. The cult was the price the Bolsheviks paid for social integration.7 Some believe the cult to be a constitutive and inescapable feature of all totalitarian movements, including Italian Fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism.8 Others view the cult as the product of cultural and ideational trends: the result of Nietzsche’s influence and his philosophy of voluntarism embodied in the superman, or as a specifically Stalinist aesthetic structure or ideal type called “culture number two” (kul’tura dva).9 And yet others think that Bolshevism was a kind of political religion and the Stalin cult just one aspect of this religion.10
This book seeks to add to these explanations of the cult’s roots above all by situating the cult in history, more precisely, in the context of modern personality cults.11 The historical paths that led to the Stalin cult were tangled and many. The sacralization of the human person in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, the concept of popular sovereignty first put into practice in the French Revolution, modern personality cults outside Russia, and the tradition of the cult of the tsar were all important signposts. The leader-centered circles (kruzhki) where so many young Bolsheviks were schooled constituted another crucial way station. Taken together, these paths offer a compelling answer to the question how Stalin’s alchemy of power could have started in the first place.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the acceleration of the desacralizing dynamic of monarchs ushered in an age from which on we can speak of personality cults as modern. During the rule of Tsar Alexander II the case of France’s Emperor Napoleon III introduced a new form of leader representation that not only became a model for his Russian counterpart but also—surprisingly— became the first modern personality cult (Fig. 1.1).12 Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte came to power as president of the Second Republic through an election after the introduction of universal adult male suffrage in the revolution of 1848. After a coup d’état in 1851 he was proclaimed emperor in 1852 and ruled until 1870. Thanks largely to the fête impériale, i.e. the ensemble of spectacles, parades, myths, and symbols, he “dazzled and seduced the French populace.”13 What allows us to speak of him as the world’s first “democratic despot” with a modern personality cult?
Figure 1.1. Napoleon III, object of the first modern personality cult. This etching shows him uniformed and with his insignia of power (the medals); no special skills are needed to decipher these—the image is addressed at the entire population. Source: Israel Smith Clare, Illustrated Universal History (Philadelphia: J. C. McCurdy and Co., 1878). Retrieved with permission 1 June 2007, from http://etc.usf.edu/clipart/200/278/napoleon3_1.tif
The source for Louis-Napoleon’s legitimacy was the people and the plebiscites through which they had expressed the general will. It was not a “cosmology of divine right and a rule that transcended his physical body.”14 When Napoleon III, like his uncle Napoleon I, went on a royal tour throughout the Empire, he gave different meaning to a form pioneered by the old divine right monarchs, as “the chief signs of Napoleon Ill’s dominance were the massive crowds that turned out to welcome him in every corner of the Empire.”15 He presented himself as being close to the people by using, for instance, a populist, pro-worker tone in his speeches, whenever and wherever politically expedient. He used charity in what Matthew Truesdell has felicitously called a “politics of sincerity.” In propaganda, he exploited his marriage to a minor noblewoman— not a royal personage—as an emblem for his down-to-earth nature.16 Unlike a medieval king, Napoleon III was not represented as a magic healer in possession of mystical healing powers, and unlike Napoleon I, his nephew never made use of the coronation’s sacre (the mystico-monarchical ceremony going back to prerevolutionary France) and emphasized economic development rather than foreign wars.17 Napoleon III claimed to represent the nation and its history, i.e. its—invented, to be sure—continuity with the past.18 Like Mussolini and Hitler after him, he was a “modern democratic dictator”—he presented himself as being of the people yet towering “above politics and petty party squabbles.”19
Moreover, Napoleon III made use of the modern mass media more fully and persistently than anyone before him. Spectacles were produced in proto-capitalist fashion with open bidding, in which different decoration companies vied for contracts to stage, for example, the fête nationale (as the celebration of Napoleon I’s birthday had come to be called).20 In these royal spectacles, the staging of mass participation and approval was crucial; there were even “paid cheerers” and “official shouters.”21 In a fascinating adumbration of twentieth-century personality cults, the “government paid very close attention to the popular response to the August 15 celebrations. Officials sometimes systematically went through the newspaper reports, and prosecutors and prefects both reported on how the celebrations had been received in their districts, after getting reports from their subordinates.”22 The signs that represented the emperor were a hybrid drawn from ancient and modern sources. Thus the overwhelming success of Louis-Napoleon in the 1851 plebiscite was celebrated in the following way: “At ten o’clock, the Invalides cannon marked the beginning of the celebration by slowly booming out seventy-five times—ten times for each million ‘yes’ votes in the plebiscite.”23 The press was the leading medium used to represent the live spectacles to members of the nation beyond the participating masses. In the early years of Louis-Napoleon’s rule, opposing accounts of the popular response to the spectacles still appeared, but later the “regime maintained a virtual monopoly on public discourse” through censorship and other measures.24
The features that allow us to qualify Napoleon III’s personality cult as modern did not arise from a vacuum. The ingredients of his cult predated his reign, but Louis-Napoleon was the first to combine them to create Bonapartism, a monarchy supported by mass elections. The most momentous shift had occurred with the French Revolution, which marked an enormous acceleration of the desacralizing dynamic that began in the early eighteenth century. It affected all European monarchs and their cults (Russia was no exception). The revolution injected into the political sphere the new terms of “nation” and “popular sovereignty,” thus supplying nonmonarchic sources of political legitimacy. Modern personality cults like that of Napoleon III reflect the instability of popular sovereignty: the modern leader’s body now absorbed all sacral aura and served as metaphor for everything, all of (homogenized) society. Premodern personality cults differed in that the reference to God was always inscribed on the king’s body; the king’s body was never a signifier for everything, but only for a part, while the postrevolutionary monarch’s or leader’s body came to represent the totality of society. From the concept of popular sovereignty something else followed: the cult object had to be male, because the new kind of sovereignty reflected social inequalities, including the rule of men. Clearly, also, the cult of Napoleon III was directed at the entire French population, not, for instance, just the nobility. And because it was directed at the entire population, it used the newly available mass media for its dissemination. The cult products spread via these mass media were no longer, say, unique single copies of a painting, but mass-produced uniform products like posters aimed at the entire population. This population had increasingly been subject to modern schooling and the modern army and had thus been inculcated with the cultural techniques necessary for a potentially uniform reception of the cult products—unlike a premodern population that might assign highly group-specific meanings to a cult product.25 Thus Hyacinthe Rigaud’s portrait of Louis XIV was interpreted in one way by those equipped with the cultural techniques necessary to decipher its classical allegory and in another way by those who lacked these techniques (Fig. 1.2).26 Finally, the public arena under Napoleon III was sufficiently closed to prohibit, for example, the introduction of a competing political figure with a cult. The cult of Napoleon III for the first time encapsulated all these five characteristics that typify a modern personality cult: the secularism and the new basis on popular sovereignty; the patricentrism; the targeting at the masses; the use of mass media and uniform, mass-produced cult products; and the limitation to closed societies.27
Figure 1.2. Hyacinthe Rigaud, Portrait of Louis XIV (1701). Only a small part of the population would have been able to understand that the bottom of the column shows the allegorical figure of justice. This is a painting of a premodern personality cult. Oil on canvas, 2.79 × 190 cm. Original at Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The changes in Western European monarchic representations affected the Russian tsars as well. Alexander III, who ruled from 1881 to 1894, felt that educated society had thoroughly discredited itself during the reform era of his predecessor Alexander II (ruled 1855–1881). Increasingly, Alexander III became both a Slavophile and a Germanophobe. The emperor’s representations came to be directed at a mysticized, Russian—not multinational—”people.” The concept of the “people” (narod) now included the peasants, with whom Alexander III was connected through bonds of nationality (Russianness) and religion (Orthodoxy). For the first time, a tsar made use of the mass-circulation press to project his image. Published by the Ministry of the Interior, the newspaper Village Messenger (Sel’skii Vestnik) was targeted at the peasants, and “by 1905 its circulation reached 150,000.”28 The monarch’s image always included the empress and the imperial family.29 It stressed their piety and portrayed them as “sympathetic human beings, recognizable to the common people.”30 At the coronation and under conditions of tightened censorship, both domestic and foreign news reports were skillfully manipulated to demonstrate the popular support for Alexander III. Overall, the court was viewed as discredited, and the rituals of the emperor’s cult were played out on different stages. Apart from the print media, the cult disseminated its message through several channels: ceremonies that took place outside the court, and realist portraiture, including works by Ilya Repin, a member of the “Wanderers” movement in painting.31 Given such successful “propaganda,” the government and the tsar himself imagined that he had bonded with the people, particularly with the peasants. The rulers believed the myth they themselves had created.
After Alexander III’s early death in 1894, Nicholas II continued the national scenario, further devaluing the court as an arena for monarchic symbolism. If Alexander III had looked upon parts of the court with suspicion, Nicholas II distrusted all officials and regular administration. He sought direct spiritual bonds with the people and greatly expanded the pious, religious component introduced by Alexander III. This was most dramatically and famously symbolized by Rasputin, and was manifested in general by the “charismatic holy men from the people” via whom the tsar and his wife sought a connection to their God, bypassing priests, rites, and institutions.32 It was also manifested in the coronation ceremonies, as Richard Wortman has explicated: “In 1881 the national myth shifted focus from the consecration of the monarchy to a consecration of autocratic power as a sacrosanct as well as historical Russian tradition. Nicholas II’s reign took this a step further: the coronation bestowed consecration not on the monarchy but on the monarch himself as the chosen of the Lord.”33
As the old regime drifted towards revolution, Russia was characterized by two increasingly diverging developments: while ever more segments of society sought enlarged political participation, Nicholas II reverted to an ideal of “a pure autocracy where a tsar drew personal authority from God and the people, unencumbered by institutions of state.”34 Even the revolution of 1905 and the introduction of a parliament (the Duma) were perceived by Nicholas II not as a crack in his bond with the people, but rather as the work of “enemies”— allegedly Jews and revolutionaries—who had directed his “good” people away from the right path.
The tsar cult’s means of communication changed dramatically under Nicholas II. To begin with, three historical celebrations—the bicentenary of the Battle of Poltava in 1909, the centenary of the Battle of Borodino in 1912, and the tercentenary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913—were modeled on festivities of Victorian England, shifting the site of ceremony outside the palace, making monarchs “objects of mass popular love and acclaim, attracting attention to their persons rather than the office of the sovereign, and connecting the monarchy with a national, popular past.”35 Still more important, after 1905 Nicholas began to compete with the Duma in the same sphere, trying to win mass support. This was the most dramatic development of the Russian monarchy at the century’s beginning. Ultimately, it proved self-destructive, for playing the game of mass politics stripped monarchy of its elevated qualities. For instance, in order to reach the masses, the government introduced (for the first time) postage stamps bearing the emperor’s portrait. Many postal officials, however, refused to cancel these stamps, because they were afraid to defile the image of the tsar (Fig. 1.3). Nicholas’s likeness had been turned into a mass, everyday image and had lost its magic in the eyes of ordinary people who were steeped in a premodern representational culture. Among the other new modes of representation were the theater (following the lifting of an 1837 ban against the representation of tsars on stage), documentary cinema, the first-ever biography of a living tsar (by Elchaninov, 1913 ), kitschy mass-produced tercentenary souvenirs, and other print media.36 The qualities of the different media had a strong impact on ruler representations. Photography of the tsar, for example, was perceived as a more mimetic medium, showing the tsar with greater verisimilitude than any other. Photographs of the tsar were, however, perceived as lacking in luster, compared to the painted images with which the public was familiar. Thus Nicholas attempted to become the first modern tsar, addressing his myth to the masses and employing the latest technical means to do so. Nicholas II “vied with the Duma and in so doing relinquished the Olympian superiority to politics fundamental to the imperial myth.”37 This was but one of the many symbolic dilemmas that beset Russian monarchic ceremony, but one that contributed significantly to bringing the Russian monarchy to its fall in 1917.38
Figure 1.3. On 1 January 1913 for the first time in Russian history the government issued postage stamps depicting the tsar. This is the seven-kopek stamp that officials were loath to cancel, fearing desacralization of their emperor, Nicholas II. Retrieved with permission 1 June 2007 from Evert Klaseboer’s online classical stamp catalogue.
As much as the Bolsheviks tried to distance themselves, the tradition of the cult of the tsar, itself a part of the wider European context of monarchical cults, weighed upon them. The sum of the specific ways in which the Bolsheviks took this tradition into account is something one might call a “tsarist carryover.”39 Occasionally this perception entered the self-reflections of the Bolsheviks, as in Stalin’s statements: “the people need a tsar” and “don’t forget that we are living in Russia, the land of the tsars . . . the Russian people like it when one person stands at the head of the state.”40 Yet the Stalin cult was not a simple relapse into the cult of the tsar. The “revenge of Muscovy” thesis cannot capture the multiple and different ingredients that combined to produce the Stalin cult.41 The tsarist ingredients were but part of this hybrid phenomenon.
Given the existence of a tsarist carryover, it is important to examine the specificity of the tsar cult. Russian monarchy had always borrowed from either the Western or the Byzantine traditions. Byzantium had been the main source of inspiration until Peter I. From Peter I until Alexander II, Russian imperial symbolism relied on Western models, mostly classical, but beginning with the nineteenth century, also on recent Western models such as that of King Frederick the Great of Prussia. In 1881, Alexander III reversed this appropriation of the Western tradition and returned to an invented Russian, Muscovite tradition. The systems of representation used by Alexander III and Nicholas II were “national” in their use of signs. The “nation” likewise came to play a huge role for the intended audiences of the tsar cult. The cults of eighteenth-century tsars were still directed exclusively at the noble elite of Russian society. This changed as the ripple effects of the French Revolution introduced Russia to the concept of “nation.” Alexander I became the first emperor to include parts of the narod in his ceremonies, if only at the coronation, and if only from estates other than the peasantry. In the wake of the Decembrist rebellion, Nicholas I had for the first time consciously excluded a part of the elite (parts of educated society, of whom he had become suspicious) from his cult, and instead emphasized more emphatically his connection to the people. Nicholas I’s son, Alexander II, had reversed his father’s course and appealed to all parts of society, including educated society, in his symbolic program in order to garner support for his reforms, such as the emancipation of the peasants in 1861. Alexander III, in turn, embarked upon a radicalized Nicholaevan symbolic itinerary and tried to exclude all of educated society and most of the nobility, especially its non-Russian parts, from his cult. Nicholas II took this course even further, bypassing not just the elites, but regular administration altogether, and returning to an archaic notion of direct, religiously colored, and mystically inclined politics that based itself on an imagined timeless bond with the narod. For him the narod now meant the masses, that is, the peasantry. It was now an age of mass politics, which Russia had entered willy-nilly with the 1905 revolution and the introduction of the Duma. Thus a narrative of the intended audience of the cult of the tsar might well look like a linear progression, of shifting downward to the large base of the social pyramid. The story starts with a tiny elite group, and at empire’s twilight encompasses nearly all of society, including the peasants, but excluding the elite.
Similarly, the range of signs and methods used to elevate the monarch also widened over the centuries. This was partly due to technological developments, and partly to the intention to project the tsar’s image to ever-wider segments of the population. It seems that much of what Soviet historians called “naïve monarchism” and Daniel Field called “peasant monarchism”—the unfaltering belief of the peasants in “father-tsar” (batiushka-tsar’)—was rapidly eroding as the old regime drifted toward revolution. Before, when anything went amiss, the peasants would typically blame the people surrounding the tsar, but not the tsar himself. Now this was changing too.42 The botched military command of the Imperial Army in World War I only amplified this development. Nicholas II (much like Napoleon III in France before him) tried to compete with the Duma in the open field of democratic politics by projecting his image on objects of everyday life and in greater numbers than ever before. He failed miserably, and ultimately had to face the desacralization of the monarch’s persona. As for sacrality, we can observe the enormous impact of the French Revolution, which rechanneled the sacral to the popular sovereign—the nation—and did much to erase the higher, metaphysical legitimizing power of God. From then on, Russian monarchy had to compete with this novel concept of sacrality. Such was the situation as Russia in 1914 entered what became known as the Great War, as the old regime drifted towards revolution, as Lenin made plans to return to his homeland from exile, and as Stalin plotted to escape from his Siberian exile.
Like the French Revolution or the reign of Napoleon III, the Great War was another one of those events that rapidly accelerated a continuum of change. The masses had entered the political scene with the French Revolution, but it was the war that signaled the beginning of a new age of mass politics.43 As the first total war, World War I required the mobilization of both the home and war fronts. Unprecedented numbers of men from all social classes entered the fighting forces and unprecedented numbers of women entered the workforce on the home front. This development created expectations of increased political participation once the war was over. The most extreme form of fulfilling these expectations was the parliamentary, representative democracy with universal suffrage of such countries as Great Britain and France. From war’s end onward, any polity anywhere had to reckon with this kind of political participation as an Archimedean point of reference—whether it liked it or not.
Consumerism, accelerated by the war, further involved the masses in different ways. Mass-produced consumer goods should be made available for sale to as many people as possible, erasing differences of class, gender, and race. Modern techniques of marketing these goods were developed. Paradoxically, the more uniformly the masses emerged from these historical and economic processes, the greater the value of individual personality. It was one of the antinomies of modernity that elevation above the anonymous masses became one of the most rare and most coveted items. The more everyone seemed alike, the greater the value of being different. In America, advice literature began to deemphasize typical character traits and to promote the nurturing of individual personality.44 The valorization of individual personality had a strong influence on the political sphere. In Britain, France, and the United States, politicians highlighted two states of being; at the same time that of being like everyone (one of the masses) and yet also that of being different from everyone (individuals above the masses). To communicate their complex message of universalism-cum-individualism, they increasingly used the modern marketing techniques pioneered by the advertising industry. Soviet Russia was not isolated from these developments precipitated by the Great War.
After more than three centuries of Romanov rule, the monarchy imploded in the February Revolution of 1917. As the tsar was disposed of, so was his public cult. As in any revolution since 1789, the February Revolution involved both caricature of the old system and iconoclasm, much of it directed at the tangible manifestations of the cult of the monarch, who had embodied the system for so long. Yet amidst the rubble of the toppled tsar statues and torn-down portraits of Nicholas, the revolutionaries immediately began to build cults around new political and military figures like Aleksandr Kerensky and Lavr Kornilov. The British ambassador to Russia, George Buchanan, recorded a soldier telling him: “Yes, we need a republic, but at its head there should be a good tsar!”45 A Menshevik deputy of the Moscow Soviet, who had traveled in March for agitational purposes to a regiment’s meeting near the town of Vladimir, reported the reaction of a soldier who enthusiastically responded to his eulogy of revolution and the republic by saying, “We want to elect you as tsar,” to the raucous applause of his fellow soldiers. “I refused the Romanov crown,” recalled the Menshevik, “and went away with a heavy feeling of how easy it would be for any adventurer or demagogue to become the master of this simple and naïve people.”46
Kerensky became this new tsar and the object of an elaborate cult (Fig. 1.4). His status was raised to that of a cult figure right after February, due to his theatrical capabilities and because he was the only politician who belonged both to the Duma committee and the Soviet executive committee. In other words, he was the only one who managed to bridge a gap, representing the liberal elite and the people at the same time.47 During the coup in July 1917, the rebellious general Lavr Kornilov was likewise celebrated in a cult.48 Yet these first post-tsarist cults of political or military leaders in Russia were small-scale, short-lived, and limited in their reach when compared with those of their tsarist predecessors and Soviet successors. They do not qualify as modern personality cults according to this book’s definition.
Figure 1.4. Alexander Kerensky giving a speech at the front, spring 1917. © Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University, New York.
Both Kerensky’s and Kornilov’s cults failed to reach, or be accepted by, all segments of the population. In contrast, the cults of the tsars since Alexander II (at the latest) and the Lenin and Stalin cults all achieved wide popularity. Kornilov’s coup collapsed quickly and Kerensky was ousted in the October Revolution. Russia soon slid into the Civil War, which was characterized by what Boris Kolonitskii has called “polytheism,” that is, multiple smaller personality cults among all fighting parties, the Reds included.49 In fact, many of the long-lasting patronage relationships between Bolshevik Civil War military commanders and painters were forged in the crucible of the Civil War. Civil War heroes like Voroshilov, Stalin’s commissar of war, began commissioning portraits from painters and reciprocated by handing out resources (brushes, money, food) that were especially scarce in time of war. Patron-client relations were formed and took on a specific shape that was to prevail throughout the Stalin period, as we will learn in Chapter 4. Patronage, a form of personalized power, and the personality cult, a form of symbolic politics, entered into a strong marriage that turned rocky only after Stalin’s death.
The first countrywide and the most influential of the modern, post–World War I personality cults in Western Europe was that of Benito Mussolini, who ruled 1922–1945.50 Mussolini’s cult both redefined the meaning of a quintessential modern personality cult and provided a stock of symbolically charged signs, such as the black shirt and the Fascist salute, to be creatively adapted by other twentieth-century dictators, most infamously Hitler (Fig. 1.5).
Italian fascism’s greatest bête noire was liberal, democratic politics. It abhorred nothing more than efforts to sort out political differences through rational discourse in a public sphere and arrive at democratic compromises. Mussolini once called parliamentary debates “a boring masturbation.”51 Thus it was only after the Great War that fascism could become a viable movement. Only the war induced the changes that put liberal democracy with universal franchise on the map as the yardstick of politics. Fascism offered a chance to overcome the factionalism and lackluster aesthetics of liberal democracy through, among other things, the cult of Mussolini. In essence, it proposed an aesthetic counter-offensive to what it perceived as the grayness of liberal democracy. Mussolini was Romanticism’s godlike “artist-creator” transposed from the sphere of the arts to the arena of politics. Like the Romantic artist, he absorbed huge amounts of sacral capital set free by the ousting of God from society’s metaphysical space. As in the vision of the late nineteenth-century crowd theorist Gustave Le Bon, Mussolini filled his role of artist-creator in a highly specific, highly hybridized modern inflection.52 It was the virile Duce who, in sculptor’s fashion, molded the anaesthetized, hypnotized, female-coded masses into a work of art; who, in an act of violent creation reminiscent always of the violence of the trenches of the war, produced out of the masses the modern, harmonious, aesthetically beautiful body national. In so doing, Mussolini overcame all of the dichotomies that threaten to tear apart the modern person—male/female, rational/emotional, mind/body, and so on. Once the harmonious body national was created, violence and disharmony shifted to the international scene, where warfare became the prized modus operandi.
Figure 1.5. Benito Mussolini photographed by Pettiti (1937). Black and white photograph on cardboard,9 × 14 cm.© Deutsches Historisches Museum—Bildarchiv, Berlin.
The target audience of the Mussolini cult was undoubtedly the masses, the totality of society. The means employed to disseminate Mussolini’s images were the modern mass media—posters, films, books, mass spectacles in sports arenas, and national holiday festivals. Technological advances allowed for an unprecedented omnipresence of il Duce so that he truly ended up being everywhere. The signs with which he was represented were highly amalgamated. They included so many overtly Christian religious references that the cult has been viewed as a paradigm for the (re)sacralization of politics in the modern, secular age.53
The Mussolini cult was highly influential because it was the first of the postwar dictator cults to be put into practice in political life. But it was never sui generis. Rather, the Mussolini cult was one variant of a common answer to the dilemmas of modernity that beset all developed nations in the postwar political order: anonymity amidst ever-growing social interaction beyond the confines of small-scale social units (family, village) through the universalizing institutions of school and army and with the help of modern communications (roads, railroads, as well as the telegraph, the telephone, and the radio); and a memory both of Gemeinschaft and the person-centered symbolic politics of the prewar monarchies. With the rise of liberal democracy, fascism, and Bolshevik-style socialism there were more political options available than ever before. Each of these “systems” and their attendant ideologies had universalist aspirations, which engendered a global climate of competition between differing political ways of life. Two blatant examples are the imagined competition of height between Moscow’s (never-built) Palace of Soviets and New York’s Empire State Building, and the real competition (at the 1937 Paris World’s Fair) between the German eagle on the Nazi pavilion and the hammer and sickle carried by Vera Mukhina’s Worker and Female Kolkhoz Farmer sculpture on top of the Soviet pavilion. Likewise, the developed nations exhibited an unprecedented degree of economic interdependency, which became patently and fatally obvious as they drifted into a downward spiral of depression after the crash of the stock market on Black Friday in 1929.
These conditions created fertile ground for leader cults, and also an as yet unheard-of interconnectedness between these leader cults once put into practice. Monarchic cults, to be sure, had also attempted to impress competing mon-archs with a dazzling display of royal grandeur while copying and influencing one another. The symbolic rivalry between the “Sun King” Louis XIV and his Habsburg contender Leopold I is a famous case in point.54 Yet the speed of this process multiplied thanks to the modern mass media. With the development of the radio, theoretically any place in the world with a receiver could be subjected to a live broadcast of Mussolini’s, Hitler’s, Roosevelt’s, or Stalin’s voice. While monarchs had been in agreement about the political order they represented, the battle of symbolic politics between the cults of Hitler, Roosevelt, and Stalin was also always a deadly standoff between the systems of National Socialism, liberal democracy, and communism respectively. Mutual dictator-watching was a natural consequence of these developments. The post–World War I leader cult ended up being entangled in new ways, by defining itself in contradistinction to another cult and the system it represented. We will revisit specific cases in the chapters to come, but let us note here that in all likelihood Stalin’s pipe, stuffed with cheap cigarette tobacco, was deliberately set off against the bourgeois cigar in general, and eventually against Churchill’s cigar in particular (Fig. 1.6, 1.7; also see Fig. 3.3, p. 96). Roosevelt’s optimistic, white-toothed smile, representing his belief in capitalism’s superior ability to overcome economic crisis, was in deliberate contrast to Hitler’s brooding, Gothic countenance (Fig. 1.8, 1.9). Hitler’s eyes, as one historian has suggested, were deliberately presented as more magnetic, exemplifying the antirationalist element of National Socialism as opposed to the Soviet Enlightenment project, embodied in Stalin’s eyes.55 The modern personality cult, in other words, emerged from the Great War in the company of an “Other.” It is a prime example of “entangled modernities.”56
New symbolic “double” and “triple alliances” developed. Both Stalin and Hitler were presented—and perceived—as incarnations of viable solutions to the economic crises that struck the capitalist nations of Western Europe and the United States. Fewer Western intellectuals would have fallen prey to Stalin’s cult if the Soviet Union had not celebrated its breakneck industrialization and collectivization as a resounding success against the depression in the West. In the case of Weimar Germany, with its fragile democratic tradition and its street warfare between political extremists, surely the longing for a monarchical or modern Führer was strong and perhaps indeed created what Hans-Ulrich Wehler has identified as an overdetermined “charismatic situation.”57 This situation was not limited to Western, Southern, and Central Europe; it extended to the East European states as well, such as Poland with its cult of Joseph Pilsudski.58
Unlike Germany, Italy, Poland, or Russia, the political culture of the United States had a strong tradition of elections. In the presidential elections of the nineteenth century, candidates still embodied a residual aristocratic distance and traditionally stayed out of the fray of campaigning. It was the party functionaries who communed with the mob and praised the candidate in countless speeches (nineteenth-century campaigning was primarily public speaking). In the late nineteenth century technological advances (photography) and the rapid expansion of commercial advertising necessitated that traditional political culture adopt these mass media, public relations techniques. The 1896 electoral campaign of William McKinley is considered the first time a candidate actively joined in campaigning and beat his main competitor, William Jennings Bryan, through deft usage of the mass media. Bryan had tirelessly traveled the country and reached about five million people directly, but McKinley mounted about 100 million posters.59 This period in 1910–1911 constituted a landslide shift from program to posing. An entire photo series showed Theodore Roosevelt posed while speechmaking.60 In many ways, the medium had (already) become the message and persona ruled over program. The American combination of commercial advertising techniques and modern personalized politics was a trendsetting and inspiring example. There are grounds to believe that Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s court photographer, copied the depiction of Hitler as a nonelevated “man of the people”—shaking hands, smiling, and reading a newspaper—from presidential representations produced by Woodrow Wilson’s public relations machine. In 1930, Joseph Goebbels explicitly vowed to “exploit the most modern advertising techniques for our movement.”61 Thus new political, democratic concepts, anchored in the ideal of universal suffrage, encroached upon symbolic representations of the leader anywhere in the world. The politician as “man of the masses” was born.
Figure 1.6. Personality cults became relational during World War I. Eventually, Stalin’s proletarian pipe (stuffed with cheap cigarette tobacco) symbolized communism and was juxtaposed to Churchill’s cigar, which stood for bourgeois capitalism. Pravda, 1 January 1936, 1.
Figure 1.7. Source: Imperial War Museum, London, IWM Collections Online, Photograph H 2646.
Figure 1.8. Smiling, optimistic Roosevelt . . . Retrieved 1 June 2007, from http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/images/photodb/09–1892a.gif
Figure 1.9. . . . and brooding Hitler, photographed by Heinrich Hoffmann (February-March 1933). Black and white photograph on cardboard, 12.3 × 8.3 cm. © Deutsches Historisches Museum—Bildarchiv, Berlin.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (president from 1933 to 1945) manipulated the mass media in unheard-of ways and managed to create a heroic image during his first hundred days in office; thereafter the image showed only cosmetic changes.62 Roosevelt started an “offensive of smiling” to exude optimism in times of economic crisis, but his main medium was the radio.63 Roosevelt’s famous weekly public radio addresses, the “fireside chats,” reached 60–70 million out of 130 million citizens. The press was his secondary medium. Roosevelt’s presentation was, interestingly, less visual than that of others. It was his sonorous, calm, and confident radio voice that assured him his following. The public relations sector expanded enormously under Roosevelt. During the New Deal almost all U.S. government institutions acquired staff in positions such as “director of information,” “publicity director,” “chief of public relations,” “press officer,” “secretary of press relations,” and “editorial assistant.” These aides produced press conferences and a steady stream of press releases and flyers.64 Roosevelt, who had journalistic experience himself, chose men with a press background as his secretaries. Louis Howe and Stephen Early, the former an Albany newspaperman, the latter an erstwhile reporter for the Associated Press, were media pros par excellence. They choreographed the relationship between the media and the president they served. They supplied news releases and personalized human stories about Roosevelt to the media. And they achieved the remarkable feat of hiding the effects of Roosevelt’s polio from the public. This was due to the voluntary “self-obligation” of the press, rather than outright censorship, and was supported by subtle pressures—for example, journalists who failed to adhere to this gentlemen’s agreement were kept away from photo opportunities and press conferences.
Between the modern, post–World War I cults of dictatorial and democratic leaders there were numerous commonalities but also differences, both of which become visible upon comparison. All cults made use of different yet related signs to portray their leaders. All made use of the same technology, though they weighted these media differently. All were targeted at the masses. The respective relationships to sacrality were quite different. Mussolini and Hitler did not shy away from comparing themselves with God and Jesus, while atheist Marxism avoided such analogies. Hitler and Mussolini did not fabricate images of modesty but openly justified their cults ideologically, while the Stalin cult was presented as an oxymoron, a cult malgré soi. What is more, as far as we know Hitler’s cult was orchestrated from a single institution, Goebbels’s propaganda ministry, while Stalin’s cult had no such central directorate. Many of the techniques used for the cults were inspired by American commercial advertising. Yet representations of this interdependency were entirely different: what the United States in its own country called “mass communications” and elevated to an academic discipline, it scorned as “propaganda” in Germany, Italy, Japan, and Soviet Russia.65 Nonetheless, Roosevelt’s America managed to suppress his wheelchair. To be sure, Western image politics had achieved what has been called the “semantic occupation of the public sphere” by different, and less repressive means than authoritarian regimes.66 Indeed it is crucial to remember that dictatorial image politics developed against the background of states that made use of terror and physical force on an unprecedented scale. In the West, there was neither censorship nor the monopoly of one newspaper or media conglomerate. Instead there was competition, but in reality this competition achieved similar results. Ultimately the New Deal marginalized pluralistic political parties and greatly strengthened the executive powers of the president, a necessary precondition for the buildup of the welfare state. As a result, politics became more personalized.67
The Bolsheviks were of course Marxists, and Marxism started as a movement around cult figures, Marx and Engels, no matter how much the founding fathers themselves derided personality cults. What is more, Bolshevik ideology was less collectivist than is often believed. There was Lev Kleinbort’s positive tradition of the “cult of man” in Russian Marxism and Georgy Plekhanov’s dialectical justification of the supreme role of the individual in history.68 Bolshevik-style Russian Marxism also contained many Nietzsche-inspired voluntarist and individualist elements—the socialist new man as superman.69 And there were the Bolshevik concepts of the Party vanguard (avangard) and the Party leader (vozhd’). Both set Bolshevik ideology—and practices—apart from the emphasis on Party soviets and cells of the Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, and other parties of the Left.70
But there is more. Most Bolsheviks were from the radical intelligentsia. Most intelligentsia members, as Barbara Walker has shown, took part in a social circle (kruzhok), in which they read poetry, discussed Marx, fought over politics, or critiqued one another’s paintings.71 And most intelligentsia circles were organized around a leader. As one participant remembered her circle leader, “his knowledge was unlimited. I believed that, were there only a few more like him, one could already begin the revolution.”72 The circle and its leader provided the members with material resources (housing, food, publication opportunities) and psychological resources (praise or what we today would call “positive reinforcement,” harmony, a sense of belonging). As a member of Maximilian Voloshin’s Koktebel circle during the 1920s recalled in 1945, “Voloshin was the center to [which] all were drawn. . . . He was a subtle psychologist. Whomever he met, he always found those words, those thoughts, which enabled him to approach his interlocutor more intimately and entice him into a long conversation, at the end of which it turned out that they were, unexpectedly to both, close friends.”73 In return, the circle members glorified their circle leader during his lifetime in poems and songs, with paintings and sculptures, and after his death in obituaries and memoirs. The circle members, in short, built a cult around their leader. Most Bolsheviks, no matter how much their Marxism stressed the importance of collectives over individuals, were socialized in these kruzhki and brought a culture of leader veneration with them. Glorifying a leader was a formative experience for these Bolsheviks, and many could not but continue to act accordingly once in power, despite all professions of contempt for personality cults in their ideological rhetoric.
Up to the early nineteenth century, the single source of limited resources for cultural producers was the tsarist court, and the single person to be glorified was the tsar.74 The intelligentsia emerged only after a parting of ways; a small part of the Russian nobility distanced itself from the monarchy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Later came the development of the intelligentsia circles around circle leaders.75 With the emergence of the intelligentsia, there appeared new resources for cultural producers, separate from the monarch; and consequently new people to be glorified, also separate from the monarch.76 Of course the tacit exchange relationship between circle leader and cultural producers, in which the cultural producers extolled their circle leader with cult products in return for resources, mirrored the exchange relationship between other cultural producers and the tsar. Slavicists and cultural historians Gregory Freidin, Harsha Ram, and Viktor Zhivov are among those who have followed with painstaking care the discursive traces that the dominant institutions of emperor and Orthodox Church left on the language of those who sought to overcome these institutions, beginning with the Decembrists.77 As Alexander Zholkovsky summed up this tradition (which began in the late eighteenth century and ended only in 1991) for the twentieth-century poet Anna Akhmatova, she “stands out as an ultimate paradox of resistance-cum-replication.”78 By continuing the circle tradition of the oppositional intelligentsia, the Bolsheviks therefore not only violated the Marxist principle of collectivism but also unwittingly slipped into a century-old tradition of replicating the reciprocal relationship between the loathed tsar and his eulogists who also received resources in exchange for cult products.
It is instructive to take a look at Bolshevik biographies in the light of the circle experience. Vladimir Lenin joined his first revolutionary circle at age nineteen, when he entered Nikolai Fedoseev’s illegal proto-Marxist kruzhok in Kazan in 1889.79 Many more circles followed, and Lenin moved from circle participant to circle leader. Lavrenty Beria in 1915 at age sixteen helped found a clandestine Marxist study circle at the Baku Polytechnical School for Mechanical Construction. He served as its treasurer.80 Anastas Mikoian took part in the organization of his first Marxist circle as a seventeen-year-old in 1912 at the ecclesiastical seminary of the Armenian Church in Tbilisi.81 Sergo Ordzhonikidze as a fifteen-year-old began studying at a school for male nurses in Tbilisi, where he joined his first Marxist circles, culminating in his entrance to the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party at age seventeen.82 Yemelian Yaroslavsky (born 1878) was introduced to his first underground circle as a fifteen-year-old through his elder sister. A long circle career followed, working together with exiles, Gymnasium students, and teachers, mostly in his native East Siberian town of Chita, where his father, a Jew, had been exiled after refusing to serve in the tsarist army for religious reasons.83 Viacheslav Molotov joined the Bolshevik Party in Kazan at age sixteen and was in charge of the revolutionary circles at the educational institutions in town.84 Kliment Voroshilov started his circle life in a theater circle at age fifteen at the Donetsk-Yuriev metallurgical factory in Alchevsk, after he was forced to quit school to earn money. In 1898, at age seventeen, he joined the factory’s “illegal group of workers, an embryonic Social Democratic circle.”85 In 1903 he joined a full-fledged Social Democratic circle at the Hartman locomotive factory in Lugansk and devoted three eulogistic pages of his autobiography to the leaders of this circle, V. A. Shelgunov and K. M. Norinsky.86 Stalin himself (in 1931) claimed to have joined his first Marxist circle at age fifteen while still a seminarian in Tbilisi (about 1894): “I joined the revolutionary movement when fifteen years old, when I became connected with underground groups of Russian Marxists then living in Transcaucasia.”87 By all accounts, he indeed joined a secret socialist study kruzhok at the seminary together with his friend Iosif Iremashvili. According to Robert Tucker,
As he entered upon his rebel career through the young socialists’ study circle that he and Iremashvili joined, he took it for granted that he belonged at the head of the movement. The circle elected as its leader an older student named Devdariani, who drew up for the new boys a six-year reading program designed to make them educated Social Democrats by the time they graduated from the seminary. Before long, however, Djugashvili [Stalin] was organizing one or more new study circles of which he himself was the mentor.88
For Stalin and all of these Bolsheviks, circle activity started in their formative years. For all of them, too, it was their debut as members of political organizations. For most, their first circle was the beginning of a revolutionary circle career. And for most, it was the beginning of an upward path from circle participant to circle leader. Thus, I propose that while these Bolsheviks might ridicule and profess their contempt for the cult of the tsar, they all internalized the principle of personality cult because they all were socialized in the microsocial institution of the circle during their formative years. Once they came to power and had the opportunity to set the rules of the macrosocial game, many were compelled to follow the logic of their microsocial kruzhok education.
Considering all these factors, it is not surprising that there were nascent cults of generals and politicians among the Reds in the Civil War. It is also not surprising that Lenin in his 1918 “Decree on the Removal of Monuments Erected to the Tsars and Their Servants and the Projecting of Monuments of the Russian Socialist Revolution” linked iconoclasm toward the old regime with the building of new statues honoring founding fathers of the Left, from Babeuf and Robespierre to Marx and Engels.89 And it is not surprising that the first full-blown personality cult of a Party leader, albeit a dead one, was constructed around Lenin.
During Lenin’s lifetime there was no modern political personality cult around him, even allowing for the accolades that did exist. Lenin died on 21 January 1924. While a part of the Bolshevik command might have been influenced by the philosopher Nikolai Fedorov’s belief in the ability of science to achieve physical immortality, the decision to embalm the corpse and build a mausoleum around it was above all determined by an unexpectedly large public interest in Lenin’s dead body.90 In order to accommodate the masses who wanted to file by and catch a glimpse of the dead Lenin, the natural decomposition of the corpse needed to be halted. To coordinate these efforts a “Commission for the Immortalization of Lenin’s Memory” was put together from members of the Party Central Committee and Politburo. Initially led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, and later by Leonid Krasin, this commission faced opposition from figures like Lenin’s widow Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Voroshilov, who saw the analogies of Russian Orthodox canonizations and tsars’ burials as looming too large in the public imagination. But the faction that favored permanently embalming the corpse fabricated evidence of popular support and eventually defeated its opponents.91
Figure 1.10. Lenin’s death mask amidst others by the sculptor Sergei Merkurov (1981 photograph). © State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow.
Later a variety of media—film, photography, paintings, posters, sculptures, and poetry—was employed in creating what came to be called “Leniniana.” Sculptor Sergei Merkurov, for example, produced a death mask that served as the blueprint for a group of sculptors commissioned to produce works of art (Fig. 1.10). Two out of fifty-five were then chosen for mass reproduction.92 During the Stalin era some of these sculptors published memoiristic accounts of their heightened sense of responsibility for fixing the Soviet leader’s image for mankind and history. The sculptor Ivan Shadr remembered how he was overcome by “panic and fear” when approaching the corpse, and Merkurov himself wrote about his death mask: “The mask is a historical document of immense importance. I [had] to preserve [Lenin’s] traits on his deathbed and pass them down to the centuries!”93 Soon mountains and towns, factories and kindergartens, airplanes and ships were getting named after Lenin. A famous outside observer, Walter Benjamin, in 1927 used the German word Kultus to describe Lenin’s posthumous public veneration: “Already today the cult (Kultus) of his [Lenin’s] image is reaching unexpected proportions. . . . Moreover, it is slowly beginning to generate canonical forms. The widely known picture of the speaker is the most common of these. More touching and probably more characteristic is another: Lenin at his desk, leaning over an issue of Pravda.”94
Stalin played a peripheral role in the Lenin cult and did not mastermind it, as has often been asserted.95 Nor was he featured in the Lenin cult before the onset of his own cult. But the existing Lenin cult surely served as a model for his own cult. And Voroshilov, the main patron of the visual arts and mastermind of the Stalin cult in painting, had been part of the initial Lenin commission. Once Stalin’s cult began, he was portrayed as Lenin’s best disciple and successor. At the time, the introduction of this quasi-dynastic succession principle in the semiotics of a modern personality cult was a novelty.96 Later in the century it was topped by genuine kinship-based dynastic successions in a communist leader cult, in North Korea where Kim Jong Il succeeded his father Kim Il Sung; and in a Ba’athist leader cult, in Syria where Bashar al-Asad succeeded his father Hafiz al-Asad.
Multiple paths, then, led to the Stalin cult. The larger context of modern personality cults was decisive. This context, of which Russia was part, gained its specific shape primarily due to the rechanneling of sacral aura from the religious sphere—a process that has inadequately been termed secularization— into other spheres, that of politics included. Crudely put, the death of God was the precondition for the deification of man and the types of modern personality cults to which the Stalin cult belongs. Rulers after the Enlightenment and the French Revolution received their legitimacy not from the killed God, but from (parts of) the people. The sacral energy set free by God’s assassination floated throughout society until it attached itself to their persons, giving rise to the secular personality cult. This personality cult became modern for the first time in France during the reign of Napoleon III. His cult was based on popular sovereignty; it was patricentric and targeted at the masses; it made use of mass media and uniform, mass-produced cult products; and it could flourish only because it took place in a sufficiently closed society. Even allowing for much overlap and nonlinear historical development, these five characteristics were so novel that they require us to draw a line between personality cults in the sphere of politics before and after the world’s first “democratic despot.” Beginning with Napoleon III, personality cults are best classified as modern.
The Russian tsar cults were not isolated from the developments in Western European monarchical symbolic politics. Russia produced its own, highly specific inflection of monarchical cults before the Revolution, even if the cult of the tsar failed at becoming fully modern. The cult of the tsar was a tradition that bore heavily upon postrevolutionary rulers and ruled, a tradition they had great difficulty breaking or ignoring, even if they tried as hard as the Bolsheviks did. This path to the Stalin cult might be called the “tsarist carryover.”
After Napoleon III’s rule, World War I was the next event that triggered momentous changes in political personality cults. Mass conscription and the influx of large numbers of women into the workforce widened the horizon of expectation. The war made “one person, one vote” the benchmark of popular sovereignty. Every country somehow had to reckon with this new standard, even if it fell short of it. Now there was no way back from mass politics. Mass consumption followed in due course and further blurred class and gender lines. All cults around political leaders presented their Duce, Führer, or vozhd’ as men who came from the masses, yet at the same time transcended the masses. These leader cults were interrelated in more ways than the cults of monarchs had ever been. While monarchical cults had been in basic agreement about the political order—monarchy—they represented, every leader embodied a modern political “system” with world-hegemonic aspirations. Stalin stood for communism, Mussolini and Hitler each stood for a variant of fascism. In addition, because of the development of the radio, in theory the entire world could now hear Stalin’s, Hitler’s, or Mussolini’s voice in real time. This tectonic shift had an impact on how these leaders were represented in their cults. The representation of Stalin as calm and unmoving was deliberately juxtaposed to Hitler’s wild, “hysterical” body language. Stalin’s pipe or cigarette was intended to signify the proletarian nature of the Soviet Union; it was one pole of a binary, with Churchill’s bourgeois cigar figuring as the opposing pole. Thus the semiotics of the modern personality cult became relational or entangled.
Finally, there was the Marxist path and the ideology and practices of Bolshevism. The wider movement of Marxism had featured personality cults; and Bolshevik ideology, with its emphasis on the Party vanguard and Plekhanov’s dialectical justification of individuals as a historical driving force, was not as immune to personality cults as it claimed. What is more, the official tsar cult was accompanied by a microsocial underside of patronage-cum-cults anchored in the countergovernmental institution of the intelligentsia circle. The members of these circles glorified their leaders with their cultural products and received material and psychological resources in return. Nearly all Bolsheviks were socialized in intelligentsia circles. Socialization is meta-intentional, and whether they liked it or not, once they came to political power many could not but act as they were taught in their circles, despite Marxism’s profession of collectivism.
Taken on its own, each of these paths only partly explains the genesis of the Stalin cult. Taken together, they give a fresh answer to the question why the alchemy of power, why the Stalin cult, got started.
