by Jan Plamper
The Stalin cult was an overwhelmingly visual phenomenon, tailored to a population whose mental universe was shaped primarily by images, as opposed to written words. When the cult was inaugurated in 1929, the Soviet Union had just launched its effort to modernize at a breakneck pace through industrialization and the collectivization of agriculture. As part of this campaign the state stepped up efforts to promote literacy, a formidable task in a land where the 1926 census had revealed an illiteracy rate of 34.6 percent for males and 63.3 percent for females.9 Many Soviet citizens could access Stalin only visually, and those who had just learned to read and write still perceived the world primarily through images. What is more, oil portraits of Stalin played a leading role in the making of the Stalin cult because certain other media were not available for this purpose. Socialist realist novels, for example, hardly ever featured Stalin as their main hero. These works followed the conventions of bildungsroman, in which the hero progresses along a linear path by overcoming obstacles, emerging, in the end, as a different and a better person—a Soviet “new man.” Stalin, however, could not be shown in the process of becoming, for Stalin had long before completed his journey to a higher kind of personhood.10 Stalin quite simply “was.” He, an d only he, embodied the endpoint of the utopian timeline. As such he was beyond time and place.11
What is a personality cult? There are many definitions, and the first distinction I make is between the historical term “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti in Russian) and the analytical term “personality cult.” At its most basic level I take a personality cult to be the symbolic elevation of one person much above others. I circumscribe the range of personality cult objects by focusing on living or deceased real human persons, not allegorical beings (“Marianne” as the embodiment of the French nation, “Uncle Sam” as the United States of America, or “Hermann” and “Michel” as Germany), nor collectives of persons (the Japanese people), nor abstract ideas (reason).12 These persons as cult objects are all from the sphere of politics, not religion (the pope), literature (celebrated writers as national symbols), film (movie stars), music (pop stars), or sports (famous athletes). Through the process of elevation the person who is glorified in a cult comes to be endowed with something I will interchangeably call “sacrality” and “sacral aura.”
My understanding of sacrality is indebted to the work of the sociologist Edward Shils. For Shils, it was axiomatic that “society has a center. There is a central zone in the structure of society.” His second axiom holds that “the central zone partakes of the nature of the sacred.”13 Sacrality and authority are tautologically intertwined: “Authority enjoys appreciation because it arouses sentiments of sacredness. Sacredness by its nature is authoritative. Those persons, offices, or symbols endowed with it, however indirectly and remotely, are therewith endowed with some measure of authoritativeness.”14 I modify Shils’s conception of sacredness in one important respect: sacrality need not exist a priori in every society; rather it is historically conditioned and culturally constructed in many different shapes and forms.15
While sacrality shares features of Max Weber’s concept of “charisma,” sacrality has a number of distinct advantages for an analysis of modern personality cults. One is its flexibility. For Weber, charisma remains locked in a grid of ideal types of authority.16 An added advantage over Weber’s charisma (and the anthropologist Victor Turner’s “communitas”) is that sacrality has stronger religious connotations and better conveys the echoes, traces, and rechanneling of religion in the modern, purportedly “disenchanted” world.17 At the same time sacrality avoids the pitfalls associated with the direct transposition of religious categories into politics, which characterizes the notions of political religion or political theology that go back to the sociologist Émile Durkheim and the political theorist Erich Voegelin.18
Sacrality is a concept that does justice to both the premodern and the modern elements in the phenomenon of the Stalin cult.19 Let me illustrate with Stalin portraits: scholars have often equated their social and emotional functions, their visual morphology, and their production with those of icons in the Byzantine, Russian Orthodox tradition. And indeed, Stalin portraits were sometimes hung in the “red corner,” the place in a room formerly reserved for the icon. Stalin portraits were experienced not just as constative or mimetic images; but rather, like icons, they were perceived as performative images that enact a change in the viewer. Just as icons were often covered with a curtain during spousal arguments in order to block the saint’s gaze (and avoid his punishment), so the Moscow students turned the Stalin portrait around because the energy pouring from the leader’s image made it impossible to converse freely. The colors used in Stalin portraits sometimes suggested the symbolic valence of colors in Russian icons. During and after production painters and art critics described Stalin portraits in terms that had long been used in discussions of icon-painting: For example, zhivoi (life-giving), which denotes the discharge of sacral energy, and obraz (image), which signifies a Russian Orthodox, nonmimetic, performative image.
One cannot simply equate icons and Stalin portraits, however. To do so is to gloss over other influences and qualities that are specific to Stalin portraiture. For example, the realist tradition, which drew upon both Western nineteenth-century portraiture and the Russian Wanderers (Peredvizhniki), is a key element of the portraits. Knowledge of icons will not explain the direction of Stalin’s gaze, which was invariably directed at a focal point outside the picture; for Stalin was perceived as the embodiment of the linear, Marxist force of History. He, indeed, only he, could see the end of the utopian timeline: the future of communism. Finally, the concrete practices by which these images were produced obviously bore scant resemblance to the crafting of icons.
This book places the Stalin cult squarely within the rubric of modern political personality cults. The first cult of this kind was that of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who was crowned Emperor Napoleon III in 1851. Five characteristics set modern personality cults apart from their premodern predecessors. First, all modern personality cults were the children of mass politics: they were directed at (and derived their legitimacy from) the entire population, the “masses,” whereas monarchical cults were often directed at (and depended on the allegiance of) an elite group. Second, they all used modern mass media that allowed for the mass dissemination of cult products such as films and posters, whereas earlier cults had reached only a limited number of people. Furthermore, because of the spread of cultural techniques like reading and writing through such modern institutions as universal schooling and mass conscription, the cult artifacts disseminated were not only uniform, but also potentially readable by the entire population. Third, modern personality cults emerged only in closed societies. Closed societies have a highly circumscribed public space, making media-transmitted criticism of a leader cult or the introduction of a rival cult nearly impossible. In most closed societies the state exercises a high degree of violence, and the political personality cult is usually crucial in defining the relationship between ruler and ruled. Fourth, modern personality cults were invariably children of a secular age, one which had expelled God—however imperfectly—from society’s metaphysical space.20 By introducing a new political vocabulary of “nation” and “popular sovereignty” the French Revolution created other, secular sources of political legitimacy. The modern leader cults must be understood in the context of popular sovereignty: the modern leader’s body now absorbs all of the sacral aura and serves as metaphor for everything, for all of (homogenized) society.21 Before that, there were divisions of the king’s body along the lines described by Ernst Kantorowicz, and the reference to God was always included; the king’s body was never a signifier for everything, but only for a part, while after the French Revolution the leader’s body came to represent the totality of society.22 Fifth and finally, the modern personality cult was an exclusively patricentric phenomenon: the objects of veneration in modern personality cults were men, whereas premodern cul
ts had often celebrated queens, tsaritsas, and princesses.23 The reason for this patricentrism lies in popular sovereignty as a source of legitimacy: since the cult object must somehow represent the population, and since power in this population is distributed unequally according to gender, the personality cult reflects this asymmetrical distribution and represents those members of society who are most powerful—men.24
Given this understanding of the modern personality cult, we must conclude that neither Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, nor Ronald Reagan possessed one. And yet, despite all the differences, there are certain discomforting commonalities between modern personality cults and the image politics practiced in more open societies. Both employ the modern mass media in breathtakingly manipulative ways to project fabricated images of political leaders in an effort to muster the population’s support. Both use similar techniques in measuring a politician’s success at “marketing” himself to the population. Both began to assume their present form during the First World War, which in several different ways ushered in the age of mass politics—through the need to engage the entire population, often by blurring class and gender lines to promote the total war effort; by paying the postwar peace dividend by expanding the franchise; and by claiming legitimacy based on the support of the entire people, rather than one or another particular group.
For most of its history the Soviet Union officially condemned “personality cults.” Marxism, after all, stresses collectives over individuals and material forces over individual agency, and then there was the fact that prerevolutionary Russia had celebrated the cult of the tsar. Even while Stalin was being glorified, inside the Soviet Union it was impossible to speak of a “personality cult.” Instead, the Soviets wanted their citizens and the rest of the world to believe that the glorification of Stalin was the result of genuine democracy: the people spontaneously and naturally expressed their love for their leader, Stalin, who could only accept these expressions of love and grudgingly tolerate the cult. In seeking to reconstruct the cult’s hidden history, then, the researcher must scour the sources for an object that, in official terms, did not—and could not—exist. Unlike Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, both of which had no ideological qualms about their respective leader cults, the Soviet Union never generated straightforward records revealing how its cults were made. Hence documents pertaining to the Stalin cult that have emerged from the state and Party archives during perestroika and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union are not located in one or several clearly defined archival collections. For the Stalin cult there is nothing like, say, the files of the “commission for the immortalization of Lenin’s memory” that was set up right after his death in 1924 and where all the documents to study Lenin’s early posthumous cult can be found.25 Instead, Soviet embarrassment over the existence of a Stalin cult obliges the historian to perform his detective work in an unusually wide range of sometimes unlikely sources from every corner of Soviet life.
Part One of this book examines the products of the Stalin cult, while Part Two treats their production. By products I mean not only the portraits and other cult artifacts themselves, but also the ways in which their meanings were created: the canonical patterns through which Stalin’s image was projected; the changes in his image over time; and the ways in which people in different contexts made sense of these cult products. By production of the Stalin cult I mean the multilayered making of cult products: the mechanisms of their creation; the process of deciding who was to portray Stalin in what fashion; and Stalin’s own influence on the way in which he was depicted. The line I have drawn between products and production is neither real nor analytically sustainable but rather a device used to shape the architecture of the book. In fact, this study presupposes that the modes of cult/ural production cannot be divorced from cult/ural products, that the meaning of a cult product is always constituted in a loop that includes the ways in which the cult product was made.
The book’s prologue, Chapter 1, reconstructs the Russian and international historical pathways to the Stalin cult, from Napoleon III via the tsars, Mussolini, and Lenin. It shows how modern personality cults emerged “entangled” from the First World War. Chapter 2 tracks Stalin’s visual representations in the central Soviet newspaper Pravda over time (1929–1953). It chronicles changes in the visual portrayal of Stalin over the course of the cult’s existence and spotlights some of the visual strategies used to elevate him above his comrades-inarms during the cult’s ascendancy. Chapter 3, the book’s most “art-historical,” interprets Aleksandr Gerasimov’s painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, focusing on the work’s spatial organization. This interpretive effort is set within additional contextual webs, including those of the painting’s making.
In Part Two, Chapter 4 concentrates on the role of individual actors in the production of the Stalin cult. It begins at the apex of the polity, with Stalin himself, and shows that while affecting humble resistance to the construction of his cult, he in reality wanted and played an important role in it. I then turn to Kliment Voroshilov, the main patron of visual artists, including Stalin’s portraitists, and examine the connections between patronage and personalized power. Chapter 5 looks at the institutional actors central to the production of the Stalin cult, including the visual artists’ union, the publishing houses, and the censorship board. I conclude that there never was anything like a “Stalin cult ministry” but instead a multitude of personal and institutional actors vied for influence in cult-making. Stalin’s position alone was never in question; he was the ultimate arbiter who could cut across all established lines of command and he was the final filter for a lot of cult products. Chapter 6 focuses on the visitor comment books (knigi otzyvov) that were put out for the public at Stalin exhibits. In analyzing visitors’ actual comments, the chapter grapples with the knotty matter of the cult’s “reception.”
In telling the story behind Stalin’s portraits, I have sought to demystify and historicize the Stalin cult. And yet, no matter how hard I tried to historicize it, I feel that I often arrived at the limits of what we can know about the cult, about any cult. The more I focused my lens, the harder it became to see my specimen. How are we to understand a woman who faints on seeing Stalin, a writer deemed an anti-Stalinist who works himself into a state of ecstasy on coming close to Stalin’s physical body, a future dissident who suffers nightmares about Stalin being poisoned, victims of Stalin’s violent policies who die of heart attack on hearing of Stalin’s death? In short, what really went on between ruler and ruled?
In many respects the Stalin cult worked like alchemy. Alchemy begins with a careful choice of discrete elements. These elements are then combined. They interact and the result is a sum total that is more than and different from the original elements. If alchemy is the endeavor to transmute base metals into gold, then the alchemy of power was such a process of transmutation. The net result was a Stalin who seemed larger than—indeed different from—real life. The alchemical process is what we are about to step into.
1 Paths to the Stalin Cult
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