by Jan Plamper
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.
THE FIRST MODERN PERSONALITY CULT: NAPOLEON III
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.
HOW THE CULT OF THE TSAR FAILED AT BECOMING MODERN
The changes in Western European monarchic representat
ions 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 educ
ated 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.