by Jan Plamper
WORLD WAR I AND THE AGE OF MASS POLITICS
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.
RUSSIA: PERSONALITY CULTS BETWEEN TSAR AND LENIN
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.
OUTSIDE RUSSIA: PERSONALITY CULTS BETWEEN THE WARS
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 are
nas, 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.