by Jan Plamper
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
BOLSHEVIK PERSONALITY CULTS
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 sti
ll 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.
THE LENIN CULT
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.