by Jan Plamper
9. Males and females above the age of seven years. See The Soviet Union: Facts, Descriptions, Statistics (Washington, D.C.: Soviet Union Information Bureau, 1929), 208.
10. I owe this point to a conversation with Hans Günther in Berkeley, 1998. Also see Rolf Hellebust, “Reflections of an Absence: Novelistic Portraits of Stalin before 1953,” in Socialist Realism Revisited: Selected Papers from the McMaster Conference, ed. Nina Kolesnikoff and Walter Smyrniw (Hamilton, Ont.: McMaster University, 1994), 111–120. On the socialist realist novel as bildungsroman see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 16–17, 57.
11. There are exceptions. Kazimir Lisovskii, V Turukhanskoi ssylke (Novosibirsk: Novosibgiz, 1947), deals with Stalin’s escape from his Siberian place of exile. Many Stalinist novels include the hero’s trip from the periphery to the center, i.e. to Stalin in Moscow. See Rosalind Marsh, Images of Dictatorship: Portraits of Stalin in Literature (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1989), 39.
12. On Marianne see Maurice Agulhon, Marianne au combat: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1789 à 1880 (Paris: Flammarion, 1979); Agulhon, Marianne au pouvoir: L’imagerie et la symbolique républicaines de 1880 à 1914 (Paris: Flammarion, 1989). On German Hermann see Andreas Dörner, Politischer Mythos und symbolische Politik: Sinnstiftung durch symbolische Formen am Beispiel des Hermannsmythos (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1995); on German Michel see Tomasz Szarota, Der deutsche Michel: Die Geschichte eines nationalen Symbols und Autostereotyps (Osnabrück: fibre, 1998).
13. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 3. Shils goes on to specify the universality of “the sacred” by claiming that “every society has an ‘official’ religion, even when that society or its exponents and interpreters, conceive of it, more or less correctly, as a secular, pluralistic, and tolerant society.”
14. Ibid., 5. Clifford Geertz reiterates the axiom of “the inherent sacredness of central authority” and adds his own, “the ingenerate tendency of men to anthropomorphize power.” Geertz, “Centers, Kings, and Charisma,” 146, 124.
15. Philippe Burrin has also criticized the axiomatic approach to sacrality and convincingly argued that it is “important to avoid speaking of a ‘transfer’ or ‘displacement’ of the sacred, as if the sacred were a fixed substance that attaches itself to different objects in different epochs.” See Philippe Burrin, “Political Religion: The Relevance of a Concept,” History and Memory 9, nos. 1–2 (1997): 345 n. 16.
16. On “charisma” and “charismatic authority” see Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, vol. 3 (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968), 1111–1156. On further problems of Weber’s “charisma” concept see Jan Plamper, “Introduction: Modern Personality Cults,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism, ed. Heller and Plamper, 34–37. For an application of the charisma concept to Soviet leader cults, see Carsten Goehrke, “Lenin, Stalin, Gorbatschow—Charisma und Sowjetherrschaft,” in Charisma: Revolutionäre Macht im individuellen und kollektiven Erleben, ed. Walter Jacob (Zurich: Chronos, 1999), 117–137.
17. For a deployment of Turner’s “communitas” that describes an antistructure sociability that can turn into structure, see Barbara Walker’s Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle: Culture and Survival in Revolutionary Times (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005). For an exploration of the similarities and differences between Weber’s “charisma” and Turner’s “communitas” see Winfried Gebhardt, Charisma als Lebensform: Zur Soziologie des alternativen Lebens (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1994), 182–187.
18. This approach has recently been most dominant and is represented by Michael Burleigh, Emilio Gentile, Philippe Burrin, and Klaus Vondung, who are indebted not only to Durkheim and Voegelin, but also to Karl Löwith, Carl Schmitt, and Jacob Talmon. Its main forum is the journal Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, founded in 2000. For an overview of this literature, see David D. Roberts, “‘Political Religion’ and the Totalitarian Departures of Inter-war Europe: On the Uses and Disadvantages of an Analytical Category,” Contemporary European History 18, no. 4 (2009): 381–414.
19. For a like-minded plea to situate the Soviet Union in a wider modern context while not losing sight of its particularities, see Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 55, no. 4 (2006): 535–555.
20. There is a considerable historiography on the ripple effects of the Enlightenment’s and the French Revolution’s attack on monarchic sacrality. Those who have argued for the rationalization and secularization of society and the desacralization of monarchy go back to Michael Walzer, Regicide and Revolution: Speeches at the Trial of Louis XVI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Those who have posited the “transfer” or rechanneling of sacral aura to alternative spheres favor an approach to modern ideologies of “political religion” or “political theology” (see above, note 15).
21. See Claude Lefort, “The Image of the Body and Totalitarianism,” in Lefort, The Political Forms of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), 292–306. George Mosse has also noted that from approximately the beginning of the nineteenth century, national myths and symbols coalesced into a secular religion that “attempted to draw the people into active participation in the national mystique through rites and festivals, myths and symbols which gave a concrete expression to the general will. . . . The new politics provided an objectification of the general will; it transformed political action into a drama supposedly shared by the people themselves.” See George L. Mosse, The Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich (New York: H. Fertig, 1975), 1–2.
22. See the classical study by Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). More generally see David G. Hale, “Analogy of the Body Politic,” in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, ed. Philip P. Wiener, vol. 1 (New York: Scribner, 1973), 67–70. For an application of Kantorowicz to the Lenin and Stalin cults see Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters Under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), chap. 4.
23. I borrow “patricentric” from John Borneman, “Introduction: Theorizing Regime Ends,” in Death of the Father: An Anthropology of the End in Political Authority, ed. John Borneman (New York: Berghahn, 2004), 3.
24. The cult of Argentina’s Evita Perón, which comes closest to qualifying, was mostly posthumous and surrounded someone who did not come to power as a politician but as a politician’s spouse.
25. For the first archivally based study of this commission, see Benno Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion (Cologne: Böhlau, 1997).
CHAPTER I. PATHS TO THE STALIN CULT
1. L. Trotskii, “Stalinskaia biurokratiia i ubiistvo Kirova: Otvet amerikanskim druz’iam,” Biulleten’ Oppozitsii (bol’shevikov-lenintsev) 7, no. 41 (January 1935): 7 (reprinted as Biulleten’ Oppozitsii, vol. 3 [New York: Monad Press, 1973]).
2. For exceptions see, for example, David Brandenberger, “Stalin as Symbol: A Case Study of the Personality Cult and Its Construction,” in Stalin: A New History, ed. Sarah Davies and James Harris (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 249–270.
3. As Moshe Lewin, one of the foremost “revisionist” historians of Soviet Russia, wrote: “Not much effort is needed to relate the ‘Stalin cult’ to this broader strategy of ‘sanctifying’ the state. The Stalin cult became a linchpin in this revamped secular orthodoxy. Sermons, vows, adulation, and panegyrics contributed a peculiar ‘Byzantine’ flavor to the neo-autocracy.” Moshe Lewin, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon, 1985), 306. Also consider Richard Stites: “St
alin’s utopia of the 1930s, with all its military and industrial achievement, its welfare infrastructure, and its mass education, was in part an archaic throwback to pre-modern forms of myth. And at the center of this archaic myth system was the cult of Stalin.” Richard Stites, “Stalin: utopian or Antiutopian? An Indirect Look at the Cult of Personality,” in The Cult of Power: Dictators in the Twentieth Century, ed. Joseph Held (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1983), 86; Eric Hobsbawm: “In turning himself into something like a secular Tsar, defender of the secular Orthodox faith, the body of whose founder, transformed into a secular saint, awaited the pilgrims outside the Kremlin, Stalin showed a sound sense of public relations. For a collection of peasant and animal-herding peoples mentally living in the Western equivalent of the eleventh century, this was almost certainly the most effective way of establishing the legitimacy of the new regime.” Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (New York: Penguin, 1994), 390; Tony Judt after quoting a 1951 Latvian Stalin poem: “This obsequious neo-Byzantine anointing of the despot, the attribution to him of near-magical powers . . .” Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945 (New York: Penguin, 2005), 175.
4. See, for example, Robert C. Tucker, Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1990), chap. 7. “Extreme self-idealizing such as that seen in Stalin inescapably leads to conflict—within the person and with others. Being at best humanly limited and fallible, such an individual is bound in practice, in his actual self and his performance, to fall short of the ideal self’s standards of perfection and supremely ambitious goals of achievement and glory. He will make mistakes, very likely all the greater because of his need to score only spectacular triumphs. For all this he will unconsciously accuse, berate, condemn, and despise himself—unconsciously because he can admit into awareness only those aspects of himself and his life that are, or appear to be, in keeping with his ideal self or that can be rationalized comfortably with its dictates” (p. 162). “So it was that the inner needs of a self-glorifying and vengeful leader were being institutionalized in public life and the workings of the governmental system” (p. 171).
5. See, for example, Benno Ennker, “The Stalin Cult, Bolshevik Rule, and Kremlin Interaction in the 1930s,” in The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, ed. Balázs Apor et al. (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), 83–101.
6. See, for example, Graeme Gill, “The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure of Leadership in the Soviet Union,” British Journal of Political Science 10, no. 2 (1980): 167–186; Gill, “Personality Cult, Political Culture and Party Structure,” Studies in Comparative Communism 17, no. 2 (1984): 111–121; Gill, The Origins of the Stalinist Political System (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), esp. 204–221, 277–278; Jeremy T. Paltiel, “The Cult of Personality: Some Comparative Reflections on Political Culture in Leninist Regimes,” Studies in Comparative Communism 16, nos. 1–2 (1983): 49–64. For contemporary public relations or branding approaches, see Lorraine E. Gayer, “Power, Purchase and Persuasion. Stalin: The Creation of an Image” (M.A. thesis, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 2004); Steven Heller, Iron Fists: Branding the 20th-Century Totalitarian State (London: Phaidon, 2008), esp. 152–169.
7. See, for example, Reinhard Löhmann, Der Stalinmythos: Studien zur Geschichte des Personenkultes in der Sowjetunion (1929–1935) (Münster: Lit, 1990). On the vydvizhentsy and upward mobility more generally see Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union, 1921–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). The “social integration” explanation ultimately goes back to Ferdinand Tönnies, Community and Association (London: Routledge and Paul, 1955), originally published in German in 1926, and Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (New York: Knopf, 1976). It is also at the root of defining socialist realism as kitsch or the aesthetic manifestation of middlebrow, petty bourgeois taste, as in Vera Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction, enlarged and updated edition (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990), which is usually traced back to Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” Partisan Review 5, no. 5 (1939): 34–49. Greenberg later disavowed this essay as “too simplistic.” Saul Ostrow, “‘Avant-Garde and Kitsch,’ Fifty Years Later: A Conversation with Clement Greenberg on the Fiftieth Anniversary of His Seminal Essay,” Arts Magazine 64 (December 1989): 56.
8. Carl Friedrich and Zhigniew Brzezinski called the cult of the leader one of the six characteristics of a totalitarian state. See Carl J. Friedrich and Zhigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956). Consider also Hannah Arendt’s well-known formulation: “In the center of the movement, as the motor that swings it into motion, sits the Leader. He is separated from the elite formation by an inner circle of the initiated who spread around him an aura of impenetrable mystery which corresponds to his ‘intangible preponderance.’ His position within this intimate circle depends upon his ability to spin intrigues among its members and upon his skill in constantly changing its personnel. He owes his rise to leadership to an extreme ability to handle inner-party struggles for power rather than to demagogic or bureaucraticorganizational qualities. . . . The totalitarian movements have been called ‘secret societies established in broad daylight.’. . . Perhaps the most striking similarity between the secret societies and the totalitarian movements lies in the role of the ritual. The marches around Red Square in Moscow are in this respect no less characteristic than the pompous formalities of the Nuremberg party days. . . . These similarities are not, of course, accidental; they cannot simply be explained by the fact that both Hitler and Stalin had been members of modern secret societies before they became totalitarian leaders—Hitler in the secret service of the Reichswehr and Stalin in the conspiratorial section of the Bolshevik party. They are to some extent the natural outcome of the conspiracy fiction of totalitarianism whose organizations supposedly have been founded to counteract secret societies—the secret society of the Jews or the conspiratory society of the Trotskyites.” Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1951), 361–365.
9. See especially Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, New Myth, New World: From Nietzsche to Stalinism (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 238–243, 360, 364, 372–394, 424–425; Vladimir Papernyi, Kul’tura “Dva” (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1996), 119–121, 134–135, 156, 185–186.
10. For examples see the classic by Nikolai Berdyaev, The Origin of Russian Communism, trans. R. M. French (London: Centenary Press, 1937) and the work of Klaus-Georg Riegel, e.g. “Marxism-Leninism as a Political Religion,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 6, no. 1 (2005): 97–126.
11. See also Benno Ennker and Heidi Hein-Kircher, eds., Der Führer im Europa des 20. Jahrhunderts (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2010), which comprises articles on Fascist (Mussolini, Franco, Dollfuß), Nazi (Hitler, Koch, Pavelić), Soviet (Stalin, Iaroslavsky, Brezhnev), but also Baltic (Smetona), East-Central European (Tiso, Ceauşescu) and Balkan (Tito, Hoxha) leader cults. The volume was published after I finished working on this book.
12. On the influence of Napoleon III’s image on the presentation of Alexander II see Richard Wortman, Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy, vol. 2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 24–25.
13. Matthew Truesdell, Spectacular Politics: Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte and the Fête Impériale, 1849–1870 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), vii.
14. Ibid., 164.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 27, chap. 6, 59.
17. Ibid., 53, 58.
18. Ibid., 67, 79–80.
19. Ibid., 35. Truesdell explains the downfall of the Republic partly as the result of symbolic dilemma, for the republicans had not managed “to create republican forms of festivity
that were viable alternatives to the monarchical forms that gave central symbolic place to one man.” And unlike the monarchists, the republicans were deeply divided among themselves, giving Louis-Napoleon ample opportunity to present himself as being above political divisions altogether. See ibid., 33.
20. Ibid., 75–76.
21. Ibid., 96, 152, 166.
22. Ibid., 78.
23. Ibid., 36–37.
24. Ibid., 10, 22, 51–52. Chap. 9 documents “rituals of opposition” to Napoleon III’s symbolic politics, consisting either of the subversion of Imperial spectacles or of the staging of alternative spectacles.
25. On this see Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language,” in Language and Symbolic Power, trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 43–65; Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), 14; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983); Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979).
26. See Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
27. A study on the resilience of premodern monarchic ritual in the German states well into the nineteenth century lends support to this chronology and definition of the modern personality cult. See Hubertus Büschel, Untertanenliebe: Der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770–1830 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006).
28. Wortman, Scenarios of Power, vol. 2, 211.
29. The familial image was, however, different from Nicholas I’s domestic scenario in that Alexander III’s family members functioned not as independent subjects in monarchic representations, but as objects of the tsar’s affection. Not the tsar’s family, but the tsar’s family life, apart from public ceremonies, assumed a sacred character. Thus Alexander III was the first tsar to adhere to the Western middle-class ideal of separate private vs. public lives. See ibid., 278–279.