by Jan Plamper
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 183, 214, 221, 230–231.
32. Ibid., 383.
33. Ibid., 344. At the coronation, the national element of monarchic representations had also been expanded, with the tsar and his wife changing—as the first royal couple since Peter I—from Western dress to Russian dress at the ball. See ibid., 378.
34. Ibid., 366.
35. Ibid., 421 (emphasis in original).
36. The numbers of printed verbal and visual depictions of the tsar increased tremendously and spread throughout the countryside through the network of outlets of Ivan Sytin’s publishing house. See ibid., 488.
37. Ibid., 501.
38. For another study of the rupture of the bond between the tsar and his subjects between 1861 and 1917, much of it based on an analysis of petitions to the special Chancellery of His Imperial Highness for the Receipt of Petitions, see G. V. Lobacheva, Samoderzhets i Rossiia: Obraz tsaria v massovom soznanii rossiian (konets XIX–nachalo XX vekov) (Saratov: Saratovskii Tekhnicheskii Universitet, 1999).
39. The phrase “royal carryover” is in Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 18.
40. Quoted in D. L. Brandenberger and A. M. Dubrovsky, “‘The People Need a Tsar’: The Emergence of National Bolshevism as Stalinist Ideology, 1931–1941,” Europe-Asia Studies 50, no. 5 (1998): 873 (and for a careful attribution of the source 884 n. 4). Brandenberger and Dubrovsky interpret the quote as testifying to Stalin’s étatism rather than his tolerance of Bolshevik personality cult inspired by a tsar cult.
41. Thanks to John G. Ackerman for coining the phrase “the revenge of Muscovy” in a 13 November 2004 letter. Boris Souvarine spoke of the Stalin cult as “historic atavism of ancient Muscovy.” Boris Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, trans. C. L. R. James (New York: Alliance, 1939), 510.
42. See Daniel Field, Rebels in the Name of the Tsar (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1976), 1–26.
43. On Russia and mass society in the wake of the Great War see Stephen Kotkin, “Modern Times: The Soviet Union and the Interwar Conjuncture,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 2, no. 1 (2001): 111–164, esp. 127–127 and David L. Hoffmann, Cultivating the Masses: Modern State Practices and Soviet Socialism, [1914–1939] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011).
44. Warren Susman’s argument about the rise of individual personality as a value in mass society is elaborated in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, “The ‘Culture’ of Personality: Mussolini and the Cinematic Imagination,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism, ed. Heller and Plamper, 83–107.
45. Quoted in Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924 (London: PIMLICO, 1997), 350.
46. Ibid., 351.
47. On the Kerensky cult see ibid., 338, 437–438, 448–449. Further see A. G. Golikov, “Fenomen Kerenskogo,” Otechestvennaia istoriia, no. 5 (1992): 60–73; Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), chap. 3; Boris Kolonitskii, Simvoly vlasti i bor’ba za vlast’: K izucheniiu politicheskoi kul’tury rossiiskoi revoliutsii 1917 goda (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2001); Kolonitskii, “‘Democracy’ in the Political Consciousness of the February Revolution,” Slavic Review 57, no. 1 (1998): 95–106, esp. 105; Kolonitskii, “K izucheniiu mekhanizma desakralizatsii monarkhii (Slukhi i ‘politicheskaia pornografiia’ v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny),” in Istorik i revoliutsiia: Sbornik statei k 70-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia Olega Nikolaevicha Znamenskogo, ed. N. N. Smirnov, B. I. Kolonitskii, and V. Iu. Cherniaev (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999), 72–86; Kolonitskii, “‘We’ and ‘I’: Alexander Kerensky in His Speeches,” in Autobiographical Practices in Russia—Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland, ed. Jochen Hellbeck and Klaus Heller (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht unipress, 2004), 179–196.
48. Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 442–443.
49. Kolonitskii also emphasizes the interrelatedness of all Bolshevik cults—of Trotsky, Lenin, and those of Red Civil War field commanders. Boris Kolonitskii, 8 September 2009 and 16 August 2010 email communications.
50. Mussolini’s cult rule was preceded by Gabriele D’Annunzio’s rule in Fiume during 1919–1920, in which the poet tried to overcome the specter of parliamentary democratic politics with harmonizing, unifying aesthetics, spectacle, symbols, oratory, and crowd hypnosis. On D’Annunzio’s cult see Michael A. Ledeen, The First Duce: D’Annunzio at Fiume (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977); Charles S. Maier, Recasting Bourgeois Europe: Stabilization in France, Germany, and Italy in the Decade after World War I (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 114–134.
51. Mussolini quoted in Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini’s Italy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 33. On Mussolini’s cult also see R. J. B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism (London: Edward Arnold, 1998); “Charisma and the Cult of Personality in Modern Italy,” special issue, Modern Italy 3, no. 2 (1998). On public spectacles, including those involving the Mussolini cult, see Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). For a review of literature on Italian Fascist culture, symbols, myths, rituals, and cults see Roger Griffin, “The Primacy of Culture: The Current Growth (or Manufacture) of Consensus within Fascist Studies,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 1 (2002): 21–43.
52. There was also a strong tradition of Russian Le Bonism, and it may have helped lay the intellectual foundation for the Stalin cult. See, for example, N. A. Ukhach-Ogovorich, Psikhologiia tolpy i armiia (Kiev: Tipografiia S. V. Kul’zhenko, 1911), 18–24.
53. See Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). Falasca-Zamponi has argued that the “political religion” approach of Gentile cannot capture the cultural specificity of the Mussolini cult. See her Fascist Spectacle, 7–8, 187–188.
54. On this rivalry see Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV, and Maria Goloubeva, The Glorification of Emperor Leopold I in Image, Spectacle and Text (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000).
55. See Ludolf Herbst, “Der Fall Hitler—Inszenierungskunst und Charismapolitik,” in Virtuosen der Macht: Herrschaft und Charisma von Perikles bis Mao, ed. Wilfried Nippel (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2000), 183; Herbst, Hitlers Charisma: Die Erfindung eines deutschen Messias (Frankfurt/Main: S. Fischer, 2010).
56. See David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism”; Michael David-Fox, “The Intelligentsia, the Masses, and the West: Particularities of Russian-Soviet Modernity,” in David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia (Pitts-burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, forthcoming). For a similar emphasis on “comparisons,” “affinities,” and “areas of convergence,” while stressing that “to compare is not to equate,” see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt’s America, Mussolini’s Italy, and Hitler’s Germany,1933–1939 (New York: Metropolitan, 2006), 10–11, 13, 15.
57. See Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Vom Beginn des Ersten Weltkriegs bis zur Gründung der beiden deutschen Staaten, vol. 4 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2003), 551–563. Despite countless books on Hitler there is no study of the Hitler cult (Ian Kershaw’s The “Hitler Myth”: Image and Reality in the Third Reich [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987] is on popular reactions to Hitler and his politics as recorded in surveillance reports). For the first overview of the literature on symbolic politics in the Third Reich see Henning Bühmann, “Der Hitlerkult: Ein Forschungsbericht,” in Personality Cults in Stalinism, ed. Heller and Plamper, 109–157.
58. On the Pilsudski cult see Heidi Hein, Der Pilsudski-Kult und seine Bedeutung für den polnischen Staat: 1926–1939 (Marburg: Herder-Institut, 2002).
59. This account is based on Ulrich Keller, “Franklin D. Roosevelts Bildpropa
ganda im historischen und systematischen Vergleich,” in Führerbilder: Hitler, Mussolini, Roosevelt, Stalin in Fotografie und Film, ed. Martin Loiperdinger et al. (Munich: Piper, 1995), 135–165; David Culbert, “Franklin D. Roosevelt: Das Image des ‘demokratischen’ Führers in Wochenschau und Radio,” ibid., 166–188. Also see Patrick J. Maney, The Roosevelt Presence: A Biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (New York: Macmillan International, 1992).
60. Keller, “Franklin D. Roosevelts Bildpropaganda,” 144–145.
61. Goebbels quoted in Sabine Behrenbeck, “‘Der Führer’: Die Einführung eines politischen Markenartikels,” in Propaganda in Deutschland: Zur Geschichte der politischen Massenbeeinflussung im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gerald Diesener and Rainer Gries (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 51.
62. The canonization thesis is in Culbert, “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” 170.
63. Term from Keller, “Franklin D. Roosevelts Bildpropaganda,” 148.
64. Ibid., 149.
65. Ibid., 152. In the Soviet Union, by contrast, “agitation and propaganda” were positive terms connoting enlightenment rather than manipulation. See Matthew Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution, and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7, 249.
66. Timothy Garton Ash quoted in Truesdell, Spectacular Politics, 10.
67. Keller, “Franklin D. Roosevelts Bildpropaganda,” 161.
68. On Kleinbort see Mark Steinberg: “Indeed, in the view of one astute contemporary observer of working-class attitudes in Russia [Kleinbort], a fully developed kul’t lichnosti . . . or kul’t cheloveka . . . existed in the discourse of activist Russian workers,” and “A comparable expression had been used earlier by Emile Durkheim. . . . Although Kleinbort employs ‘kul’t cheloveka’ in quotation marks, he mentions no source.” Mark Steinberg, “The Injured and Insurgent Self: The Moral Imagination of Russia’s Lower-Class Writers,” in Workers and Intelligentsia in Late Imperial Russia: Realities, Representations, Reflections, ed. Reginald E. Zelnik (Berkeley: International and Area Studies, 1999), 310, 325 n. 2. For Plekhanov see George Plekhanov, “On the Role of the Individual in History,” in Russian Philosophy, ed. James M. Edie et al., vol. 3 (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1965), 368–370.
69. The voluntarist Nietzschean element in Lenin’s personality, for instance, was perceived as un-Russian and very effective at the same time. See Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 392. Also see Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal, ed., Nietzsche and Soviet Culture: Ally and Adversary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Hans Günther, Der sozialistische Übermensch: M. Gor’kij und der sowjetische Heldenmythos (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1993).
70. As Figes has written, “Much of Lenin’s success in 1917 was no doubt explained by his towering domination over the party. No other political party had ever been so closely tied to the personality of a single man. Lenin was the first modern party leader to achieve the status of a god: Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler and Mao Zedong were all his successors in this sense. Being a Bolshevik had come to imply an oath of allegiance to Lenin as both the ‘leader’ and ‘teacher’ of the party. It was this, above all, which distinguished the Bolsheviks from the Mensheviks (who had no clear leader of their own).” Figes, A People’s Tragedy, 391.
71. See Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle; Walker, “Kruzhkovaia kul’tura i stanovlenie sovetskoi intelligentsii: Na primere Maksimiliana Voloshina i Maksima Gor’kogo,” Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie 40, no. 6 (1999): 210–222; Walker, “On Reading Soviet Memoirs: A History of the ‘Contemporaries’ Genre as an Institution of Russian Intelligentsia Culture from the 1790s to the 1970s,” Russian Review 59, no. 3 (2000): 327–352; Walker, “Kruzhok Culture and the Meaning of Patronage in the Early Soviet Literary World,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 1 (2002): 107–123. Formal university education introduced circle-like seminars in the late nineteenth century. Often these seminars were taught at home, and often university teachers were held in esteem by their students in ways reminiscent of the reverence accorded to circle leaders. See Andy Byford, “Initiation to Scholarship: The University Seminar in Late Imperial Russia,” Russian Review 64, no. 2 (2005): 299–323.
72. Quoted from Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 144.
73. Anna Ostroumova-Lebedeva quoted in Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle, 182. On the cult-building around Voloshin after his death in 1932, especially during Khrushchev’s Thaw, see ibid., 189–190, 193–196.
74. On the relationship between ruler and poet as manifest, for example, in odes to the three eighteenth-century empresses, see Harsha Ram, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), esp. chap. 2.
75. Andrei Turgenev and his Friendly Literary Society of 1801 likely was the first, Nikolai Stankevich and his circle of Russian Hegelians of the 1830s was the most famous.
76. For a historical sketch of Russian circles from the late eighteenth century onward see Walker, Maximilian Voloshin and the Russian Literary Circle, 8–9, 13–15.
77. See, for example, Ram, The Imperial Sublime, 126–127.
78. Alexander Zholkovsky, “The Obverse of Stalinism: Akhmatova’s Self-Serving Charisma of Selflessness,” in Self and Story in Russian History, ed. Laura Engelstein and Stephanie Sandler (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 68.
79. Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography (London: Macmillan, 2000), 71. John Markovic found that at least 190 revolutionaries were socialized in kruzhki. His findings are based on a working sample of 1,144 biographies of revolutionaries in the first and third editions of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, with data on circle activity missing for 954 individuals. See John Markovic, “Socialization and Radicalization in Russia, 1861–1917: An Analysis of the Personal Backgrounds of Russian Revolutionaries” (Ph.D. diss., Bowling Green State University, 1990), 104–105.
80. Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 16; Sergo Beriia, Moi otets Beriia: V koridorakh stalinskoi vlasti, trans. from French by N. M. Stambulian (Moscow: OLMA-PRESS, 2002), 16.
81. Stepan A. Mikoian, Vospominaniia voennogo letchika-ispytatelia (Moscow: Izdatel’skii Dom “Tekhnika—Molodezhi,” 2002), 8.
82. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 31 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Nauchnoe Izdatel’stvo “Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia,” 1955), 171; Oleg V. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze, trans. David J. Nordlander, ed. Donald Raleigh (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), 10.
83. See Sandra Dahlke, Individuum und Herrschaft im Stalinismus: Emel’jan Jaroslavskij (1878–1943) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2010), 38.
84. Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 2nd ed., vol. 28 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Nauchnoe Izdatel’stvo “Bol’shaia Sovetskaia Entsiklopediia,” 1954), 152.
85. Kliment E. Voroshilov, Rasskazy o zhizni (Vospominaniia), vol. 1 (Moscow: Politizdat, 1968), 69, 90.
86. Ibid., 139–141.
87. Quoted from Robert McNeal, Stalin: Man and Ruler (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 9.
88. Robert C. Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 1879–1929: A Study in History and Personality (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 85. As always with Stalin’s early years, the source for this is the only extant account of Stalin’s youth by his former friend and later émigré: Joseph Iremaschwili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens: Erinnerungen (Berlin: n.p., 1932). For a review of the first Stalin biographies see Christoph Mick, “Frühe Stalin-Biographien 1928–1932,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 36, no. 3 (1988): 403–423.
89. See James von Geldern, Bolshevik Festivals, 1917–1925 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 82–84; Richard Stites, Revolutionary Dreams: utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 65, 88–93.
90. For the argument of Fedorovian continuit
y see Nina Tumarkin, Lenin Lives! The Lenin Cult in Soviet Russia (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). For the ad hoc thesis see Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion. For the Lenin cult as political religion see L. A. Andreeva, Religiia i vlast’ v Rossii: Religioznye i kvazireligioznye doktriny kak sposob legitimizatsii politicheskoi vlasti v Rossii (Moscow: Ladomir, 2001). For the public reception of Lenin as related in surveillance reports see Olga Velikanova, The Public Perception of the Cult of Lenin Based on Archival Materials (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 2001); Velikanova, Making of an Idol: On Uses of Lenin (Göttingen: Muster-Schmidt, 1996). On the Lenin museums as part of the Lenin cult see Velikanova, “Der Lenin-Kult in sowjetischen Museen,” Osteuropa 43, no. 10 (1993): 929–938. Further see Claudio Sergio Ingerflom and Tamara Kondratieva, “Pourquoi la Russie s’agite-t-elle autour de Lénine?” in La Mort du Roi: Autour de François Miterrand. Essai d’ethnographie politique comparée, ed. Jacques Julliard (Paris: Gallimard, 1999), 261–292; François-Xavier Coquin, “L’image de Lénine dans l’iconographie révolutionnaire et postrévolutionnaire,” Annales: Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 44, no. 2 (1989): 223–249.
91. See Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion, 120–228.
92. See ibid., 267–270.
93. Both quoted ibid., 268.
94. Walter Benjamin, “Moskau,” in Denkbilder (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), 48.
95. Both Robert Tucker and Nina Tumarkin supported the thesis that Stalin orchestrated the Lenin cult. Ultimately this thesis goes back to Nikolai Valentinov and has been convincingly proven baseless by Ennker, Die Anfänge des Leninkults in der Sowjetunion, 315–319.
96. Mikhail Yampolsky stressed this point in an interview in Oksana Bulgakowa, Frieda Grabe, and Enno Patalas, Stalin—Eine Mosfilmproduktion (Westdeutscher Rundfunk documentary film in color, 90 minutes, 1993).