Stalin's World by Sarah Davies

Author:Sarah Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300184723
Publisher: Yale University Press

Some of modern history's most extravagant leader cults flourished in the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the existence of these cults was always the source of some tension for the Bolsheviks. The notion that a leader should be aggrandized in such extreme fashion sat awkwardly with the party's stated commitment to Marxism and seemed uncomfortably redolent of the SRs’ proclivity to exaggerate the significance of heroic personalities.

Although Lenin did not make a particularly concerted effort to rein in the incipient cult tendencies focused on his self, he adopted a modest persona and voiced principled objections to the glorification of the individual. His words set an important precedent for his successors to follow. Before the emergence of his own full-blown cult, Stalin also denigrated various cult practices, without doing very much to terminate them. Once his cult was in full swing in the 1930s, he was under even more pressure to cultivate a modest self-image and to choose his words carefully to minimize any impression that he was encouraging the blatant adulation. Stalin embarked on a quite delicate balancing act. On the one hand, he tacitly endorsed the cult, allowing it to escalate to quite epic proportions, largely thanks to initiatives undertaken by others and without any need for specific encouragement or much positive guidance from him. At the same time, he let it be known that he was criticizing and restraining it in line with Bolshevik norms.

Stalin himself was only one of many people involved in the packaging of his image for public consumption, but his interventions played a decisive role. We now have a much clearer picture of the significance he attached to these matters. He exercised quite careful supervision over issues he considered important, prescribing detailed changes designed to ensure that the cult remained within certain boundaries. He was particularly concerned to monitor writings relating to his political biography and personal life and to scrutinize the projection of his image in major political rituals and ceremonies. Although it is true that Stalin did relatively little to halt the ever-increasing emphasis on his leadership, at certain stages he did make some effort to limit the diffusion of his image. Moreover, at his insistence, the cult remained a largely impersonal phenomenon, minimally focused on the personality and personal life of the vozhd’. The cult of the leader continued to be linked to a broader cult of the party, and Stalin strove to retain a residual notion of collective leadership, insisting that the contributions of other Bolshevik figures were not entirely overlooked. Stalin's utterances thus played an important role in the shaping of the cult. Ultimately, his balancing act proved quite successful, containing some of the ideological and political tensions of the cult, as well as enabling the system to outlive him, in the short term at least.196

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