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Yale-Hoover Series on Authoritarian Regimes
The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power
Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 17, 2012
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About the author
Jan Plamper
11 books2 followersJan Plamper is a German professor of history at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research interests include Russian history and the history of emotions.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 15, 2022
When readers across the Soviet Union opened their copies of the newspaper Pravda on December 21, 1929, they were treated to an issue celebrating the fiftieth birthday of their country’s leader, Joseph Stalin. Graced with a head shot of the man himself on the front page, the edition was filled with articles lauding his achievements, reproductions of congratulatory telegrams from Communists at home and abroad, and literary tributes to Stalin by some of the country’s most prominent writers. The issue was all the more unusual because of the fact that, despite being in control of the country for the past two years, Stalin’s representations in public until then had paled before those of Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Mikhail Kalinin.
The tribute to Stalin in Pravda was soon mirrored in other newspapers throughout the Soviet Union. Yet Jan Plamper sees this coordinated praise of Stalin as not just a celebration of his birthday, but the launch as well of a personality cult that would develop around the Soviet leader over the next 24 years and would define his image in the minds of millions of people even after his death. Focusing on Stalin’s visual representation in Soviet art and contemporary media, Plamper describes the emergence of this cult, the ways in which Stalin’s image was molded for public consumption, and the role that Stalin himself played in this process. In the process he highlights the aspects of his image that Stalin wished to feature, and how these elements changed over the course of his time in power.
Though public imagery had long been an important aspect of political power, the audience for it had changed dramatically by the time Stalin came to power. Whereas traditionally such displays by kings and tsars had been directed towards political and cultural elites, the emergence of mass politics in the 19th century demanded a different approach. Plamper sees Napoleon III as the first ruler to develop a “modern” personality cult, as the advent of universal male suffrage in France in 1848 meant that the French leader had to appeal to a mass audience in order to maintain his power. Napoleon’s use of public spectacles to that end was emulated by others as public participation in politics became more common by the start of the 20th century. Even the Bolsheviks developed personality cults around leaders such as Lenin, even though individual veneration ran contrary to Marxist ideology.
Thanks to these precursors, Stalin had a wealth of examples upon which to draw when he began constructing his own personality cult in the 1930s. This was introduced very slowly, however, as after the birthday celebrations over three years passed before representations of Stalin became more prominent. Plamper attributes this delay to the initial setback in the collectivization drive, as Stalin did not want to linked with the upheavals taking place throughout the Soviet Union. In mid-1933, however, the campaign took off in earnest. Plamper uses Stalin’s representations in Pravda as the main metric of this campaign, noting how the newspaper was used not just to propagate official Communist Party messaging, but to set the line followed by media elsewhere. Through the carefully-staged photographs published in its pages, an image was propagated of Stalin as a wise ruler who was central to Soviet rule and who was beloved by his people.
This image was also conveyed through to portraiture by contemporary artists, which Plamper examines from a variety of perspectives. He devotes considerable space to analyzing Aleksandr Gerasimov’s 1938 painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, presenting it as emblematic of the Stalin-centric paintings of the era. Yet Plamper also addresses two additional, often overlooked, factors which are important to this aspect of propaganda: the patronage provided to artists; and the reproduction of their work for general circulation on posters, postcards, and other media. In the absence of a propaganda ministry much of this was managed by Stalin’s secretariat in the midst of their other activities, which limited the extent of their control and sometimes engendered Stalin’s criticism as a result.
Plamper argues that this limited control was a conscious choice on Stalin’s part, as the Soviet leader preferred to minimize his role in promoting the cult so as to cultivate a belief that it was the product of grassroots spontaneity. Here the author demonstrates the challenges he faced in writing such a book, as his interpretation fills in the gaps in the available sources. This is also reflected in his limited examination of the popular reception of the cult within the Soviet Union and the lack of attention to its role in Soviet politics, both of which are more challenging, if not impossible, to determine. Though this is a flaw in Plamper’s analysis, it also makes what he achieves within its pages all the more impressive. Within its limits he has produced an excellent study of the development of Stalin’s personality cult and the images of the Soviet ruler that it fostered. It’s a fascinating work that is worth reading not just as a study of Stalin or Soviet culture during his rule, but for its description of the art of image construction for personality cults more generally.
The tribute to Stalin in Pravda was soon mirrored in other newspapers throughout the Soviet Union. Yet Jan Plamper sees this coordinated praise of Stalin as not just a celebration of his birthday, but the launch as well of a personality cult that would develop around the Soviet leader over the next 24 years and would define his image in the minds of millions of people even after his death. Focusing on Stalin’s visual representation in Soviet art and contemporary media, Plamper describes the emergence of this cult, the ways in which Stalin’s image was molded for public consumption, and the role that Stalin himself played in this process. In the process he highlights the aspects of his image that Stalin wished to feature, and how these elements changed over the course of his time in power.
Though public imagery had long been an important aspect of political power, the audience for it had changed dramatically by the time Stalin came to power. Whereas traditionally such displays by kings and tsars had been directed towards political and cultural elites, the emergence of mass politics in the 19th century demanded a different approach. Plamper sees Napoleon III as the first ruler to develop a “modern” personality cult, as the advent of universal male suffrage in France in 1848 meant that the French leader had to appeal to a mass audience in order to maintain his power. Napoleon’s use of public spectacles to that end was emulated by others as public participation in politics became more common by the start of the 20th century. Even the Bolsheviks developed personality cults around leaders such as Lenin, even though individual veneration ran contrary to Marxist ideology.
Thanks to these precursors, Stalin had a wealth of examples upon which to draw when he began constructing his own personality cult in the 1930s. This was introduced very slowly, however, as after the birthday celebrations over three years passed before representations of Stalin became more prominent. Plamper attributes this delay to the initial setback in the collectivization drive, as Stalin did not want to linked with the upheavals taking place throughout the Soviet Union. In mid-1933, however, the campaign took off in earnest. Plamper uses Stalin’s representations in Pravda as the main metric of this campaign, noting how the newspaper was used not just to propagate official Communist Party messaging, but to set the line followed by media elsewhere. Through the carefully-staged photographs published in its pages, an image was propagated of Stalin as a wise ruler who was central to Soviet rule and who was beloved by his people.
This image was also conveyed through to portraiture by contemporary artists, which Plamper examines from a variety of perspectives. He devotes considerable space to analyzing Aleksandr Gerasimov’s 1938 painting Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin, presenting it as emblematic of the Stalin-centric paintings of the era. Yet Plamper also addresses two additional, often overlooked, factors which are important to this aspect of propaganda: the patronage provided to artists; and the reproduction of their work for general circulation on posters, postcards, and other media. In the absence of a propaganda ministry much of this was managed by Stalin’s secretariat in the midst of their other activities, which limited the extent of their control and sometimes engendered Stalin’s criticism as a result.
Plamper argues that this limited control was a conscious choice on Stalin’s part, as the Soviet leader preferred to minimize his role in promoting the cult so as to cultivate a belief that it was the product of grassroots spontaneity. Here the author demonstrates the challenges he faced in writing such a book, as his interpretation fills in the gaps in the available sources. This is also reflected in his limited examination of the popular reception of the cult within the Soviet Union and the lack of attention to its role in Soviet politics, both of which are more challenging, if not impossible, to determine. Though this is a flaw in Plamper’s analysis, it also makes what he achieves within its pages all the more impressive. Within its limits he has produced an excellent study of the development of Stalin’s personality cult and the images of the Soviet ruler that it fostered. It’s a fascinating work that is worth reading not just as a study of Stalin or Soviet culture during his rule, but for its description of the art of image construction for personality cults more generally.
May 25, 2022
“You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!’”
“Stalin’s portraits had saturated Soviet space, and through portraits Soviet citizens formed an image of their omnipresent leader”
“A woman fainting when she saw Stalin, a writer working himself into a state of ecstasy when in physical proximity to Stalin, a future dissident suffering from nightmares about Stalin getting poisoned, victims of Stalin’s violent policies dying of heart attacks when hearing about Stalin’s death—these testimonies seem the stuff of mystery, magic, and transcendence.”
“The Stalin portraits, posters, drawings, statues, busts, films, plays, poems, and songs, which I collectively call “cult products,” did not arise ex nihilo”
“These practices—or the “cult production”—can be reconstructed”
“The cult began on 21 December 1929, when on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday Stalin was glorified on a broad scale in various media—first and foremost in central newspapers like Pravda”
“In mid-1933 the cult took off in earnest and by the end of the 1930s his depiction in the various media had coalesced into a coherent system of signs—a canon—that was maintained from then on, even though it still evolved”
“This book focuses on 1929–1953, the active period of the cult during Stalin’s lifetime. It also focuses on a specific place: Soviet Russia”
“its center of gravity is Stalin portraiture, specifically oil painting”
“Other media copied the master medium. Oil painting and photography were at the top of the hierarchy until they ceded this position to film in the second half of the 1930s. Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October, released in 1937, was the first movie starring an actor as Stalin, and from then on cinema became the master medium.”
“The Stalin cult was an overwhelmingly visual phenomenon, tailored to a population whose mental universe was shaped primarily by images, as opposed to written words”
“Many Soviet citizens could access Stalin only visually, and those who had just learned to read and write still perceived the world primarily through images”
“Stalin quite simply “was.” He, and only he, embodied the endpoint of the utopian timeline”
“What is a personality cult? There are many definitions, and the first distinction I make is between the historical term “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti in Russian) and the analytical term “personality cult.”
“personality cult to be the symbolic elevation of one person much above others”
“focusing on living or deceased real human persons”
“These persons as cult objects are all from the sphere of politics”
“Through the process of elevation the person who is glorified in a cult comes to be endowed with something I will interchangeably call “sacrality” and “sacral aura.”
“Through the process of elevation the person who is glorified in a cult comes to be endowed with something I will interchangeably call “sacrality” and “sacral aura.”
“My understanding of sacrality is indebted to the work of the sociologist Edward Shils”
“society has a center. There is a central zone in the structure of society.”
“the central zone partakes of the nature of the sacred.”
“Authority enjoys appreciation because it arouses sentiments of sacredness. Sacredness by its nature is authoritative. Those persons, offices, or symbols endowed with it, however indirectly and remotely, are therewith endowed with some measure of authoritativeness.”
“While sacrality shares features of Max Weber’s concept of “charisma,” sacrality has a number of distinct advantages for an analysis of modern personality cults. One is its flexibility”
“Sacrality is a concept that does justice to both the premodern and the modern elements in the phenomenon of the Stalin cult.”
“And indeed, Stalin portraits were sometimes hung in the “red corner,” the place in a room formerly reserved for the icon.”
“like icons, they were perceived as performative images that enact a change in the viewer”
“The colors used in Stalin portraits sometimes suggested the symbolic valence of colors in Russian icons”
“One cannot simply equate icons and Stalin portraits, however. To do so is to gloss over other influences and qualities that are specific to Stalin portraiture”
“the realist tradition . . .”
“Knowledge of icons will not explain the direction of Stalin’s gaze, which was invariably directed at a focal point outside the picture; for Stalin was perceived as the embodiment of the linear, Marxist force of History”
“Finally, the concrete practices by which these images were produced obviously bore scant resemblance to the crafting of icons.”
“This book places the Stalin cult squarely within the rubric of modern political personality cults”
“First, all modern personality cults were the children of mass politics: they were directed at (and derived their legitimacy from) the entire population, the “masses,” whereas monarchical cults were often directed at (and depended on the allegiance of) an elite group.”
“Second, they all used modern mass media that allowed for the mass dissemination of cult products such as films and posters, whereas earlier cults had reached only a limited number of people”
“Third, modern personality cults emerged only in closed societies”
“Fourth, modern personality cults were invariably children of a secular age, one which had expelled God—however imperfectly—from society’s metaphysical space.”
“The modern leader cults must be understood in the context of popular sovereignty: the modern leader’s body now absorbs all of the sacral aura and serves as metaphor for everything, for all of (homogenized) society”
“after the French Revolution the leader’s body came to represent the totality of society. Fifth and finally, the modern personality cult was an exclusively patricentric phenomenon: the objects of veneration in modern personality cults were men, whereas premodern cults had often celebrated queens, tsaritsas, and princesses”
“And yet, despite all the differences, there are certain discomforting commonalities between modern personality cults and the image politics practiced in more open societies”
“For most of its history the Soviet Union officially condemned “personality cults.”
“Even while Stalin was being glorified, inside the Soviet Union it was impossible to speak of a “personality cult.”
“In seeking to reconstruct the cult’s hidden history, then, the researcher must scour the sources for an object that, in official terms, did not—and could not—exist”
“the Soviet Union never generated straightforward records revealing how its cults were made.”
“Instead, Soviet embarrassment over the existence of a Stalin cult obliges the historian to perform his detective work in an unusually wide range of sometimes unlikely sources from every corner of Soviet life.”
“In fact, this study presupposes that the modes of cult/ural production cannot be divorced from cult/ural products, that the meaning of a cult product is always constituted in a loop that includes the ways in which the cult product was made.”
“I conclude that there never was anything like a “Stalin cult ministry” but instead a multitude of personal and institutional actors vied for influence in cult-making”
“How are we to understand a woman who faints on seeing Stalin, a writer deemed an anti-Stalinist who works himself into a state of ecstasy on coming close to Stalin’s physical body, a future dissident who suffers nightmares about Stalin being poisoned, victims of Stalin’s violent policies who die of heart attack on hearing of Stalin’s death? In short, what really went on between ruler and ruled?”
“Stalin’s portraits had saturated Soviet space, and through portraits Soviet citizens formed an image of their omnipresent leader”
“A woman fainting when she saw Stalin, a writer working himself into a state of ecstasy when in physical proximity to Stalin, a future dissident suffering from nightmares about Stalin getting poisoned, victims of Stalin’s violent policies dying of heart attacks when hearing about Stalin’s death—these testimonies seem the stuff of mystery, magic, and transcendence.”
“The Stalin portraits, posters, drawings, statues, busts, films, plays, poems, and songs, which I collectively call “cult products,” did not arise ex nihilo”
“These practices—or the “cult production”—can be reconstructed”
“The cult began on 21 December 1929, when on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday Stalin was glorified on a broad scale in various media—first and foremost in central newspapers like Pravda”
“In mid-1933 the cult took off in earnest and by the end of the 1930s his depiction in the various media had coalesced into a coherent system of signs—a canon—that was maintained from then on, even though it still evolved”
“This book focuses on 1929–1953, the active period of the cult during Stalin’s lifetime. It also focuses on a specific place: Soviet Russia”
“its center of gravity is Stalin portraiture, specifically oil painting”
“Other media copied the master medium. Oil painting and photography were at the top of the hierarchy until they ceded this position to film in the second half of the 1930s. Mikhail Romm’s Lenin in October, released in 1937, was the first movie starring an actor as Stalin, and from then on cinema became the master medium.”
“The Stalin cult was an overwhelmingly visual phenomenon, tailored to a population whose mental universe was shaped primarily by images, as opposed to written words”
“Many Soviet citizens could access Stalin only visually, and those who had just learned to read and write still perceived the world primarily through images”
“Stalin quite simply “was.” He, and only he, embodied the endpoint of the utopian timeline”
“What is a personality cult? There are many definitions, and the first distinction I make is between the historical term “cult of personality” (kul’t lichnosti in Russian) and the analytical term “personality cult.”
“personality cult to be the symbolic elevation of one person much above others”
“focusing on living or deceased real human persons”
“These persons as cult objects are all from the sphere of politics”
“Through the process of elevation the person who is glorified in a cult comes to be endowed with something I will interchangeably call “sacrality” and “sacral aura.”
“Through the process of elevation the person who is glorified in a cult comes to be endowed with something I will interchangeably call “sacrality” and “sacral aura.”
“My understanding of sacrality is indebted to the work of the sociologist Edward Shils”
“society has a center. There is a central zone in the structure of society.”
“the central zone partakes of the nature of the sacred.”
“Authority enjoys appreciation because it arouses sentiments of sacredness. Sacredness by its nature is authoritative. Those persons, offices, or symbols endowed with it, however indirectly and remotely, are therewith endowed with some measure of authoritativeness.”
“While sacrality shares features of Max Weber’s concept of “charisma,” sacrality has a number of distinct advantages for an analysis of modern personality cults. One is its flexibility”
“Sacrality is a concept that does justice to both the premodern and the modern elements in the phenomenon of the Stalin cult.”
“And indeed, Stalin portraits were sometimes hung in the “red corner,” the place in a room formerly reserved for the icon.”
“like icons, they were perceived as performative images that enact a change in the viewer”
“The colors used in Stalin portraits sometimes suggested the symbolic valence of colors in Russian icons”
“One cannot simply equate icons and Stalin portraits, however. To do so is to gloss over other influences and qualities that are specific to Stalin portraiture”
“the realist tradition . . .”
“Knowledge of icons will not explain the direction of Stalin’s gaze, which was invariably directed at a focal point outside the picture; for Stalin was perceived as the embodiment of the linear, Marxist force of History”
“Finally, the concrete practices by which these images were produced obviously bore scant resemblance to the crafting of icons.”
“This book places the Stalin cult squarely within the rubric of modern political personality cults”
“First, all modern personality cults were the children of mass politics: they were directed at (and derived their legitimacy from) the entire population, the “masses,” whereas monarchical cults were often directed at (and depended on the allegiance of) an elite group.”
“Second, they all used modern mass media that allowed for the mass dissemination of cult products such as films and posters, whereas earlier cults had reached only a limited number of people”
“Third, modern personality cults emerged only in closed societies”
“Fourth, modern personality cults were invariably children of a secular age, one which had expelled God—however imperfectly—from society’s metaphysical space.”
“The modern leader cults must be understood in the context of popular sovereignty: the modern leader’s body now absorbs all of the sacral aura and serves as metaphor for everything, for all of (homogenized) society”
“after the French Revolution the leader’s body came to represent the totality of society. Fifth and finally, the modern personality cult was an exclusively patricentric phenomenon: the objects of veneration in modern personality cults were men, whereas premodern cults had often celebrated queens, tsaritsas, and princesses”
“And yet, despite all the differences, there are certain discomforting commonalities between modern personality cults and the image politics practiced in more open societies”
“For most of its history the Soviet Union officially condemned “personality cults.”
“Even while Stalin was being glorified, inside the Soviet Union it was impossible to speak of a “personality cult.”
“In seeking to reconstruct the cult’s hidden history, then, the researcher must scour the sources for an object that, in official terms, did not—and could not—exist”
“the Soviet Union never generated straightforward records revealing how its cults were made.”
“Instead, Soviet embarrassment over the existence of a Stalin cult obliges the historian to perform his detective work in an unusually wide range of sometimes unlikely sources from every corner of Soviet life.”
“In fact, this study presupposes that the modes of cult/ural production cannot be divorced from cult/ural products, that the meaning of a cult product is always constituted in a loop that includes the ways in which the cult product was made.”
“I conclude that there never was anything like a “Stalin cult ministry” but instead a multitude of personal and institutional actors vied for influence in cult-making”
“How are we to understand a woman who faints on seeing Stalin, a writer deemed an anti-Stalinist who works himself into a state of ecstasy on coming close to Stalin’s physical body, a future dissident who suffers nightmares about Stalin being poisoned, victims of Stalin’s violent policies who die of heart attack on hearing of Stalin’s death? In short, what really went on between ruler and ruled?”
February 15, 2025
Stalin is still a touchy subject in Russia. He's considered Georgian, and not a true Russian. At least, that's what all the pro-Putin "Russians" say on social media.
Despite the title and subtitle, this is an art book. It focuses on Stalin's public image from 1929 to even after his death in 1953. It focuses on paintings of Stalin, but also goes into movies, caricatures and newspaper articles. There was also a look at "comment books" of art exhibitions, showing you that having a public comment section is never a good idea.
This was an incredibly ambitious subject, considering that many Stalin images were destroyed after the tyrant's death -- and even before his death. Two boys of a prominent art collector in the USSR set fire to the collector's home, destroying hundreds of paintings, vases and letters with prominent Soviets and Old Bolsheviks. I'm not sure whether these boys should be condemned or given medals.
Plamper notes in his Introduction that getting the permissions to reproduce photographs and paintings was a job in and of itself. That this book was generously illustrated despite all of the restrictions is a remarkable achievement.
This book was written for art historians and historians of the USSR, so you need to already know many art terms and your basic Russian history. Plamper gives a very interesting argument for Napoleon III being the first modern cult of personality.
Despite the title and subtitle, this is an art book. It focuses on Stalin's public image from 1929 to even after his death in 1953. It focuses on paintings of Stalin, but also goes into movies, caricatures and newspaper articles. There was also a look at "comment books" of art exhibitions, showing you that having a public comment section is never a good idea.
This was an incredibly ambitious subject, considering that many Stalin images were destroyed after the tyrant's death -- and even before his death. Two boys of a prominent art collector in the USSR set fire to the collector's home, destroying hundreds of paintings, vases and letters with prominent Soviets and Old Bolsheviks. I'm not sure whether these boys should be condemned or given medals.
Plamper notes in his Introduction that getting the permissions to reproduce photographs and paintings was a job in and of itself. That this book was generously illustrated despite all of the restrictions is a remarkable achievement.
This book was written for art historians and historians of the USSR, so you need to already know many art terms and your basic Russian history. Plamper gives a very interesting argument for Napoleon III being the first modern cult of personality.
September 21, 2013
The author is biased and sometimes wants to say too many things at once. Still, the book presents a unique and interesting perspective, and the author has a great sense of humour.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews