The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of PowerBetween 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. |
Other editions - View all
Common terms and phrases
actors AKhR Aleksandr Gerasimov archive art criticism art soviet Arts Affairs artwork birthday Bolshevik Brodsky canon celebrated Central Committee circle commission Committee for Arts Comrade Stalin cult products cultural Denisov depicted Diky example exhibition February gaze Georgian Glavlit ibid institutions intelligentsia Isaak Brodsky J. V. Stalin January Kaganovich Kalinin Katsman kolkhoz Kremlin Leader Cult leader portrait Leningrad letter March mass modern personality cult Molotov Moscow MOSSKh movie Narkompros newspaper November October Revolution organized painters painting Palace of Soviets Party patron patronage personality cult photograph picture Politburo political Poskryobyshev Pravda publishing house realist Red Army representations of Stalin reproduction retouched RGALI RGASPI role Russian sacral sculpture social socialist realism Sovetskoe Iskusstvo Soviet art Soviet Union Stalin and Voroshilov Stalin cult Stalin portrait Stalinist symbolic Tretyakov Gallery tsar University Press V. I. Lenin viewer visual representations workers wrote