International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: leaders, tribunes and martyrs under Lenin and Stalin

1 Introduction: wherever a communist party is at work ...

This chapter sets out the rationale for a transnational study of the cult of the individual. It also outlines the theoretical and empirical bases on which the present study has been attempted. Influential studies of the best-known communist leader cults have approached describe these as a distinctive feature of ‘closed’ or totalitarian societies. In extending the discussion to the wider international communist movement, the importance is also highlighted here of a tradition of alternative, oppositional personality cults reaching back into the radical and socialist movements of the nineteenth-century. The unevenness over time and place of communist personality cults thus requires a more nuanced and historicised account which allows for this basic tension between the veneration of ruling party leaders and the promotion of oppositional ‘tribune’ figures. Variations in the incidence and character of cultic types and practices will in this account be evaluated using the heuristic devices of the integrating and enkindling cult.


2 Cult developments 1917-56


This chapter begins by outlining the key features of the Lenin and Stalin cults as projected internationally from the early 1920s to the 1950s. It then describes the internationalisation of the cult phenomenon through the promotion of a wider cast of international figures from the early 1930s. Rather than a simple unilinear process corresponding to a stalinisation narrative dating from the 1920s, the plotting of different cases internationally suggests two distinct phases in the development of the cults. The first, which became increasingly evident over the course of the 1930s, did include mimetic elements deriving from the cult of Stalin. However, it must also be understood as a form of adaptation to national histories and political cultures characteristic of the popular front approach adopted by communist parties from the mid-1930s. From the mid-1940s, a second phase can be identified of a near-ubiquitous cult of party leader according to largely standardised rituals and conventions. This was a time both of greatly extended communist influence – mass parties in the west, people’s democracies in the east – and of the intensified isolation one identifies with communist counter-societies and the iron curtain. It is to this period that the idea of a stalinisation of the cult phenomenon is most applicable.

3 Cult variations

Accounts of leader cults, left or right, tend to identify them with conditions of flux, division or upheaval in which they provided a focus for cohesion. These are characterised here as the features of an integration cult; crucially they are addressed to the consolidation or activation of some existing population or cult community, whether conceived of at the level of the party or the state. Though the Lenin and Stalin cults are typically described in this way, communist parties elsewhere were concerned, not only with consolidating, but with extending the bases of communist support to wider social and political constituencies. This is particularly apparent during the popular-front years of the 1930s in which the cult of the individual was first established as a feature of the communist movement. In seeking to mobilise support through what was typically the contestation of established authority structures, these features are characterised here as those of the enkindling cult. Employing these as heuristic devices, this chapter elaborates upon this distinction between the integrating and enkindling cult, drawing upon a wider range of international examples. It concludes with a discussion of the analytical concepts of charisma and political capital as ways of best understanding the communist cult of the individual.

4 Leader cults

This chapter begins with the central cult of Stalin. In the power struggles that followed Lenin’s death, it was Trotsky whose literary and oratorical brilliance and revolutionary accomplishments offered the promise or threat of a more personalised appropriation of Lenin’s legacy. In identifying himself with the collectivities of party, state and bureaucracy, Stalin had no such obvious personal qualities or record of achievement on which to draw. It was thus that the cult of his leadership, inextricably bound up with that of the party, was projected through the paradoxical attributes of modesty, identification with the collective and avoidance of loquacity and display. A second section considers the French communist leader Maurice Thorez. Thorez also lacked the personal political capital of some political rivals and had had no conspicuous role in the defining moment of the communists’ collective memory which was the resistance. In conditions of Cold War isolation, Thorez was also therefore an integrating figure whose cult required the marginalisation, subordination or exclusion of any personal history that might have overshadowed his own. The Briton Harry Pollitt and the Belgian Joseph Jacquemotte, discussed in a final section, exercised claims to leadership that were founded on the deployment of a personal political capital accumulated in a wider sphere of activities that predated the formation of communist parties. These were not therefore in the first instance simply integrating figures; but in tracing these parties’ histories into the Cold War years, in both cases it is the features of the integrating cult that by this time are seen to predominate.

5 Cult variations

This chapter is divided into three sections. The first considers the figure of the martyr-victim-hero through the contrasting cases of the Bulgarian Georgi Dimitrov and the German Ernst Thälmann. Both were the focus of major international campaigns in the 1930s, but it was Dimitrov’s conduct at the Reichstag fire trial of 1933 that generated support and interest beyond the usual communist circles and provided a source of personal political capital which Dimitrov for a time deployed at the head of the Communist International. The second section considers the cult of the writer. This was a long-established feature of radical movements and in a communist context it may be traced from Marx. The discussion here also focuses on the cults of writers like the Russian Maxim Gorky and the Frenchman Henri Barbusse, and describes how these were progressively subordinated to the primary cult of the party leaders whose writings came to be venerated in the form of their collected works. The third section examines the legitimation or foundation cults of an international cast of figures including Clara Zetkin in Germany, Marcel Cachin in France, Tom Mann in Britain, and W.Z. Foster in the USA. It concludes with a discussion of the posthumous foundation cult of the Italian Antonio Gramsci.

6 Cult representations

In the internationalisation of the cult phenomenon, one obvious challenge was the projection of personality across state and linguistic boundaries. Another was that posed by material and legal constraints and opportunities that varied hugely as between ruling and non-ruling communist parties. The representation of communist cult figures was thus influenced both by the skills and expectations of different audiences and by the forms of mass communication that were available in seeking to reach these audiences. This chapter begins by discussing the representation of communist cult figures through film, photography, the radio and art works, notably Picasso’s famous drawing of Stalin on his death. The chapter then discusses the paradox of the cult biography which was indispensable to the claims invested in the leader but at the same time almost impossible to construct according to the canons of the biographical genre. Stalinism is sometimes described as an age of biographical flourishing, but it is also presented here as an age of biographical devastation in which lives and persons were decimated that cast a shadow over the consummate personal history of the leader. The final section discusses the communist conception of the role of the individual in history, both in theoretical terms and through the contested historical legacies which are here described as appropriation cults.


ch 7 Cult Reflections: No Saviour from on High

Communism’s cult of the individual did not end with the Khrushchev speech. More than ever this was now a movement of global reach, and in Asia in particular integrating leader cults came to be practised on a scale surpassing even Stalin’s. Citing such cases as Nelson Mandela and the Zapatistas movement in Mexico, this concluding chapter argues that the enkindling personality has also remained a feature of the symbolic politics of the left, and is similarly discernible long before the rise of communism. What was specific to communism was the vesting of such authority in the domineering political structures whose instrument and beneficiary the leader was. The chapter concludes with the lines the communists sang in the Internationale: ‘No saviour from on high delivers, our own right hand the chains must shiver.’ Once every account if taken of the historical complexities which it reveals, the cult of the individual under communism shows how well-founded that basic impulse was.