The Stalin cult
Subtitle: a study in the alchemy of power
By: Jan Plamper
Series: The Yale-Hoover series on Stalin, Stalinism, and the Cold War
Publisher: Hoover Institution, Stanford University; Yale University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif; New Haven
Language: eng
Number of pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9780300169522
Subjects: Politics and government; Cults; Influence; Political culture; In mass media; Public opinion; Mass media; History
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Paths to the Stalin cult; title: pt. 1. Cult products; title: Stalin's image in time; title: Stalin's image in space; title: pt. 2. Cult production; title: The political is personal, art is political : Stalin, the cult, and patronage; title: How to paint the leader? Institutions of cult production; title: The audience as cult producer : exhibition comment books and notes at celebrity evenings; title: Appendix: The statistics of visual representations of Stalin in Pravda.