The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power by Jan Plamper (review)

Jan Plamper's The Stalin Cult is a thorough, well-researched monograph about the cult's production, from Iosif Stalin's official 50th birthday celebration in December 1929 through his death in 1953. Plamper focuses on the creation and dissemination of visual materials, including representations of the dictator in Pravda, socialist realist painting, and film. Although some of Plamper's attempts to "add value" to the book, most prominently his claim to be elucidating the cult's "alchemy of power," do not succeed, The Stalin Cult is well worth reading for any student of Stalinism or of modern personality cults throughout the world.

Chapter 1, "Paths to the Stalin Cult," traces the development of modern personality cults from Napoleon III through the interwar period, as well as the tendency of the prerevolutionary radical Russian intelligentsia to organize around charismatic leaders. In the chapter's conclusion, Plamper briefly outlines the emergence of a cult of Vladimir Lenin following the Bolshevik leader's death. The material in this chapter is fascinating, but Plamper does not connect the development of the Lenin and Stalin cults directly to the international context he limns earlier. He does not discuss Bolshevik leaders' knowledge or views of personality cults in other societies, nor does he ask whether the Lenin cult emerged out of a series of ad hoc decisions or a deliberate process of construction by party leaders. This last point seems especially important to explore, given Plamper's claim that the Stalin cult was deliberately constructed, above all by the dictator himself.

In chapter 2, Plamper tracks representations of Stalin in Pravda from 1929 through 1953, noting changes over time in the frequency and types of images. One of the book's most intriguing observations is the increasing use of Stalin's absence to represent his "presence," as in a socialist realist painting of Soviet citizens crowding round a radio to hear the dictator speak. Regrettably, in this case as in others, Plamper does not offer an explanation of this shift, beyond a one-sentence suggestion that it was intended to prepare the population for the ruler's death. However, Plamper's discussion of the compositional structure and symbolism of socialist realist paintings (in chapter 3, "Stalin's Image in Space") includes both description and incisive analysis.

The second part of The Stalin Cult (chapters 4-6) is devoted to the production of Stalin images, chiefly in socialist realist painting. Early on, Plamper uses scattered archival evidence to argue that Stalin closely managed his own cult. This evidence is intriguing but is insufficient to make a definitive case, and Plamper does not consider the possibility that artists and officials were "working toward the vozhd (chief )," making educated guesses in response to indirect central signals regarding the kinds of images that would please Stalin. Plamper's hypothesis that Stalin deliberately left an archival paper trail showing his "modesty" is unsupported. On the other hand, Plamper makes the excellent general point that Soviet leaders, in contrast to the Nazis and Fascists, had to present the Stalin cult as unwanted by the "chief " because of the collectivism inherent in Marxist ideology.

Much of the second half of The Stalin Cult is a thick description of the production of socialist realist paintings of Stalin. Plamper details Kliment Voroshilov's role as the figure in the party leadership who was the chief patron of painters. Plamper surveys the practices of subpatronage, the rhetoric of letters between patrons and clients, and the construction of special communities for artists, in particular the artists' housing complex on Upper Maslovka Street in Moscow. He concludes his examination of patronage with a flourish regarding the "mutually reinforcing nexus between personality cult and patronage" that, he claims, came out of the "demiurgic realization" of the socialist project (p. 164). Yet Plamper has not actually made a case for this in his thick description—it remains a flourish and no more.

Plamper's examination of the actual production...