International Communism and the Cult of the Individual: Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs under Lenin and Stalin, by Kevin Morgan

Abstract

Kevin Morgan has performed an inestimable service for students of international communism. His investigation of the cults erected by the leaders of Western European communist parties helps one understand why these parties gained support. But his efforts also demonstrate why the support they gained was never sufficient, during the Cold War, for them to form a government. And since in Western Europe there was never the anarchy caused by war that enabled the Bolsheviks in Russia to carry out an insurrection successfully, coups d’état were equally out of reach. One of the many virtues of Morgan’s book (a writing style that is always lucid and sometimes elegant is another) is that one finishes it with a much greater sense of why communism in Western Europe failed to provide a credible alternative not only to conservative parties but also, more critically, to Social Democracy. Morgan’s task, as he sees it, is to understand what he calls ‘the politics of personality’, by which he means the personalisation of communist parties—mostly in Western Europe, although his book contains useful insights into several in Latin America and Asia—through the establishment of cults based more on the leader’s charisma, in the Weberian sense of the word, than on the programmatic objectives or the ideological aspirations of the party itself. Morgan rightly describes the sacralisation of communist party leaders as the result of ‘[a] craving to personify a cause’. He is especially insightful on Maurice Thorez and the French Communist Party, but he also has intelligent things to say about Harry Pollitt and William Gallacher in Great Britain, Ernst Thällman in Germany, Palmiro Togliatti in Italy and Dolores Ibárurri in Spain—perhaps the most charismatic communist luminary of them all. While Morgan shows that the cults that were created around these communists shared certain features, he provides copious evidence of the distinctiveness of their parties and, by implication, of the national cultures with which these parties had to come to terms if they were to have any chance of success. In the same context, Morgan properly distinguishes the cult of the Bulgarian, Georgi Dimitrov, from the others he writes about; Dimitrov’s notoriety, both from his leadership of the Comintern and as the defendant acquitted in Nazi Germany of the charge of incinerating the Reichstag, was pan-European.