“Lenin Is the Stalin of Today”: A Deictic Approach to the Cult of the Leader

Abstract

The cult of the leader was one of the main characteristics of Soviet culture —it marked its strict hierarchical structure, and, more importantly, the head of that structure. In this article I elucidate the mechanisms of the cult of leadership from the point of view of language theory. In the first part I will focus on the development of the cultural origins of the cult of leadership in Russia. The second part, drawing on Émile Benveniste’s theory of deictics, Ernesto Laclau’s theory of hegemony and Tartu-Moscow School’s semiotics of culture, concentrates on the expression that characterized the cult of the leader during the Stalin era — “Stalin is today’s Lenin”. I claim that the expression “Stalin is the Lenin of today” was, in Stalin’s era, equivalent to the expression “Lenin is the Stalin of today”, for only Stalin’s own act of utterance created the time of the utterance. And it was the time of Stalin’s utterance that determined the conditions of the situation of the utterance — the canonized way that prescribed to the “Soviet people” how to view and interpret Lenin. But the totality of Stalin’s “I” makes it plausible to suggest that there was only a cult of one leader — that of Stalin’s. Accordingly, Stalin’s “I” made it possible to maintain the ideological view of the society as a coherent system of meaning.