The Cult of Number One in an Age of Leaders

Abstract

The Cult of Number One in an Age of Leaders Reviewed by Yves Cohen Centre d'études des mondes russe, caucasien et est-européen (Cercec) École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales 54, boulevard Raspail 75006 Paris France yvecohen@free.fr Translated by Steven E. Harris Balázs Apor, Jan C. Behrends, Polly Jones, and E. A. Rees, eds., The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc. 288 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ISBN 1403934436. $79.95. Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper, eds., Personality Cults in Stalinism/Personenkulte im Stalinismus. 472 pp. Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2004. ISBN 3899711912. €52.00. By virtue of the extensive ground they cover, these two collected works will make a considerable contribution to one of the most complex questions of 20th-century history: the cults ascribed to the great leaders and great personalities of the communist world. On account of the previous lack of access to archives, these cults long remained the objects of study in political science, while historians have only recently been able to examine them.1 Excellent studies have been published in the past 20 years and since the opening of the archives.2 The two books reviewed here stand out for three reasons: the [End Page 597] abundance of their empirical evidence offered for analysis; the surprising diversity in their methodological approaches; and the interpretive problems they raise. Let us briefly define what these works offer together and separately. Both studies concentrate on communist parties that were in power in Europe. One will find nothing here on Asia or on communist parties in Europe and elsewhere that never came to power. Therefore, these works do not account for communism in its entirety. In regards to what they see as leaders and as personalities worthy of analysis, both works concentrate on the greatest of leaders and, among these, the top leader in particular. Of 29 essays, 21 concentrate on the Number One leader. Among these, 13 essays in Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships (hereafter LC) focus on Stalin and other general secretaries of "people's democracies" in Europe. The authors of this volume are young researchers whom E. Arfon Rees of the European University Institute in Florence has brought together. In Personality Cults in Stalinism (hereafter PC), only 3 of its 15 essays examine personality cults outside the Russian and Soviet contexts, focusing instead on Mussolini, Hitler, and Germany in connection with Stalin. We can examine the interpretive questions that these points raise if we place communism in the larger context of 20th-century history. In the two works together, eight essays do not focus on leader Number One, and seven of these appear in PC. This volume's choice of the theme "cult of personality" makes it possible to examine figures other than leader Number One, both social and individual "figures" who contributed to the definition and deployment of this type of cult: the figure of the master (khoziain) such as the pater familias and the teacher of life (uchitel´ zhizni) in intellectual circles in Russia before the Revolution; minor figures, examined by Malte Rolf in both works, who were honored in the Soviet provinces; the Soviet star of the 1930s, Liubov´ Orlova; the dual figure of the writer/hero Ostrovskii/Korchagin; another center of public attention in the Soviet Union in this same time period—Prince Aleksandr Nevskii, as conceived and filmed by Eisenstein under Stalin's direct control; and finally, the care Gor´kii took in the construction of his own glory. The empirical and methodological richness of these works makes it possible to read them in conjuction and to identify the motifs in the web spun by all the contributions.3 The Cult of Personality These two works focus on that which they call a "cult." We face here a paradox which these books do not in any way address and is simply never [End Page 598] addressed...