Abstract
From about the time of the 17th Party Congress in 1934, Stalin, his immediate colleagues, and other outstanding individuals began to receive intense and unprecedented adulation in the media. Stalin’s ‘cult of the individual’, subsequently condemned by Khrushchev, was in fact a cult of individuals (and individualism?) at all levels of the Soviet hierarchy, and it emerged in stark contrast to the collectivism of the First Five-Year Plan period. This study examines the cult of the leader in both official and popular discourse in the period 1934–41. It traces the evolution of the cult, and examines how ordinary people used and, in some cases, modified the official cult discourse. Now that new sources are available to historians, the main purpose of the work is to exchange what has hitherto been an almost exclusive preoccupation with the ‘dominant ideology’, for a broader focus on the interaction between this ideology and popular beliefs.1
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