The 1956 secret speech given by Khrushchev at the end of the 20th Party Congress was one of the key moments of the Cold War. The denunciation of Stalin and his actions was the moment that the Soviet Union pivoted in its direction, leading to massive upheaval, including the Hungarian Revolution later that year and the eventual Sino-Soviet split. But you already know this, we've covered it in previous episodes.
But what we haven't talked about is what that denunciation was really about. One of the primary things that Khrushchev attacked in his speech was the cult of personality surrounding Stalin. Now, I'm sure most of you are aware of what a cult of personality is, but we wanted to take a bit of a closer look at the role that that played in the Soviet Union and how they developed in the first place.
This will give us a good understanding as we move forward. to be able to examine similar phenomena in such places as the People's Republic of China, North Korea, Indonesia and Yugoslavia. I'm your host David and this week we are talking about Lenin and Stalin and the people who loved them. This is the Cold War. Shoutout to Call of War for sponsoring this video!
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Click the link in the description, type the Cold War in the search bar, and enter the password TheColdWar. Slots are limited, so don't waste time. We're going to start this episode in 1920. By that point, the Red Army was increasingly looking like achieving its victory over the White Army. The Bolsheviks were consolidating their power and exerting more and more control.
over large swaths of the territory of the former Russian Empire. The radical transformation of Russia was underway. A huge state with a population largely made up of peasants and with a long tradition of paternalistic and authoritarian systems of governance. Lenin was the recognized leader of the revolution and the Bolshevik party, although he didn't possess dictatorial powers within the party.
Instead, he was more like a first among the equals in the organization. His position didn't give him higher authority over the other leaders in the party or the government. He was a member of both the Politburo and the Central Committee of the party, along with others such as Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, Zinoviev and others.
It was not uncommon for proposals put forward by Lenin to be opposed by those others. For example, when Lenin proposed expelling both Kamenev and Zinoviev from the party, For their opposition to enacting the October Revolution, the rest of the Central Committee refused to move forward with it. Lenin also faced opposition to the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which would end the war with Germany. In fact, he had to threaten to resign to get the Central Committee to agree to it. All this to say, Lenin was not an uncontested dictator with unlimited power.
But while collective decision-making existed in government, the propaganda machine of the fledgling state was working overtime, glorifying Lenin as the leader of the revolution and the workers. These portrayals of Lenin as the lauded and glorious leader of the revolution only intensified in the wake of the 1918 assassination attempt against him, and then even further following his 50th birthday in 1920. Poems and newspaper articles were written praising his leadership and his outstanding character. This choir of commendation was even joined by other party leaders, including Sverdlov, Zinoviev and Trotsky. By the time of Lenin's departure from politics in 1923, The cult of personality surrounding him was expanding across the Soviet Union. Even Stalin joined in heaping praise on the leader of the revolution and the proletariat.
So why would the Marxist leadership of the new egalitarian state pursue the glorification of one man, almost bordering on sycophancy? After all, at no point does Marx encourage the building of a cult of personality around the leadership of the revolution. In fact, Marxism actively downplays the role of personality in the historical process within the logic of dialectic materialism. So, where did it come from?
Well, many scholars have argued that it stemmed from legacies of Russian culture. For generations, Russian society was built on a foundation of paternalism, traditionalism and authoritarianism. Despite the revolutionary purposes of communism in Russia, simply sweeping away centuries of life was possible. Instead, it was easier to consolidate the Soviet state by taking advantage of some of the mechanisms of the old regime. The people were used to a ruling father figure, the Tsar.
So now, instead of a Tsar, the leader of the Communist Party would take on that role. Where the people had based their lives on religious teachings, now Marxism would take that place. Instead of reading the lives of the Orthodox Saints, very popular among the people, the Tsar would take peasants in the early 20th century, by the way, biographies of Lenin and other leaders were substituted. To quote the historian Nina Tumarkin, The cult was in accordance with the interests of the young Soviet state. In essence, it was strictly chosen and used symbols and measures carefully prepared by the party and government to attract the uneducated public.
Lenin's death at the start of 1924 only fuelled the cult surrounding him. Petrograd, formerly St. Petersburg, was renamed Leningrad. Numerous towns, villages and oblasts were also renamed after him.
Babies being born were given variations of his name, like Vladlin, Vilin, Vilor and Marlin. The highest state award, the Order of Lenin, was given his name. His body was preserved and put into a mausoleum on Krasnaya Ploshad, Red Square.
The mausoleum familiar to most of you I'm sure, was then used as a dais for the senior leadership during important gatherings, celebrations and memorials relevant to the Soviet Union. The official ideology of the state became not Marxism, but Marxism-Leninism. It was Lenin's interpretation of Marxist theory.
So, what was Lenin's take on all of this cult of personality that was being built around him? Well, there is a lack of consensus on this. While he didn't condone all the propaganda aspects that surrounded the use of his name, he certainly understood its intent and its importance.
There are numerous episodes on record in which Lenin was critical of his party comrades and the propaganda tools used to help glorify him. But at the end of the day, given his first among equals role in the governance of the state, had he wanted to, he likely would have been able to eradicate his own cult. Had he wanted to. that he chose not to… well… Following Lenin's death in 1924, a power struggle ensued, one which Stalin ended up winning, defeating his rivals inside the party and consolidating his hold over the Soviet Union by the late 1920s. Now, instead of trying to dismantle the cult of personality surrounding Lenin, it's been argued that Stalin actually took steps to intensify it.
This was being done in order to help justify the cult of personality that he was fostering around himself. Even before his ultimate victory in the leadership struggle, Stalin was using his power to advance himself. Major cities like Tsaritsyn, Yuzovka and Dushanbe were renamed.
Stalingrad, Stalino and Stalinabad appeared on maps. After Stalin's 50th birthday in 1928, this process only intensified. He was praised as the great leader, the father of nations.
the best friend of teachers and engineers, and so on. The propaganda machine set to work, showing Stalin as Lenin's best student and a champion of the arts and sciences. In the 1930s, monuments and statues of Stalin began to be built across the country. The man with the mustache also started being depicted in Soviet films, always as a glorious and benevolent figure.
Musicians, poets and artists were also encouraged. to praise Stalin in their works. Now, keep in mind that all film and art at this time needed to be sanctioned by the authorities through the unions, so anything that didn't meet the ideological standards was either not made, published or displayed, or would be illegal if it was, promote the cult of personality or find yourself unable to work. Stalin at this time also took on a little project to rewrite the history of the revolution.
A group of historians, called a well actually, incidentally, was gathered by Stalin and under his close scrutiny, produced The Short Course of the History of the Communist Party. This work not only just glorified the role Stalin played in the revolution, but went so far as to omit major figures and praise secondary ones while generally distorting the truth to do so. This is largely considered the major written work of Stalinism and was an attempt to place Stalin in the pantheon of Marxist thinkers, along with Marx, Engels and Lenin. Coupled with this, by the late 1930s, Stalin's portrait was being prominently displayed together with these men.
placing them on the same level. All of this of course, while the purges were ongoing and hundreds of thousands of people were sent into the prison system and to their deaths, all at the direction of the Great Leader. Now, the victory in the Great Patriotic War only exacerbated the cult of personality. After all, there is nothing like snatching victory from the jaws of defeat to elevate a person's perceived greatness. Stalin assumed the title of Generalissimo the only one in Soviet history and only the fifth such person to hold the title in Russian history.
The key operations of the war were propagandized as Stalin's Ten Blows. Cities in conquered and occupied European nations like Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and even unoccupied Albania found themselves with cities named after Stalin. And how did Stalin feel about all this?
Well, he was the driving force behind it, so obviously... He approved, but in public, he was sure to demonstrate some opposition to it, creating a greater illusion that the cult of personality was truly driven by popular opinion. For example, there is a story of how he opposed renaming Moscow State University after himself, insisting that the university continue to hold the name of Mikhail Lobonosov.
And then 1953 happened and the Vozhd died. As we talked about in our episode on the Generalissimo's death, there was a large and overall genuine outpouring of grief over his death. The cult of personality was real and Stalin, despite the terrors and the purges, was a loved man.
His body was interred in the mausoleum on Red Square next to Lenin. So, you can imagine what a shock then the secret speech was three years later when Khrushchev began a process of tearing down the hero worship around the man with the mustache. Nikita, who had been one of Stalin's closest aides, laid bare that Stalin had encouraged and even engineered the cult. It was explained that Stalin would personally edit articles and books by adding pieces describing his own greatness and leadership.
This began the process of de-Stalinization. Busts and statues to Stalin were removed all across the Soviet Union. In 1961, the Generalissimo's body was removed from the mausoleum and quietly reburied in a section of the Kremlin Wall marked only by a plaque.
The highest point in the USSR, named Stalin's Peak in 1932, was renamed Communism Peak in 1962. Books were edited to remove the passages he had included and cities named after him were renamed again. Stalin remained a controversial figure for the rest of Soviet history. It was difficult to balance his role in both the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union and the great victory over Fascism in the Great Patriotic War with his driving role in the repressions, totalitarian leadership and cult of personality.
As the cult of Stalin was removed, however, the cult of Lenin remained. In fact, part of Khrushchev's call towards de-Stalinization was a return to Leninist principles in ruling the state and the party. The cult of Lenin would remain in place until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Ok, so you may be asking yourself why we are talking about this since so much of the topic takes place before the Cold War period even began.
Well, it's an important topic in contextualizing Soviet politics after Stalin's death. The criticism of Stalin's authoritarian leadership style and the cult surrounding him actually made for a more moderate and tolerant leadership style. tolerant of some dissent in the post-Stalin era. Of course, that doesn't mean that the dictatorial and authoritarianism of the party was gone, just that it was a lighter version of it than had previously existed. And of course, the example set by Moscow would be emulated by Marxist movements globally.
Similar cults of personality developed across the communist world, from China to Albania, from Cuba to Angola. In some cases, the ideologies these leaders decreed even took on the leader's name, from Maoism to Hoxhaism. Despite there being no call in Marxist theory for personality-driven dictatorial leadership, this became extremely common in how communist nations and movements were led. We hope you've enjoyed today's episode but to make sure you don't miss all of our future episodes, please make sure you are subscribed to our channel and have glorified the bell button. We can be reached via email at thecoldwarchannel at gmail.com.
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