From 1929 until 1953, Iosif Stalin’s image became a central symbol in Soviet propaganda. Touched up images of an omniscient Stalin appeared everywhere: emblazoned across buildings and lining the ...streets; carried in parades and woven into carpets; and saturating the media of socialist realist painting, statuary, monumental architecture, friezes, banners, and posters. From the beginning of the Soviet regime, posters were seen as a vitally important medium for communicating with the population of the vast territories of the USSR. Stalin’s image became a symbol of Bolshevik values and the personification of a revolutionary new type of society. The persona created for Stalin in propaganda posters reflects how the state saw itself or, at the very least, how it wished to appear in the eyes of the people. The ‘Stalin’ who was celebrated in posters bore but scant resemblance to the man Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, whose humble origins, criminal past, penchant for violent solutions and unprepossessing appearance made him an unlikely recipient of uncritical charismatic adulation. The Bolsheviks needed a wise, nurturing and authoritative figure to embody their revolutionary vision and to legitimate their hold on power. This leader would come to embody the sacred and archetypal qualities of the wise Teacher, the Father of the nation, the great Warrior and military strategist, and the Saviour of first the Russian land, and then the whole world. This book is the first dedicated study on the marketing of Stalin in Soviet propaganda posters. Drawing on the archives of libraries and museums throughout Russia, hundreds of previously unpublished posters are examined, with more than 130 reproduced in full colour. The personality cult of Stalin in Soviet posters, 1929–1953 is a unique and valuable contribution to the discourse in Stalinist studies across a number of disciplines.
The article addresses the question whether the Church᾽s posthumous respect for the founder of the Orthodox Church in the Czech lands, Matěj Pavlík (later Bishop Gorazd), in the second half of the ...20th century has the features of natural esteem and gratitude for his merits, or whether the features of a cult of personality prevail. The manifestations of respect for Gorazd II and his life work have been apparent since 1945, when World War II ended. Their organizer was primarily the Orthodox Church itself. The Church presented the bishop in two ways: 1) as the founder and most important figure in the history of Czech Orthodoxy, and 2) as an Orthodox martyr, Czech patriot and a warrior against fascism who sacrificed his life for this idea. However, the second interpretation very soon prevailed. From February 1948, the cult of bishop Gorazd as a warrior against fascism took over, supported and enhanced by official communist propaganda. This was due to the fact that the leaders of the Orthodox Church fully supported the idea of socialism in Czechoslovakia. The above-mentioned cult of bishop Gorazd was linked to the myth of the Orthodox Church as a progressive, patriotic, and national church, which, in the years of war, sacrificed the most for the Czech nation and its future. Our research has confirmed the efforts to create a cult of a warrior against fascism and to forcibly update his life work so that it would appear to be conforming to the goals of a socialist political regime, which was, outside the public space, complemented with highlighting the features legitimizing his sacralisation.
The paper presents one of the tools of indoctrination of Czechoslovak society after 1948 – the building of the cult of personality, namely Stalin's cult of personality. In the introduction, it ...discusses the starting points of the cult of personality of Stalin and briefly presents its manifestation in the Soviet Union. It maps the period from the turn of the 1920s and 1930s to the end of World War II. The text also deals with the form and methods of cult behavior, its aim and content. The article talks about the spread of popularity and respect for this native of Gori across Europe after 1945 and the causes that led to his cultivation in Czechoslovakia, too. It presents the regime, in which this behavior was embedded and in which it had been intensively promoted for several years. The core of the text maps one of the concrete manifestations of building a cult of personality – the celebration of the 70th birthday of ‘generalissimus’. It describes the origin, establishment and activities of the government commission that was in charge of preparing the celebrations. It presents the first plans for the realization of celebrations and reflections on the appropriate content of the feast. It includes the time and organizational problems that accompanied this mass-popularization event and analyzes the form and possible impacts of propaganda content disseminated through the celebrations. The text also deals in more detail with some of the main parts of the celebrations, such as the event of gifts that traveled from Czechoslovakia to the USSR. It talks about ‘zdravica’ – about the written congratulations of the Czechoslovak people to Stalin, but also about the network of lectures and discussions and also about the laying of the foundations of the monumental statue, which was later erected in the country's capital. The authoress also declares a tendency of the state party seeking to establish itself in the newly dominated territory, to transform the wide diapazon parts of the everyday life of a Czechoslovak citizen. The paper, by its timeframe, falls into the so-called founding period of the communist regime (1948 – 1953), with an accent on the end of 1949.
The article focuses on the effect of Khrushchev's denunciation of Stalin's sins, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, on the cult of the Hungarian 'mini-Stalin', Mátyás ...Rákosi. It tries to assess how the leadership of the Hungarian Workers Party reacted to the 'Secret Speech', and what measures were taken to dismantle the 'cult of personality' in the country in 1956. The party leadership became confused and split after Khrushchev's revelations and, with unclear signs from Moscow thereafter, it remained hesitant about the elimination of the institutionalised veneration of the leader. Rákosi's reluctance to face the legacy of the cult, and his belief in his own infallibility, also contributed to the half-hearted measures to wipe out the Stalinist practice of leader-glorification in Hungary. The failure of the party leadership to handle the issue of the cult contributed significantly to the escalation of popular discontent culminating in the outbreak of the October revolution. Despite the unwillingness of the party leadership to eliminate the remnants of the cult, the 'cult of personality' was widely discussed and criticised among the population in 1956, and the concept came to form an essential part of the political vocabulary. The article argues that the confusion of Eastern European communist parties with regard to the dismantling of the cult in 1956 was rooted in the inadequate explanation of the concept of 'cult of personality' by Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership. Given the generality of the notion, it became an umbrella term to describe Stalinist terror in its totality. Such a general usage by contemporaries has influenced the present use of the term in both academic and everyday contexts.
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Based on examples of socialist heroes from East German schoolbooks and teaching guides designed for elementary school, this essay examines the role of state ideology in primary education. It assesses ...the German curriculum of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR) and illuminates distinctions between civic education and political propaganda. It also shows how the curricular emphasis on socialist virtue helped to form “the socialist personality.”
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Using Weber’s concept of charismatic routinisation, this article analyses the dilemmas related to political succession and post-charismatic order in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. While the ...presidents of these three countries have drawn their authority from a combination of charismatic, legal-rational and traditional authority, they have relied most heavily on charisma in particular to sustain their rule. With the presidents of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan aging and facing the question of political succession, the article provides an analysis of the problems associated with potential for post-charismatic succession in these states. It does so by drawing on three of Weber’s mechanisms for charismatic routinisation: designation, hereditary charisma, and charisma in office. The analysis demonstrates that in these three cases, despite charisma only having two routes available to it, traditional and legal-rational, the mixture of legal-rational, traditional and charismatic domination undermines the process of charismatic routinisation. Consequently, the article argues that political succession in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan will most likely evolve into a reconstitution of charismatic leadership.
The present study starts from a legitimate question: why the communist regimes, though they allocated massive resources to the propagandistic apparatus, did not refine their propaganda in order to ...increase its persuasive impact and to enhance its adaptability to necessities? The proposed answer is that the communist propaganda maintained the known coordinates because it corresponded to the ideal model imagined by the doctrinaires of Marxism-Leninism and, more important, because it fulfilled several functions which were extremely useful to the communist regimes. Propaganda was endowed, besides its communicative function that we customarily take into consideration, with two other, even more important, for which its brutal aspect was the appropriate one: that of stimulating terror by exhibiting the power's discretionary character, as well as that of exerting, together with other key-factors of the regime, the social control. The type of mass communication practiced under communism was forged during the first three decades of the Soviet regime, depending upon presumptions on human nature, state and society which were specific during most of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th , internalized by the "classics" of the Marxism-Leninism. The fidelity to the ideological canon, maintained by the inertial functioning of the regime in the Soviet Union and its political and academic parochialism, explains why the propaganda model created during the Leninist and Stalinist period perpetuated in the main up to the end of the regime. The domination of the Soviet Union upon Eastern Europe led to the taking over of the Soviet mass communication model all over the communist camp. The communist propagandistic model is based on the presumption that the human being is radically malleable, the propaganda being endowed with the ideologically meliorist function of creating the "new man".
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