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Stalinist Leader Cults in the Soviet Bloc PSA, 2013, Cardiff (This Is a Draft Balázs Apor (Trinity College Dublin) Exporting Charisma? Stalinist Leader Cults in the Soviet Bloc PSA, 2013, Cardiff (This is a draft. Please do not cite or circulate.) There is a tendency in the historiography of the establishment of communist rule in Eastern Europe to downplay or simply ignore the ritual aspects of the Sovietization process, including the emergence of leader cults. Such neglect is clearly demonstrated by the little attention that the implementation of the communist leader cult in the Soviet bloc received from historians. Although leader cults have received considerable scholarly attention in the last decade or so, such studies focus predominantly on the representations of Party leaders, and not so much on the function of the cult. There seems to be a general (albeit somewhat superficial and unreflected) academic consensus in relation to the cult’s function in Stalinist regimes that holds that the leader worship was nothing more than an excessive feature of Stalinist rule promoted by megalomaniac dictators. The function of leader cults was more complex, however. Generally speaking, the leader cult should be understood as a system of rituals and myths that were meant to bolster symbolic and affective attachment to the regime and thereby to widen the social base of communist rule. Moreover, the cult should not simply be understood as a by-product of the personalisation of power, but as an inherent component of the communist system of rule with remarkable political, social, cultural and even economic functions (‘the economy of the gift’, etc.). The cult was also instrumental in fostering the Sovietization process. Arguably, the primary function of the Stalin-cult in the post-war period was to advance the integration of satellite states to the Soviet cult community through ritual means. The 70th birthday of the Soviet leader in 1949 thus signaled the ritual completion of Sovietization in the Soviet sphere of influence, and the creation of a transnational cult community. The fixation with representations resulted in a tendency to regard communist leader cults in the Soviet bloc as clones (at best) of the Stalin-cult. If one focuses on the way these leaders were represented by the communist press or on visual images then such an interpretation seems justified. However, if one 1 takes the ritual aspects and the popular reception of such cults into consideration then the picture becomes considerably more complex. This paper attempts to provide a brief overview of the nature of communist leader cults in the Soviet bloc during the Stalin years arguing that despite dominance of the Stalin-model, the cults of Eastern European party leaders were different to some extent. I would also argue that it is more fruitful to understand the cults of communist leaders in the framework of a hierarchical system of cults rather than to study and interpret them separately and in isolation. The take-over of communist parties in Central and Eastern Europe in 1948-49 and the launching of rapid Sovietization in the region entailed the importation of the Stalin-cult from the Soviet Union and the adaptation of the leader worship to local party secretaries. The cults of “mini-Stalins”, such as Boleslaw Bierut, Gheoghiu-Dej, Clement Gottwald, Georgi Dimitrov, Mátyás Rákosi and so on, that were mainly constructed through emulating the example of the Stalin-cult, became all-pervasive in the respective countries in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nevertheless, the transplantation of the cult to Eastern Europe was not a uniform process, because the systematic veneration of party leaders had to be adapted to local political contexts and national traditions in order to overcome the resistance that was frequently experienced in the respective societies. While in most of the countries the implementation of the Soviet-type leader cult was impeded by many obstacles (in Poland and the GDR in particular), in other places the development of the cult was smoother. The cults of Tito in Yugoslavia and Enver Hoxha in Albania, for example, combined the myth of a war leader with the myth of the party secretary and managed to acquire genuine popular support without the need to rely on Soviet techniques of mass persuasion. Here, a Soviet-type leader cult emerged even before the launching of the Sovietization project. Sovietization brought about the introduction of a hierarchical system of myths and cults in the countries of the Soviet bloc. However, cultic practices and the cultic language were introduced in different countries with varying degrees of intensity. In some states, the preconditions were favorable to the leader’s veneration, in others they were not. Some party secretaries promoted the exaltation of their own personality some remained relatively modest. The 2 dedication of communist leaders to the Sovietization process can be measured by the extent to which they promoted the introduction of the cult in a local context. Therefore, the cult, besides being a barometer that measures the level of authoritarianism in a given state, was also the barometer of Sovietization that in the context of the Eastern Bloc indicated the determination of a local communist party in adopting the policies of the Stalinist Soviet Union (Rees 2004: p.8). Despite the fact that the cults of satellite leaders were modeled primarily on the Stalin cult, they also displayed a substantial amount of specificity. The problem of adoption vs. innovation, or more precisely: the extent to which such cults were based on the mechanical copying of the Soviet model, and the extent to which they were rooted in specific local traditions, and imbued with national characteristics, in fact, is one of the most intriguing aspects of the worship of the mini-Stalins. The Stalin-cult was originally invented in the Soviet Union and it was later exported to Eastern Europe as part of the Sovietization process, where it had to be implemented into different environments and political cultures. Because of the transference of the Soviet-type cult to different contexts, the leader cult acquired a trans-national character. The local variations of the Stalin- cult and the differences in the veneration of the local party secretaries offer a revealing indicator of the willingness of the countries of the Soviet Bloc to proceed with the Sovietization project and to adopt Soviet cultural values. Although Władysław Gomułka claimed in 1956 that Eastern European leaders were obliged to implement the leader cult, such a claim can not be buttressed by archival sources (Brzezinski 1967: p. 65). Therefore, the extent to which the formulation of cultic figures out of the local party secretaries were influenced by Soviet orders, remains unclear. It is more likely that the cult phenomenon emerged in the Eastern Bloc as a result of self-Sovietization, and was to a lesser extent shaped by Soviet directives. Since the majority of Eastern European communist leaders were trained in Moscow and had been exposed to the Stalin- cult from the 1930s on, they adopted the veneration of the Soviet leader to the national environment after World War II without much hesitation. It has to be acknowledged, however, that while the cults of local party secretaries were created on the initiative of local party elites, the construction of the Stalin-cult in the distant parts of the Soviet empire was monitored from the center, Moscow. 3 Thus, the phenomenon of the leader cult emerged in the satellite states as a combined result of Sovietization and self-Sovietization. Although the dominance of the Soviet import remains unquestionable, many of the cults sought to establish a link between the leader of the party and national traditions. Communist leaders were often compared to historical figures and in some cases (in Hungary, for example), national traditions became integral parts of the initially foreign (Soviet) leader cult. Although the adding of national constituents to the Soviet model of leader-worship created a certain leeway for the development of each local leader cult, they all remained restrained by the all- embracing cult of Stalin and the authority of the spiritual forefathers of communism (Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels). The primacy of Stalin-worship indicates the existence of a strict cult hierarchy within the Soviet Bloc in the period of High Stalinism. The highest echelons of the pantheon of heroes were occupied by the founding fathers, Marx, Engels, and Lenin, whose positions remained incontestable. The fourth to join the club was “the Lenin of today”, Stalin, until he was gradually purged from the pantheon after the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956. The second rung of the “ladder of cults”, as Gomułka once labelled the system, was taken by Stalin’s entourage and the leaders of international communist parties, whose position largely depended on their place in Stalin’s favour and their relationship with the Soviet party-leadership. Apart from the international hierarchy of cults headed by Stalin, there existed a similar hierarchy on a local level in every country of the Bloc. In the Soviet Union a certain cultic reverence emerged around the members of Stalin’s inner circle, but regional party bosses, factory managers or directors of kolkhozes also became the objects of sycophantic eulogies. The Stalin-cult was a powerful example that served as a model to emulate in a micro-environment, which eventually triggered the spreading of patterns of leader-adulation in the peripheries of the empire. The promotion of lesser leaders was often fuelled by pragmatic reasons (i.e. to gain access to material resources), therefore the regime usually sought to suppress them. Nevertheless, “leaderism” was a prevailing form of behaviour that was apparent at all levels of the Soviet administration (Fitzpatrick 1999, pp. 28-35 and Fitzpatrick 1994: pp. 174-204).
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