Twentieth Century Communism

Introduction: Stalinism and the barber's chair

Kevin Morgan

With its inaugural cover this new journal returns to one of the defining images of twentieth-century communism. Familiar now, as it was ubiquitous in the lands over which he ruled, Stalin's profile alone is enough to dominate the scene, as it did so many Soviet works of art, and as it did the communist movement itself. In Europe's age of dictators, Stalin was not just marked out by his relative longevity. Compared with Hitler and Mussolini, his nearest counterparts, his was not merely a national cult, of however expansive a character, but commanded allegiance, sometimes devotion, of truly international scope. In a famous scene in Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator, the fascist rivals Hinkel and Napaloni desperately crank up their barber's chairs in a contest to assert pre-eminence over the other. Stalin, of course, was no less a nationalist than they. Even so, if in Russia his portrait was garlanded by Komsomols, it was also reproduced and carried aloft wherever communism had the presence and resources to do so. Stalinism was not exclusively or even primarily a cult of 'personality'; as an alibi for a system that was altogether too convenient. Nevertheless, the cult of its leaders was one of the most striking characteristics of the communist movement internationally, and of its development, or degeneration, over time. Moreover, while the images are familiar, to fathom their significance remains a massive task for historians of communism; as Yves Cohen has recently observed, they present us with one of the most complex questions of twentieth-century history.1

The articles in the present issue represent one of the first attempts to survey the appearance of the cult of the leader within the communist movement internationally. Collections have been published in recent years focusing on communism as a system of government; Balázs Apor, who contributes to the present issue, is co-editor of an important one on Eastern Europe.2 As Cohen notes however, the discussion has yet to be extended to communist parties that did not exercise power. This is the focus of the present issue, and it raises questions going beyond the assumption of mere transference or imitation. Our cover image again offers one clue why. It is not hard to imagine the personal or military dictator who might esteem such forms of representation: their origins predate the Soviet experience by at least a century, and they persist into more recent times, not only in surviving communist regimes, but in a figure like Saddam Hussein. For communists internationally, the magisterial iconography also mattered: it symbolised the stability and prepotency of accomplished soviet power and its ascendancy over the national parties for which it served as inspiration and future prospect.3 How, on the other hand, was such a figure to be replicated locally, for the present mobilisation of workers and the exemplification of struggle? Drawing on Max Weber, scholars have stressed the integrating effect of practices of veneration, providing a point of cohesion and authority for deeply fragmented or unsettled societies.4 A similar construction could also underpin the leader cult in oppositional communist parties afflicted by internal factionalism. Nevertheless, for communist parties seeking not to exercise power, but to contest it through movements of protest or resistance, what might be described as a mobilisation figure was at least as important.5 This, at least, Stalin did not provide. Famously he spoke 'without a single platform gesture'; even Lenin's statues, Stalin's first biographer suggested, gesticulated too much; by the cold war years, such was the ageing dictator's impassivity that he could barely be got to speak at all.6 For the orator's posture, the accusing finger, the menace or defiance of the clenched fist, examples had to be sought elsewhere.

Empirically, this means tracing the dissemination of cultic practices with greater precision than has sometimes been the case. Traditionally, local communist leader cults were seen as a replication and transmission of the personalised leadership model, dating from the consolidation of Stalin's power after 1934. Each communist party had its leader, 'just like' Stalin or Hitler; each leader exercised within it the same 'absolute' authority; as Michelle Perrot put it, Stalin as the 'father of the peoples' expected sons in his own image.7 In reality, this seems to have been a phenomenon of the post-war years. Juxtaposition of more general experiences of stalinisation in different national settings has revealed how problematic is the assumption of synchronicity, or the readiness to generalise from a single national case.8 If the leader cult may be regarded as a distinguishing feature of the stalinised party, the contributions here corroborate that view, at least for the 1930s. Parties had to function in very different environments; central co-ordination was often difficult; the proverbial orders from Moscow in any case were that they should acclimatise to those environments. The popular front was a time of expedients, of recognising the variables of opportunity and constraint. As shown by the examples here of Belgium, Britain, Vietnam, Finland, disparate leadership resources were exploited with a good deal less uniformity than is sometimes imagined.

Between the wars: an episodic phenomenon
In the USSR itself the cult had yet to achieve the consistency of 'stable ritual'.9 David Brandenberger has noted that biography as a genre was at the heart of the personality cult.10 It can be traced in this issue in Antony Howe's fascinating discussion of the British communists' attempts to exploit Tom Mann's biographical capital. In Hitler's Mein Kampf, or in the relentless auto/biographical enterprises of Il Duce, it was equally a feature of Stalin's rival dictatorships.11 Stalin's own biography, however, proved frustratingly meagre, refractory and incomplete. It was not until 1935 that an authorised version, by the French communist writer Henri Barbusse, at last appeared. Even this was ill-fated. Its Russian edition was withdrawn as passages were compromised by the show trials. Elsewhere, the rights belonged to commercial publishers, whose translators had no party pedigree and who priced the book beyond the reach of a popular readership.12 If Stalin's cult as yet was 'episodic' in character,13 its reproduction internationally could hardly have been otherwise.

There was also the issue of the barber's chair. Famously, Stalin's was a cult of modesty in spite of himself; as A. Kemp-Welch wryly observes of a laconic appearance before frenzied Komsomols, Weberian notions of charisma seem 'not entirely appropriate'.14 The careful scripting of such performances seems but a further instance of Stalin's megalomania. Nevertheless, as the work of Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal reminds us, it was consistent with the construction of a leader cult that was always, and fundamentally, a cult of the party. Stalinist cults, Cohen points out, were never advertised as cults; more than that, despite the obvious precedent of 'Leninism', they were almost never described as stalinist. Jean Vigreux has suggested that there were discussions at the International Lenin School as to whether it should be renamed the School of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.15 There was in fact, Sophie Quinn Judge reminds us, a 'Stalin School' which Ho Chi Minh attended; but in 1937 even this was renamed in a less personalised fashion. Perhaps, Vigreux reports, even Stalin could never quite be relied upon until safely in his mausoleum. More likely, the construction of a 'Stalinism' risked suggesting a sort of equivalence or barber's chair contest with 'Trotskyism'. By the time of Trotsky's murder, a language of 'Leninist-Stalinist' crept into some Comintern pronouncements; exceptionally, as in the example provided by José Gotovitch, that of 'Stalinist' alone can be discovered in a positive construction.16 Nearly always in the 1930s, however, as Barbusse's biography clearly shows, Stalin was coupled with Lenin, and through him with the party: charisma itself, like gesture or facility with words, was a suspect, almost a Trotskyist, quality. Even the repeated outbreaks of 'stormy and prolonged applause' could not disguise the ambiguous nature of the Stalin cult. A passage in Dimitrov's diaries described a lunch at Voroshilov's at which Stalin, characteristically, discountenanced the accolades he received. Trotsky, he recalled, had been more popular in Lenin's day; so indeed were Bukharin, Zinoviev and others. It was Stalin, however, who had had the support of the 'middle cadres', which it is not difficult to read as meaning the apparatus. What better reminder to Dimitrov himself, the hero of the Leipzig trial, that 'popularity' counted for nothing and that it was safer not to try to raise your chair. 'They're the ones who choose the leader', Stalin saluted the middle cadres. 'They don't try to climb above their station; you don't even notice them.'17

Nevertheless, it was Dimitrov who captured the radical imagination of the 1930s.18 As the cult of leadership was for the first time established as a truly international phenomenon, it is sometimes suggested that its generation was a Comintern affair of central directive and local transmission belt. This at least has been the explanation offered of the flurry of auto/biographies succeeding Barbusse's life of Stalin.19 If these directives do exist, it seems the archives have yet to divulge them. In the meantime, an obvious discrepancy can hardly be missed. In Britain, as shown here, it was not the 'leader' Pollitt, but the veteran Tom Mann, and the communist MP Willie Gallacher, who were given biographical precedence. In the USA it was the same: not the general secretary Browder but his rival W. Z. Foster published autobiographies in 1937 and 1939. If biography was the heart of the personality cult, this was not yet centred on the single figure of the leader; or rather, this was only one of its possible variations.

The examples presented here suggest if anything that the development of the cults was uneven and somewhat ill-coordinated. France was perhaps an exemplary case, in which leader, party and party life seemed inextricable, and the quality of charisma was subsumed in the collective persona of the party.20 As José Gotovitch notes, in neighbouring Belgium this later provided a possible model for emulation; but for the time being the general secretary Jacquemotte, reflecting a greater caution than was extended to Stalin himself, received such accolades only after his death. Old age, conversely, allowed the possibility of a sort of 'living history' corresponding to the invented traditions Balázs Apor traces in post-war Hungary; and for the inter-war British party, preoccupied with issues of indigenous legitimacy, Mann was elevated to the leadership as recognition of his status, not as its precondition. In Finland, where the communists were subject to heavy legal repression, the figure of the revolutionary martyr predominated. In Brazil, Luiz Carlos Prestes enjoyed a more emphatic advancement on the basis of political capital accumulated independently of any association with the communists. In Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, who time would show to be a credible candidate for a genuine party cult, experienced fraught relations with other party groupings, with which the Comintern had yet to establish a single undisputed line of command. Charisma was a dangerous quality: symbolic capital required restraint, and potentially could cut across the convergence of forms of authority that the stalinist model required. In Spain, for example, it was not, as Borkenau suggested, the general secretary Diaz who was the party's principal figurehead, but Dolores Ibárruri - the legendary Pasionaria. In Belgium José Gotovitch notes the more shadowy role of the Comintern agent Berei, resembling that of Eugen Fried in France, or of the creatures of the apparatus whose influence belied the pioneering projections of the German Thälmann cult.21 Perhaps it was precisely the combination of these roles that could be regarded as getting above one's station.

Ambiguity as to what Stalin represented also allowed for variation. Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal stress the importance of the proletarian leader-type, and this was very much predominant in the countries of north-western Europe. While Stalin was thus presented as a son of the common people, there was nevertheless little to connect him with a more substantive sense of class. 'Underground worker, party organiser, theoretician, military commander, international leader, inspirer of Socialist construction … tactician of the revolution': for almost every political role Stalin provided a reference point, but one bereft of any specificity of social context.22 The son of working peasants, in Barbusse's account he appears above all as a professional revolutionary for whom neither family ties, locality, occupational identity or cultural preference provide any distinct coloration. If one theme is more personalised than the others, it is that of Stalin's ostensible military contributions during the Russian civil war; and the soldier-like cast of the radical hero, familiar in the Europe of the previous century, must certainly have had a resonance for Brazilian communism's 'cavalier of hope', evoked here by Marco Santana. Through the mastery of theory, Stalin was also very definitely an intellectual - the 'perfect blend', in Barbusse's depiction, of intellectual and worker - which would later offer an opening for the theoretician cults of Kuusinen the Finn and the Italian Palmiro Togliatti.23 In wartime Britain, as communists announced the discovery of 'progressive' capitalists, Stalin was even described as 'the world's greatest business executive'.24 So protean a figure, indeed, was accessible in many versions. In the Italian south, communists demanded land reform: 'Big moustaches is coming!'25 In Britain, to a local folk air, they sang: 'your Uncle Joe's a worker / And a very decent chap / Because he smokes a pipe and wears / A taxi-driver's cap'.26 Not only did Stalin's image carry considerable symbolic weight; so surreal were some of these variations that it was difficult to see that it carried anything else.

High stalinism: the cult of mediocrity
In contrast to the disparate adaptations of the inter-war years, the synchronicity of cultic phenomena in the 'high Stalinist' period is remarkable. Of the parties considered here, only Hungary's was a member of the Cominform, set up in 1947 as a sort of mini-Comintern. Nevertheless, the reader of these articles will encounter a litany of celebrations, rhapsodies and genuflections that was anything but polycentric, and reached its apogee on the occasion of Stalin's seventieth birthday in December 1949. Not only was a fulsome participation incumbent on every communist party, but the commemorative practice itself was widely adopted. Although already in 1929 Stalin's fiftieth birthday had provided a first important precedent, involvement in such practices was initially no more than fitful. Even following the more grandiose celebrations a decade later, the occasion was not invariably marked; or at least, if coverage in the British communist press is anything to go by, it slipped off the calendar after the Comintern's dissolution in 1943.27 Rather, it appears to have been at the close of the war, as leaders returned from Moscow to head mass communist parties or the new people's democracies, that such practices acquired an almost universal currency.28 In Finland, already in 1946 Kuusinen's sixty-fifth birthday prompted what would come to seem relatively modest panegyrics, even in his continuing absence from the country. Attending the Czechoslovak party congress the same year, Pollitt witnessed ovations to Klement Gottwald such as he had not yet heard outside the ovations given Stalin himself.29 From Hungary to Brazil, the cults acquired a new significance, and with the example of Stalin's seventieth birthday they were taken to grotesque lengths. In the remaining years of Stalin's life, the seventieth birthday of Kuusinen, the sixtieth of Rákosi, Bierut, Togliatti and Pollitt, the fiftieth of Thorez - communist leaders by this time did not get much younger than this - all were marked by what one of Thorez's biographers describes as the 'paroxysm' of the cult of personality.30

The focus on the leader's birthday was more than just a detail. As Tauno Saarela points out, it marked a departure from myths and rituals centred on examples of heroism or martyrdom, and in this sense was clearly expressive of the emptiness of the post-war cults. On the one hand: there was nothing in the mere fact of a birthday to set the chosen leader apart. On the other hand, to the extent that this provided the occasion for cultic ritual, it was available to any chosen vessel, irrespective of political qualities, of personal history, or of their absence. Like the royalist ceremonies it subliminally evoked, the cult of birth was a cult of mediocrity, of office over achievement, of arbitrary preferment no longer of divine origin but deriving from a higher power in Moscow or Prague. Not every leader so preferred was innately a mediocrity; but, through the formalisation of such rituals, distinction was negated and the possession of independent political capital rendered innocuous.

At the same time, the consolidation of Stalin's authority underpinned a clear, manifest and immutable hierarchy of cults. Before the war he was the greatest of the communist general secretaries; after it he was 'marshal' or 'generalissimo', a figure lifted beyond the distinctions of party rank. On his sixty-first birthday, when the London Daily Worker depicted him in the 'simple soldier's' tunic with which Barbusse concluded his 1930s portrait, the image was removed from the paper's second edition and replaced with the one we see on our cover. Increasingly saluted in general terms, Stalin seemed a figure almost transcending biography, just as the wisdom of his final years virtually transcended human utterance. The 'anti-individualism' of communist biography - the eschewing of all such detail as set the individual apart - allowed the explicit formalisation of hierarchy and the removal of the very notion of rivalry.31 Tito - as it happened, 'Marshal' Tito - was the exception that proved the rule. The prevalent watchword of self-criticism, found in the Cominform resolution denouncing Tito, provided a necessary concomitant of the secondary leader cult, and a safeguard against its being turned against a higher authority - just as the harnessing of national traditions, as Balázs Apor shows, was subject to precisely the same order of precedence. 'It is a great thing that in a Communist Party it does not matter how important you think you may be, or what position you occupy', Pollitt wrote of the Tito affair; 'when you refuse to discuss your mistakes, when you think you are above being corrected … you get exactly the same treatment as the lad at the bench'.32 Supposed 'absolute' authority was clearly circumscribed when Stalin alone was above such correction. That was why, at his seventieth birthday celebrations, leaders like Togliatti and Mao Zedong - no doubt especially Mao Zedong - delivered their tributes interspersed with those of second-rank figures from the USSR itself.

With Stalin's death in 1953, a chapter of communist history came to a close. Already the following year, Belgium's Edgar Lalmand, who did not receive the customary fiftieth-birthday greeting from Moscow, then fell victim to a movement precisely of the 'middle cadres'. Though Lalmand's fate was exceptional, Khrushchev's attack on Stalin at the CPSU Twentieth Congress signalled the winding up of the cults internationally as part of a faltering process of destalinisation. As gradually these leaders gave way to a political generation formed by stalinism, the lesson was also underlined of how often credible cults had depended, like those of Mann or Prestes, on sources of political capital drawn from beyond the collective experiences of the party apparatus. The 'cult of impersonality' that followed, though noted by a British communist, was not confined to Britain; indeed, with Khrushchev alone excepted, it hardly excluded the most prominent figures in the USSR itself. At the same time, though, the fragmentation of world communism now allowed the projection or simulation of charismatic leadership without Stalin's constraining super-cult. Mao was not again to mingle with middling Soviet functionaries; even in Romania the cult of Gheorgiu-Dej flourished principally after the Khrushchev secret speech, prefiguring the nationalist-communist cult of Ceasescu.33 In Asia and Latin America, the Cavalier of Hope had authentic successors, whose appeal, like that of Ho Chi Minh, resonated far beyond the ranks of the communists themselves.

The varieties of post-Stalin communist leader will certainly deserve their own separate treatment. So will the wider phenomenon of the cult of leadership evident at all levels of the communist movement and in diverse spheres of activity. In the meantime, the articles that follow offer insight into the cult more specifically of the leader, and its flourishing - if that is the word - in the shadow of Stalin himself. Several of the articles focus on key individuals, notably Ho Chi Minh (Sophie Quinn Judge), Luiz Carlos Prestes (Marco Santana) and Edgar Lalmand (José Gotovitch). Balázs Apor similarly focuses on the Hungarian leader Rákosi, but in the wider context of the attempted appropriation by the communists of Hungarian national traditions. Antony Howe takes a similar approach to Tom Mann, as the claimed embodiment of British labour movement traditions, while Tauno Saarela's piece on Finland surveys changing constructions of the outstanding individual over several decades. Fittingly, the features begin with a discussion of the wider phenomenon of the leader cult by Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, whose work has made such an important contribution to the opening up of this whole field of discussion.

Notes
1. Yves Cohen, 'The cult of number one in an age of leaders', Kritika, 8, 3, 2007, pp597-634.
2. Balázs Apor et al, eds, The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships. Stalin and the Eastern bloc, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004; see also Klaus Heller and Jan Plamper, eds, Personenkulte im Stalinismus/Personality Cults in Stalinism, Göttingen: V &R unipress, 2004.
3. For an example, see William Gallacher, 'Joseph Stalin', Communist Review, December 1949, pp739-44.
4. See for example E. A. Rees, 'Leader cults: varieties, preconditions and functions' in Apor, Leader Cult, ch. 1.
5. See the discussion in Norman LaPorte and Kevin Morgan, '"Kings among their subjects?" Ernst Thälmann, Harry Pollitt and the leadership cult as stalinization' in LaPorte et al (eds), Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern. Perspectives on Stalinization 1919-53: Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, pp124-45.
6. Pat Sloan, 'Why they call him "Our Stalin"', Daily Worker, 21 December 1939; Henri Barbusse, Staline: un monde nouveau vu à travers un homme, Paris: Flammarion, 1936 edn, pp15-16.
7. Michelle Perrot, 'Les vies ouvrières' in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, Paris: Gallimard, 1997 edn, pp3937 ff; see also for example Franz Borkenau, World Communism, University of Michigan Press, 1962, p394; Henry Pelling, The British Communist Party. A Historical Profile, London: A. & C. Black, 1975 edn, p89.
8. LaPorte et al, Bolshevism, Stalinism and the Comintern.
9. Benno Ennker, 'The Stalin cult, bolshevik rule and Kremlin interaction in the 1930s' in Apor, Leader Cult, pp83-5.
10. David Brandenberger, 'Stalin as symbol: a case study of the personality cult and its construction' in Sarah Davies and James Harris (eds), Stalin: a New History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p251.
11. See for example Didier Musiedlak, Mussolini, Paris: Presses des Sciences PO, 2005, ch. 1.
12. See for example W. Zak, 'The man at the wheel', Labour Monthly, January 1936, pp58-9.
13. Ennker, 'Stalin cult', p85.
14. A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-39, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991, p231.
15. Jean Vigreux, Waldeck Rochet, une biographie politique, Paris: La Dispute, 2003, p38.
16. D. Manuilsky, Lenin and the International Labour Movement, London: Modern Books, 1939.
17. Ivo Banac, ed., The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov 1933-1949, New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003, pp62-7, entry for 7 November 1937.
18. Or at least the evidence from Britain suggests his pre-eminence in this respect over Stalin himself; see Kevin Morgan, Gidon Cohen and Andrew Flinn, Communists in British Society 1920-1991, London: Rivers Oram, 2006, ch. 4.
19. Philippe Robrieux, Maurice Thorez : vie secrète et vie publique, Paris : Fayard, 1975, pp201-2.
20. In Canada, the cult of 'Tim Buck's party' was even earlier to be launched and seems to have taken precociously extravagant forms; see John Manley, '"Audacity, audacity, still more audacity"; Tim Buck, the party, and the people, 1932-1939', Labour/Le Travail, 49, 2002, pp9-41.
21. LaPorte, 'Kings', p137.
22. 'Sixty years old today', Daily Worker, 21 December 1939.
23. Barbusse, Staline, p6 citing Enoukidze; see also Aldo Agosti, Palmiro Togliatti: a biography, London: Tauris, 2008, pp219-22.
24. J. B. S. Haldane, 'Firewatchers should keep Stalin's birthday', Daily Worker, 19 December 1944.
25. Cris Shore, The Italian Communist Party. The Escape from Leninism, London: Pluto, 1990, p98.
26. Daily Worker, 22 December 1949.
27. Compare the Daily Worker and World News and Views for 1941-2 and 1943-4. Even the article of Haldane's, cited above, referred to the anniversary only as the peg for a story. As Haldane commented: 'Communism is not a religion. We don't want Stalin's birthday to supersede Christmas.'
28. It did not, for example, figure in the GDR, where there was no comparable cult of Walter Ulbricht, nor indeed any post-war show trials. There are obvious possible historical explanations for this which would repay closer examination.
29. Harry Pollitt, Impressions of Czechoslovakia, London: CPGB, 1946, p9.
30. Stéphane Sirot, Maurice Thorez, Paris: Presses des Sciences PO, 2000, pp54-66.
31. For anti-individualism, see Claude Pennetier and Bernard Pudal, 'Les autobiographies des "fils du peuple". De l'autobiographie édifiante à l'autobiographie auto-analytique' in Pennetier and Pudal (eds), Autobiographies, autocritiques, aveux dans le monde communiste, Paris: Belin, 2002, pp223-9
32. Pollitt, 'Yugoslavia', Communist Review, August 1948, p229.
33. Alice Mocanescu, 'Surviving 1956: Gheorghe Gheorgiu-Dej and the "cult of personality" in Romania' in Apor, Leader Cult, pp246-60.

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