The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power

Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s, one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits, posters, statues, films, plays, songs, and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult, Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists, party patrons, state functionaries, and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism.
Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalin's psychopathology, Plamper establishes the cult's context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives, Plamper's lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history, visual studies, the politics of representation, dictator biography, socialist realism, and real socialism.
Jan Plamper is Professor of History at Goldsmiths, University of London. His books The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford UP) and The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power (Yale UP) won prizes and were translated into several languages. His latest book Das neue Wir. Warum Migration dazugehört: Eine andere Geschichte der Deutschen [The New We. Why Migration is No Problem: A Different History of the Germans] appeared in February 2019 with S. Fischer publishers. Plamper was educated in the U.S. (B.A. Brandeis, Ph.D. Berkeley) and commutes between London and Berlin.