Propaganda promoted each leader’s qualities and achievements, thus propagating a cult of personality.

Cult of Personality

The adoration of an individual through the use of art and popular culture.

It was used as a method of enhancing the status of an individual leader and creating a sense of loyalty to them

One of the features of Stalin’s rule, which caused Trotsky to accuse him of betraying the revolution by creating a personal dictatorship from a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Brezhnev had less personal power than Stalin or Khrushchev, but his Cult gave him the appearance and trappings of power.

Lenin

• “Father of Communism” - association gives legitimacy and stability to other leaders

• Resisted it while alive, but developed post-humously by Stalin

  • Mauseleum in Red Square, Stalin’s eulogy

• Stalin doctored photos to establish himself as a disciple

Stalin

• “Lenin of Today”

  • Doctored photos

  • Dictatorship gave great personal power

• Autobiography rewrote socialist history

• 70th Birthday celebrations lasted more than a year

• High-Stalinism - greatest personal power after Great Patriotic War

  • Gave speech from Red Square to commemorate 50th anniversary of October Revolution while Nazis were 50 miles away - wartime leader

Khrushchev

• Ended collective leadership to establish personal power

• Helped to survive anti-party coup

• Presented himself as

  • responsible for new successes (like Soviet Space & rising harvests in Virgin Lands)

  • Authority in many topics

  • Reformer perfecting the Soviet system

  • Lenin’s disciple, completing the journey

  • Respected statesman negotiating equally with US

• Obvious failures undermined the media’s claims

• Condemned Stalin’s Cult of Personality in Secret Speech 1956

  • Didn’t fully denounce Stalin publicaly, so popular loyalty continued

  • Limited de-Stalinisation

• Khrushchev was then condemned himself for his Cult as a reason for dismissal (1964)

Brezhnev

• His personal image was a subsitute for power, rather than a tool for manipulating it

• Inspired cynacism - “What will do if the Bolsheviks come into power?”

  • Medals & Military honours for WW2 “expanded chest”

  • Lenin Prize for Literature

  • Luxury cars

• His Cult was counter-productive as an obviously priviledged bureaucrat not a radical revolutionary or war hero

  • Led to ridicule