Joseph Stalin's cult of personality

Joseph Stalin's cult of personality became a prominent feature of Soviet popular culture beginning in 1929, after a lavish celebration of his purported 50th birthday. For the rest of Stalin's rule, the Soviet press presented Stalin as an all-powerful, all-knowing leader, with Stalin's name and image appearing everywhere. Historian Archie Brown sets the celebration of Stalin's 50th birthday on 21 December 1929 as the starting point for his cult of personality. The building of the cult of personality around Stalin had to proceed judiciously, as British historian Ian Kershaw explains in his history of Europe in the first half of the 20th century, To Hell and Back: A Stalin cult had to be built carefully. This was not just because the man himself was so physically unprepossessing – diminutive and squat, his face dominated by a big walrus mustache and heavily pitted from smallpox – or that he was a secretive, intensely private individual who spoke in a quiet, undemonstrative voice, his Russian couched in a strong Georgian accent that never left him. The real problem was the giant shadow of Lenin. Stalin could not be seen to be usurping the legendary image of the great Bolshevik hero and leader of the revolution. So at first Stalin tread cautiously. Lenin had not wanted Stalin to succeed him, stating that "Comrade Stalin is too rude" and suggesting that the party find someone "more patient, more loyal, more polite". Stalin did not completely succeed in suppressing Lenin's Testament suggesting that others remove Stalin from his position as leader of the Communist party. Nevertheless, after Lenin's death 500,000 copies of a photograph of Lenin and Stalin apparently chatting as friends on a bench appeared throughout the Soviet Union. Before 1932, most Soviet propaganda posters showed Lenin and Stalin together. This propaganda was embraced by Stalin, who made use of their relationship in speeches to the proletariat, stating Lenin was "the great teacher of the proletarians of all nations" and subsequently identifying himself with the proletarians by their kinship as mutual students of Lenin.

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