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 International
Communism
and the Cult of
the Individual
Leaders,Tribunes and Martyrs
under Lenin and Stalin

KEVIN
M O R GA N
International Communism and the Cult
of the Individual
 Kevin Morgan

International
Communism and the
Cult of the Individual
Leaders, Tribunes and Martyrs under Lenin
and Stalin
Kevin Morgan
Sch of Social Sci Politics
University of Manchester
Manchester, United Kingdom

ISBN 978-1-349-71778-1    ISBN 978-1-137-55667-7 (eBook)

DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55667-7

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957363

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher,
whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation,
reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in
any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic
adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or here-
after developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information
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lisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the
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The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 Acknowledgements

This book draws on research into communist history going back over
many years and it is impossible to register all the debts I have accumu-
lated here. Nevertheless, a number of these must be recorded dating from
the period I spent working specifically on this project in 2013–2015. For
this opportunity I must first acknowledge the support of the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (award AH/J005975/1: ‘Communism and
the cult of the leader’) supported by sabbatical leave from the University
of Manchester and the cover provided by my colleagues in Politics. I was
very fortunate to have the assistance of Francis King while researching in
the Moscow archives and for guidance on diverse translation issues. Unless
otherwise stated, translations from Russian sources are by Dr King. I am
also grateful to Julie Johnson and Norman LaPorte for help with trans-
lations from the German and diverse other matters, to José Neves and
Stephen Parker for help with original texts which I had read in French and
to Gavin Bowd and Gareth Price-Thomas for their comments on other
translation issues. I must also thank Lynda Morris for assistance in locat-
ing the Picasso images, and owe special thanks to Aldo Agosti for the
translation of the letter of Togliatti cited in Chaps 2 and 3, and for assis-
tance with a number of other queries.
The immediate idea for writing the book came from editing the inau-
gural issue of Twentieth Century Communism on ‘Communism and the
leader cult’ in 2009. I must therefore record my debt to those who con-
tributed to that issue and to my fellow journal editors. I also derived
much benefit from the Manchester seminar on the cult of the individual
in December 2013, and would like to thank Balázs Apor, John Bulaitis,

v
vi Acknowledgements

Sarah Davies, Mario Kessler, Norman LaPorte, Marietta Stankova and all
who contributed to a stimulating day. I also appreciated the opportunity
to present parts of this research at events organised by the Society for
the Study of Labour History and the Communism Group of the Political
Studies Association, and at the ESSHC and Historical Materialism confer-
ences held respectively in Vienna and London in 2014. A final presenta-
tion at the University of Bern provided the occasion for comments on the
introduction from Brigitte Studer which I found particularly helpful.
The broader treatment offered here would have been impossible
without the stimulus and intellectual generosity of colleagues work-
ing on communism and left movements internationally. In addition to
those already mentioned, those who helped through discussion, feed-
back, sources or advice on specific points include Kasper Braskén, John
Callaghan, Madeleine Davis, Jean-François Fayet, Mike Jones, Anastasia
Koukouna, Carl Levy, Adriá Llacuna, Stuart Macintyre, John Manley,
Emmet O’Connor, Bernard Pudal, Ole Martin Rønning, James G. Ryan,
Andrew Thorpe, Stephen White, Serge Wolikow and Matthew Worley. I
am particularly grateful to those who read over sections of the text dealing
with matters in which they have particular expertise, namely John Bulaitis,
Romain Ducolombier, José Gotovitch, Norman LaPorte, Lars T. Lih,
Silvio Pons, Tim Rees and Tauno Saarela. Given our published collabora-
tions in the field, I owe it to Norry LaPorte in particular to point out that
I alone am responsible for the interpretations presented here.
On many occasions in the past I have already had to record my thanks
to colleagues at the Working Class Movement Library, the Labour History
Archive and Study Centre and other research libraries in Britain. As well
as further research at RGASPI in Moscow, I must now also acknowledge
the assistance I received from libraries and archives in Paris including the
departmental archives of Seine-Saint-Denis; the Bibliothèque de docu-
mentation internationale contemporaine at Nanterre; the archives of the
PCF; the Archives nationales; and the Centre d’Histoire Sociale du XXe
siècle. I must also thank the Centre des Archives Communistes en Belgique
for assistance with visual materials; and for permission to consult sections
of the Thorez deposit in the Archives nationales in Paris I must thank the
Thorez family. My special thanks as always to Julie, Sam and Jane.
The usual caveats apply, and for both the judgements offered here and
any errors or misunderstandings I am alone responsible.
December 2015
 Contents

1 Introduction: Wherever a Communist Party is at Work…   1

2 Cult Developments 1917–1956  25

3 Cult Variations  71
3.1 Integrating and Enkindling 71
3.2 A Unifying Concept 80
3.3 ‘By Desert and Accident’: The Enkindling Figure 93
3.4 Capital and Charisma103

4 Leader Cults 127
4.1 A Leader Made of Filth127
4.2 Maurice Thorez’s Party140
4.3 Office Boys and Lifelong Fighters158

5 Cults of Circumstance 185
5.1 Comintern People185
5.2 Writers in Arms203
5.3 The Red and the Grey221

vii
viii Contents

6 Cult Representations 257
6.1 Remembering Stalin’s Pipe257
6.2 The Impossible Cult Biography277
6.3 The Cult of the Individual in History293

7 Cult Reflections: No Saviour from on High 327

Select Bibliography339

Index349
 Abbreviations

ARAC Association Républican des Anciens Combattants

CGT Confédération générale du travail
CGTU Confédération générale du travail unitaire
CPGB Communist Party of Great Britain
CPUSA Communist Party of the United States of America
ECCI Executive Committee of the Communist International
IMEL Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute
KPD Kommunist Partei Deutschlands (German communist party)
MOPR Mezhdunarodnaya Organizatsiya Pomoshchi Bor’tsam
Revolyutsii (International Red Aid)
PCB Parti communiste de Belgique (Belgian communist party) /
Partido Comunista do Brasil (Brazilian communist party)
PCE Partido Comunista de España (Spanish communist party)
PCF Parti communiste français / Parti communiste de France /
Section française de l’Internationale communiste (French
communist party)
PCI Partito comunista italiano (Italian communist party)
POB Parti ouvrier belge (Belgian workers’ party)
PUWP Polish United Workers’ Party
RCP Russian Communist Party
SED Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity
Party of Germany)
SPD Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (German social-­
democratic party)
UFF Union des Femmes françaises (Union of French Women)

ix
x Abbreviations

In Notes

CdB Cahiers du bolchevisme

CdC Cahiers du communisme
CHS Centre d’Histoire Sociale du XXe siècle (CHS), Paris
CI Communist International
CR Communist Review
DW (L) Daily Worker (London)
DW (NY) Daily Worker (New York)
LM Labour Monthly
MQ Modern Quarterly
NA National Archives, London
NC La Nouvelle Critique
Pens. La Pensée
SSD Archives Départmentales de Seine-Saint-Denis
TCC Twentieth Century Communism: a journal of international
history
WD Workers’ Dreadnought

A Note on Terminology
Over the period covered here, several of the parties discussed went through
at least one change of name. Where there was basic organisational conti-
nuity, the most familiar of these names is used here for simplicity’s sake.
Thus, although the Communist Party of Great Britain became the British
Communist Party in the 1940s, the more familiar acronym CPGB is used
throughout; and similarly the most familiar acronyms for other parties
with a continuous history are also employed generically here, e.g. PCF and
PCI. The nomenclature of party offices and committees has also to some
extent been standardised, for example referring to the German Zentrum as
central committee. In the case of widely transliterated names and terms, I
have tended to follow the conventions of contemporary English-language
sources, except, at the obvious risk of some inconsistency, where common-­
sense or familiarity suggested otherwise.
 List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Homage to Stalin, Salle de la Madeleine, Brussels, 10 March 1953

(courtesy Centre des Archives Communistes en Belgique) 3
Fig. 2.1 Palmiro Togliatti, cover image from S. Scuderi (ed.),
Vita di un italiano (Life of an Italian), Edizione di
Cultura Sociale, 1953  41
Fig. 2.2 Palmiro Togliatti, images from 60th birthday, 1953 from
S. Scuderi (ed.), Vita di un italiano (Life of an Italian),
Edizione di Cultura Sociale, 1953 (courtesy Editori Riuniti) 56
Fig. 4.1 Commemoration of Joseph Jacquemotte, Brussels,
10 October 1937 (courtesy Centre des Archives
Communistes en Belgique) 168
Fig. 5.1 ‘Dimitrov lets in the light’, cartoon by Buchan (James Boswell),
Daily Worker (London), 21 October 1933 (courtesy James Boswell
Archive and Working Class Movement Library) 186
Fig. 5.2 ‘The judge, the judged’, montage by John Heartfield,
Arbeiter-Illustrierte-­Zeitung, 16 November 1933 (Collection of
the Akron Art Museum, Gift of Roger R. Smith, © The
Heartfield Community of Heirs/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and
DACS, London 2016) 189
Fig. 5.3 ‘When Hitler speaks of peace, remember this: Peace sits in jail
with Ernst Thälmann. Freedom for Thälmann—peace for the
world!’, montage by John Heartfield, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung,
12 April 1936 (International Center of Photography, purchase,
with funds provided by the ICP Acquisitions Committee, 2005, ©
The Heartfield Community of Heirs/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn and
DACS, London 2016) 198

xi
xii List of Figures

Fig. 5.4 Maxim Gorki by Fred Ellis, International

Literature, 1933/1 (courtesy Working Class Movement Library) 211
Fig. 5.5 Clara Zetkin by Paula Illès-Kupka, International
Literature, 1934/1 (courtesy Working Class Movement Library) 225
Fig. 6.1 Maurice Thorez by Pablo Picasso, pen-and-ink drawing,
23 May 1945, as reproduced in Maurice Thorez, Fils du peuple,
Éditions sociales, 1950 (courtesy Tate Images,
© Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2016) 272
Fig. 6.2 ‘Stalin, to your health’ by Pablo Picasso, pen-and-ink drawing,
November 1949 (courtesy Tate Images, © Succession Picasso/
DACS, London 2016) 273
Fig. 6.3 Stalin by Pablo Picasso, drawing, 8 March 1953, as reproduced
in Les Lettres françaises, 12–19 March 1953 (courtesy Tate
Images, © Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2016) 274
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Wherever a Communist Party

is at Work…

(i)
In December 1949, millions across the world took part in one of the
defining public rituals of the twentieth century. Cold War tensions were
reaching their height. Germany’s division had been sealed, NATO formed,
and the first of a new wave of show trials held in eastern Europe. In China,
communism’s second great revolution had prevailed, while on the Korean
peninsula tensions would soon break out in open warfare. Overseeing all
from the Kremlin, on 21 December the Soviet leader Stalin marked his
70th birthday with a demonstration of personal power that arguably had
had no historical parallel. In the sky above Red Square, searchlights picked
out his giant profile, suspended from balloons. In the Soviet daily Pravda,
every line of every page was given over to Stalin’s accomplishments. Plays
were staged, films released, songs composed and presents received—so
many presents that a special museum was needed to display them. The
‘stream of greetings’ would feature in Pravda for more than a year; if any
quality was mentioned more than the others, it was Stalin’s modesty.
Stalin was not the only dictator to relish such performances. What was
of a different order was the promotion and reproduction of his cult on an
international scale. Not only from Stalin’s newly extended eastern bloc,
but from both sides of the iron curtain offerings arrived in truckloads.
In Paris alone, some four thousand gifts were assembled. These included
not only the products of diverse handicrafts, trades and professions, but
also the revolver of resistance hero Colonel Fabien; a baby’s bootees kept

© The Author(s) 2017 1

K. Morgan, International Communism and the Cult
of the Individual, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-55667-7_1
2 K. MORGAN

as a memento of a daughter killed by the Nazis; a widow’s wedding ring

from a husband shot dead by French police; a 20-minute film, ‘The Man
We Love the Most’, sonorously narrated by the poet, Paul Éluard. Picasso
contributed a drawing, Éluard himself a poem, and a birthday anthem
Camarade, Bonjour! thanked Stalin for having done away with winter. In
La Pensée, the communists’ ‘journal of modern rationalism’, hommages
were contributed by a linguist, psychologist, soldier, chemist, biologist,
musician, lawyer and designer—most of them acclaiming some quality
of excellence or inspiration in their own field. Watched over by a huge
illuminated portrait, and surrounded by panels of scenes from Stalin’s
life, 40,000 Parisians viewed the offerings before they were packed into
trunks—116 of them—and dispatched to the Soviet capital.1
Communists sometimes claimed that no man had had such world-wide
popularity as Lenin. Certainly, no man’s birthday, excepting only Christ’s,
can have been celebrated on so wide a scale as Stalin’s. Internationalists
according to their guiding precepts, it was as if the communists of all lands
were now to unite, not even in allegiance to a particular state, but in the
veneration of an individual. When Stalin died in 1953, the British com-
munist R. Palme Dutt evoked the scenes of mourning in just these terms:
‘Hitherto the recognition of greatness across the barriers of countries and
continents, of nations and language, of race and colour, has had to await
the verdict of generations and of centuries. Communism has changed
this. Already through Communism the human race begins to become one
kin.’2 (Fig. 1.1)
Though Stalin at the apex had no rival, the party he headed served as
a model as well as inspiration. The quality of ‘greatness’ did not therefore
only emanate from the Kremlin; it was also reproduced at national level
in sometimes strikingly imitative forms. France in 1949 had the world’s
strongest non-ruling communist party, the Parti communiste français
(PCF), enjoying nearly 30 per cent of the popular vote and the cultural and
intellectual prestige epitomised by the recruitment of Éluard and Picasso.
The week immediately following Stalin’s birthday celebrations, the PCF’s
secretariat began planning for the 50th birthday the following spring of
the party’s own general secretary, Maurice Thorez. The same party worker,
Jean Chaintron, was put in charge. If anything, the preparations were even
more painstaking. There were 40,000 posters instead of 30,000, a Maurice
Thorez stamp and postcards, the decking out of the Ivry town hall in
Paris’s red belt, the gifts, the songs, the poems, the ­relics of resistance mar-
tyrs, a handkerchief soaked in the blood of an injured demonstrator—all
 INTRODUCTION 3

Fig. 1.1 Homage to Stalin, Salle de la Madeleine, Brussels, 10 March 1953

(Centre des Archives Communistes en Belgique)

culminating after several days in a firework display and the releasing of car-
rier pigeons.3 In the journal of modern rationalism, Thorez was equated
with the century that bore his imprint, while a popular anthem added the
note of his ubiquity: ‘for everywhere that we are, he is’.4
The French are sometimes said to have a penchant for the providential
or otherwise exalted leader.5 Thorez’s biographers ponder the significance
4 K. MORGAN

in this connection of the country’s Catholic traditions, or of the legacy of

absolutism.6 The PCF itself is held to have conformed particularly closely
to the stalinist canons of the time, and had resources with which to do so
far exceeding those of most other oppositional communist parties. Even
so, it is the international character of the cult phenomenon that stands
out during the Cold War. Not only did every communist party of suf-
ficient size or standing boast a Stalin-figure of its own. These individu-
als were also clearly signalled as part of an interdependent and mutually
reinforcing order of party paragons through which both the indivisibil-
ity and the authentic national character of the world’s communist parties
were expressed. Everywhere these parties had grown in stature, ran one
Stalin tribute; ‘everywhere have shot up the likes of Thorez and Duclos,
Togliatti, Markos, Carlos Prestes, Mao-Tse Tung, Gottwald and William
Foster’. If the names as yet are unfamiliar, they will become less so in the
chapters that follow. In Europe, East and West, in Asia and the Americas,
communism was a school of struggle in which at every level the best of
its leaders were found in the place befitting them. ‘Wherever a communist
party or central committee is at work, Stalin is alive.’7

(ii)
This is a book about the meaning of such claims and how they came to
be made. It explores the communist cult phenomenon from its earliest
manifestations under Lenin to its condemnation in 1956 by Stalin’s suc-
cessor Nikita Khrushchev. It draws on what is already an extensive litera-
ture, including accomplished studies of the Lenin, Stalin and other ruling
party cults. The focus here, however, is on communism as an interna-
tional movement embracing parties of every conceivable legal status, from
the monopoly of power to outright persecution. Respectively in Europe,
Latin America and Asia, figures like Togliatti, Gottwald, Prestes and Mao
were the focus of cultlike practices that were clearly interlinked and shared
common features, but according to varying political imperatives and the
most disparate political circumstances. Having originated in the USSR,
the internationalisation of the cult phenomenon can be traced from the
first continuous promulgation of Stalin’s own cult in the early 1930s.
Nevertheless, it was a complex, spasmodic and in some respects uncer-
tain process which was properly formalised only in the period of ‘high
­stalinism’ in which Stalin’s 70th birthday fell. It is this uneven and often
 INTRODUCTION 5

contradictory development that the present study charts through both

different national cases and the interconnections between them.
Its primary focus is on the oppositional parties of Europe and to a
lesser extent America. Nevertheless, it is impossible to make sense of these
national-level cults without also considering the projection internation-
ally of the Soviet cult figures which served as exemplar and inspiration,
and to which the lesser party cults were, by 1949, overtly subordinated.
Lenin and Stalin therefore figure prominently here, as they did in the
political imaginations of the communists themselves. There was never, on
the other hand, just a transposition from one environment to another.
In considering the different ways in which communists used the politics
of personality, scholarly interpretations developed within a purely Soviet
context will therefore also require adaptation.
These interpretations vary widely, and divisions evident in the wider
field of Soviet studies may equally be found in writings on the Soviet cult
of leaders.8 One important reading, albeit less influential in recent years,
emphasises the singularity of Stalin’s cult and the role of his personal crav-
ings and insecurity.9 Another gives primacy to specifically Russian contin-
gencies and cultural structures, and to the persistence through successive
epochs of Russian history of traditional or neo-traditional practices con-
ducive to the cult of the ruler.10 A third reading, which we might describe
as a modernist or comparativist one, looks beyond Russia’s borders to a
notion of the modern personality cult as a characteristic if not ubiquitous
feature of an age of mass politics.11 Divergent as these readings clearly are,
there is a common point of reference which is the sacralisation of some
centre of sovereign power. It was the Chicago sociologist Edward Shils
who argued that every society has an ‘ultimate and irreducible’ symbolic
centre sustained by sentiments of sacredness and an ‘affirmative attitude’
towards established authority.12 From a neo-traditionalist or exceptionalist
perspective, this may be linked, as it is by J. Arch Getty, with ‘deep struc-
tures’ in Russian culture concerning the sacralised person of the ruler.13
Should a broader context be allowed, as it certainly was by Shils, this may
suggest affinities with a political religions approach grouping bolshevism
with fascism as ‘religiously charged symbolic universes’.14 Getty, while
insisting on the specificity of the Russian case, cites Shils in postulating
a universal human tendency to anthropomorphise power.15 The cult of
personality, in all these cases, is therefore in some basic sense the cult of
power.
6 K. MORGAN

Another common feature is that communism as an international

movement barely figures in these accounts. Nevertheless, the opportuni-
ties to make the connections between these fields of study have in some
ways never been greater. Where just a decade ago the historiographies
of Soviet and international communism appeared to have ‘hardly taken
proper notice of each other’, there has since then emerged a flourish-
ing literature seeking in different ways to overcome this divide.16 Major
publishing projects draw on specialists in both these fields, or seek to
synthesise their work, in addressing the need for a truly global history of
communism.17 A vigorous recent trend in Soviet historiography also seeks
to break down what Katerina Clark refers to as an ‘intellectual iron cur-
tain’ and the denuding of Soviet history of its transnational interactions.18
From the other side of this curtain, the predominance in international
communist historiography of the single-party monograph has also been
giving way to a broader concern with transnational agencies and forms
of interaction.19 Nevertheless, the international literature has so far dealt
only in passing with the discourses and rituals of the leader cult, while
conversely, accounts approaching the cults as the sacralised centre of some
or other communist state have largely disregarded their transnational
aspect. Within the Soviet historiography, it is not only exceptionalists
who play down external factors in their narratives of Russian history, for
even comparativists have worked within a typology which in some cases
is explicitly confined to ‘closed’ societies and to comparators in practice
of the authoritarian right.20 Within the recent global histories of commu-
nism, leading authorities deal cogently with the cult of personality, but as
a feature of the communist polity whose international aspect remains in
many respects elusive.21
Where these communist polities may themselves accommodate a trans-
national dimension is in respect of the hierarchy of interlocking cults that
assisted in the sovietisation of eastern Europe after 1945. Here too there is
an important literature, including the introduction by Alexey Tikhomorov
of the helpful notion of an international cult community.22 Recalling
Weber’s idea of the charismatic community, identification with a com-
mon sacral centre could be seen here as an instrument of discipline and
exclusion, and it is within the wider perspective of the eastern bloc that
E.A. Rees has characterised the leader cult as a ‘deliberately constructed
and managed mechanism’ aimed at integrating some polity around the
leader’s persona. On the other hand, the recognition of a cultic bloc
may merely reinforce the binary pairing of closed and open systems, with
 INTRODUCTION 7

c­ ommunist systems that were doubly closed, as Rees puts it, ‘both domes-
tically and in their relations to the outside world’.23 Intriguingly, it is not
in Stalin’s case but Mao’s that a global history of the Little Red Book has
been produced by scholars from a wide range of areas and subject special-
isms.24 Considering the ever-burgeoning literature on Stalin, it is symp-
tomatic of the iron curtain which Clark alluded to that works of similar
scope have not so far been devoted to either his or Lenin’s cult.
In approaching the subject as a historian of international communism,
the differences to be accommodated are in part ones of periodisation.
Disregarding minor discrepancies as to their dating, every authoritative
account of the Soviet cult of Stalin identifies two distinct phases culmi-
nating respectively in the pre-war period of the Moscow trials and the
­post-­war period of high stalinism. Internationally speaking, the same dis-
tinction broadly holds, with a ‘turn to the individual’ that is clearly trace-
able from 1934 and becomes more emphatically projected onto the figure
of the leader with the onset of the Cold War. In France, for example, Annie
Kriegel’s periodisation of the Thorez cult corresponds closely to Stalin’s
own, with a first phase in 1936–1938 and a second in 1947–1953.25
Though both Kriegel and Stéphane Sirot note that there was an intensifi-
cation of the cult in the second of these periods, no significant distinction
is drawn between them, as if there were the same basic continuity of pur-
pose and effect that is evident in the USSR itself.26
The premises of the present account are different. In respect of the
communists’ envisaged cult community the differences are very simple. In
the first of these phases of cult-building, as it recovered from the shock of
Hitler’s victory in Germany, international communism was a movement
whose effectiveness and even survival depended on reaching out to new
constituencies and mobilising them under the banner of anti-fascism. In
the second of these phases, on the other hand, communism was a move-
ment far more firmly established even in the West, but subject as if under
siege to the intense external pressures of the Cold War. Despite the obvi-
ous elements of synchronicity between national and international devel-
opments, the relevance to these situations of a system of exclusive sacral
rites was clearly not the same. The Soviet cult of Stalin, according to those
who allowed it some functionality, had gained traction as a device to draw
together a heterogeneous population around the ‘concrete living figure’
at its centre.27 Though the rationale in this case was that of a party already
holding power, there was at least a basic congruence between these esoteric
practices of a formalised cultic hierarchy and the turning in upon themselves
8 K. MORGAN

of western communist parties, as notoriously happened during the Cold

War. What is far less clear is how gathering round a venerated ruling figure
served the object of the popular-front mobilisations and reaching out to a
liberal public that coincided with communism’s first phase of cult-building.
Writing of this period, Silvio Pons has noted the difficulties that existed
in exporting a Soviet conception of the nation that was more akin to
fascism itself than to the anti-fascist discourse with which communism
became associated in the West.28 There was certainly no less a predicament
in seeking to export a leader cult that within the USSR bordered on deifi-
cation. For just this reason, however, it was not initially this that was princi-
pally exported. Within a specifically Soviet context, historians observe that
Stalin’s personal cult cannot be properly grasped in isolation, but has to be
located within the wider turn to the heroic that was so much a feature of
the stalinist culture of the 1930s.29 It was this wider heroisation of com-
munist discourse, rather than the single symbolic centre of Stalin himself,
that in the first of these cult-building phases was generalised throughout
the parties of the Comintern. Already one can speak of the cult of the indi-
vidual, in a way one could not have in the 1920s. Nevertheless, this was
represented through conceptions of the leader and the communist hero
that varied considerably according to changing political imperatives and
the disparate conditions in which these were or could be made effective.
No single notion of the personality cult will encompass these differ-
ences. In the attempt to bring them within a common field of vision, the
key distinction is therefore made here between an integrating cult figure
and an enkindling one. An integrating figure may be thought of as activat-
ing, controlling and meshing together more closely a population already
in some sense won for communism. This might be a society subject to
communist rule, like Russia’s, or an oppositional microsociety, as most
famously delineated by Kriegel in the case of France.30 An enkindling fig-
ure, on the other hand, served to draw into communism or communist-
sponsored campaigns a larger population neither subject to the party’s
authority nor yet freely accepting it. This distinction is more fully elabo-
rated in Chapter 3. It will be seen there that it offers a way of distinguish-
ing particular features of the cult phenomenon as these were variously
grouped together over time rather than a crude device for classifying indi-
vidual cases. Stalin’s cult was for many years sui generis as that of a ruler
already established in power. Nevertheless, even Stalin had designs of his
own upon an international public, albeit with just the aforementioned
difficulties of translation from one political environment to another. As
Another random document with
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 Siitä huolimatta täyttyi Anna Marin sydän suurella hellyydellä —
hänhän oli kaikessa tullut niin äitiinsä — ja taistellen ujoutta vastaan,
joka yhtäkkiä yllätti hänet, astui hän isänsä viereen ja laski kätensä
tämän olkapäälle.

— En ole kuullut siitä mitään, sanoi hän. — Mutta eikö ne etsi teitä
nyt… tavoita joka paikasta?

— Kyllä kai — sehän on heidän velvollisuutensa. Mutta tähän asti

olen minä onnistunut, he eivät. Ja tätä on nyt kestänyt kolme
viikkoa.

Tuulen kumea kohina kuului akkunan takaa, ja rapisten ilmestyi

ruutuihin pieniä vesipisaroita. Syysräntää.

Anna Maria värisytti.

Hän kuvitteli miesjoukon kulkevan metsän läpi karannutta etsien ja

tuossa tuokiossa, tietämättä tarkoin itsekään mitä teki, kiiruhti hän
peittämään akkunoita ja lukitsemaan ovea. Ja sitä tehdessään oli
hän varma siitä, että äiti olisi tehnyt samoin…

Kun hän palasi takaisin ja istahti isänsä viereen, näki hän

kyynelkarpalon vierivän tämän poskea pitkin ja katoavan karkean
parran kätköön. Sitä seurasi toinen… kolmas…

Isä kyseli äidistä.

Anna Mari kertoi tarkoin, kertoi kuolinyön ja mitä äiti oli sanonut.

— Olivatko ne hänen viimeiset sanansa? kysyi isä.

 — Olivat. Aina muistan kuinka hän pyysi minua kumartumaan
puoleensa ja kuiskasi sitten: Kun isä palaa, sano hänelle, että kaikki
on annettu anteeksi.

— Vaikka sitä oli paljon… Jumala nähköön… niin paljon että…

Yhtäkkiä hypähti karkuri ylös ja kuulosti. Hänen silmissään

kuvastui hurja kauhu. Anna Mariinkin tarttui hänen pelkonsa, ja hän
hiipi ovelle, painoi korvansa lautaa vasten — eikä kuullut muuta kuin
oman sydämensä rajut lyönnit.

— Tuuli se vain on… ei siellä ole ketään, ei ketään.

Isäkin rauhoittui vähitellen. He puhuivat kuiskaten, ja heillä oli

vielä paljon sanomista toisilleen. Mutta aika kului, ja sen, joka joka
hetki pelkäsi takaa-ajajia, täytyi valmistautua lähtemään.

— Isä, viipyisitte vielä vähäsen, niin saisitte nähdä Antinkin.

Muistattehan, että tähän aikaan kestää nuotanveto aamupuoleen
asti.

— Minä olen nähnyt hänet… nuottarannalla. Ennenkuin tulin

tänne, seisoin kauan aikaa metsässä ja katselin häntä, kun hän istui
keittotulilla toisten miesten kanssa. Suuri ja vahva mies… oikea
korvenraataja… Mutta sanohan, Anna Mari, eihän hän vain ole
saanut isänsä luontoa?

Anna Mari painoi katseensa alas huokaisten.

— En minä sitä niin tarkoin tiedä… mutta kiivas ja kova hän

useinkin on…

— Sinullekin… omalle sisarelleen?

 Tyttö nyökkäsi.

Se myönnytys sai karkurin kiristämään hampaitaan ja puristamaan

kätensä nyrkkiin — vain siten voi hän pidättää kipeän voihkaisun.
Mitä hyödytti hänen oman mielensä muutos … mitä päätöksensä
pyrkiä meren taakse tekemään työtä ja kokoamaan omaisuutta
lapsilleen, jos pojassa eli se… se hirveä, joka oli tuhonnut hänen
oman elämänsä ja hänen kättensä kautta toistenkin elämän…

Hyvä Jumala! Hän palaisi tältä paikalta vapaaehtoisesti vankilaan,

jos vain Antti… Antti…

Mutta velikään ei voi veljeänsä lunastaa, ja tulevaisuus vasta

näyttää mihin Antinkin tie viepi, mitä luonteensa hänellä teettää ja
mitä kaikkea ne, jotka tulevat olemaan lähinnä häntä, saavat
kärsiä… Eikä voi tietää, keventääkö anteeksianto hiventäkään hänen
kuormastaan.

— Sanoiko äiti tosiaankin, että kaikki on annettu anteeksi? kysyi

isä ajatuksiensa jatkoksi.

— Sanoi.

— Ja ne olivat hänen viimeiset sanansa?

— Ne.

Partaiset kasvot kirkastuivat hetkeksi. Ne muistuttivat

syysmaisemaa, johon aurinko väistyvien pilvien lomasta valahtaa. Ja
suru pojan tähden liukui loitommaksi hänen mielestään, kun hän
ajatteli omaa, hiljaista iloaan.
 — Anna Mari, ne olivat lohdutuksen ja voiman sanoja, sanoi hän
sitten. — Niille minä nyt rakennan. Jos onnistun pakenemaan maasta
ja pääsemään aikomusten! perille, niille rakennan. Tai jos joudun
kiinni ja tyrmään uudelleen, rakennan sittenkin.

Puolituntisen kuluttua oli karkuri kadonnut jälleen pimeään,

myrskyiseen yöhön.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARRASKUUN ILTA
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