Jan Plamper

On his book The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power

Cover Interview of February 14, 2012

The wide angle

The Stalin Cult crosses disciplinary boundaries: it is both history and art history and it speaks to the fields of symbolic politics, the high politics of Stalinism, socialist realist visual studies, and dictator biography. I hope the book wears its theory lightly, but, undeniably, I was influenced by the new cultural history, by practice studies in the vein of Pierre Bourdieu, and by the social history of art. I also hope that the book’s empirical core will stand the test of time—this is the first book to reconstruct how the Stalin cult was made.

Soviet citizens encountered not Stalin, the person, but Stalin, the cult product. Consider this story that Artyom Sergeev, Stalin’s adopted son, was fond of telling. He recalled a fight between Stalin and his biological son Vasily. After Stalin found out that Vasily had used his famous last name to escape punishment for one of his drunken debauches, Stalin screamed at him. “â€˜But I’m a Stalin too,’ retorted Vasily. â€˜No, you’re not,’ said Stalin. â€˜You’re not Stalin and I’m not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!’”

history / art / media studies / power / russia / socialism / stalin joseph / myth / propaganda / putin vladimir /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009