Jan Plamper

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

Cover Interview of February 14, 2012

Lastly

The Russian translation of the book appeared in early 2010 when Moscow mayor Luzhkov had agreed to a veterans organization’s demand to carry, for the first time in decades, Stalin portraits during the annual May 9 celebrations of the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany. Luzhkov’s decision reignited public debates about Stalinism, in which the Kremlin appeared more anti-Stalinist than in previous years. (In retrospect, the Kremlin probably merely used the Stalin poster scandal to sack Luzhkov, which it did during the summer.)

At the height of this scandal, the book earned me an invitation to Pust govoryat—a Russian talk show in the Jerry Springer style (that translates “Let them talk”). I declined the invitation, but the book had become a political argument. Russian democrats used it to assail Stalin’s legacy, going so far as to warn about post-Soviet image politics drifting into a personality cult (recall Putin’s bare torso photo op on the Yenisei or Putin shooting a Siberian tiger with a tranquilizer gun). Russian nationalists accused me of foreign intervention; one blogger suggested that “the Fritz”—apparently, me—“better go and study his Hitler.”

I had never expected the book would have this kind of relevance to contemporary politics. However, if The Stalin Cult helps to uncover the mechanics of personality cults and makes it a bit more difficult for, say, a pseudo-popular initiative to rename a mountain after Putin (after some staged reluctance from him), that’s not too bad.

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