Cult of Personality

Etymology and Early Usage

The phrase was not political to begin with. It emerged in English around 1800–1850 as a Romanticist expression for the worship of genius, without political connotations, and Karl Marx first used it as a political term in 1877. In Russian usage it became widespread in the mid-1950s, during the struggle with the Stalinist legacy; it was normally not applied to bourgeois or fascist figures, and later served at times as a negative label in propaganda directed against particular individuals.

Marx and Engels Against It

Marx and Engels rejected any cult of the individual as early as the 19th century. In a letter to Wilhelm Blos, Marx said that out of his 'aversion to any personality cult' he had not published the many requests to acknowledge his services during the International, and that when joining the secret Communist League with Engels he had made it a condition that every article promoting superstitious reverence for authority be struck from its rules. This principle stands in sharp contrast to the later establishment of a personality cult as policy in the USSR.

The first personality cult formed in the USSR was that of Lenin. Lenin fiercely condemned attempts to build a cult around himself during his lifetime, but after his death the Lenin cult became part of the party's pursuit of legitimacy, and Stalin merged the Lenin cult into the cult of himself. The earliest evidence of Stalin's cult appeared in press coverage of his fiftieth birthday in 1929; through the 1930s he established himself as the supreme expert in fields beyond politics, and the mass terror went forward together with the quasi-deification of his person. After the great purges of 1936–1938 Stalin began to encourage the cult, and from 1936 the Soviet press described him as the 'father of nations'; the cult grew into the absolute devotion of every Soviet citizen to an omnipotent leader.

At the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956, Khrushchev read 'On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences' and demoted Stalin's personality cult. He defined such a cult as impermissible and foreign to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, and criticized the elevation of one man into a superhuman, divine being. The criticism nonetheless confined the problem to Stalin's personal defects and to the fact that he himself encouraged and supported his own glorification, while Leninism and communist ideology continued to be praised. Khrushchev identified the cult as a source of grave distortions of the party's norms of collective leadership, of party democracy, and of socialist legality, and his criticism went as far as the great terror, the purge of the military command, the misjudgements of the war's opening, and the deportation of whole nationalities. It did not address atrocities that were not the direct result of Stalin's actions alone, such as the deportations in Poland and the Baltic, the Katyn massacre, and the Holodomor.

After Khrushchev, Brezhnev criticized Khrushchev's style of leadership but halted the attack on the Stalin cult and used the institution of leader worship to strengthen his own legitimacy. The Soviet institution of leader cults came under sustained attack only in the glasnost period, which contributed to the weakening of Soviet legitimacy and to the collapse.

Examples

The most notorious and widespread personality cults of the twentieth century formed around Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao Zedong, Franco, Chiang Kai-shek, Ho Chi Minh, Kim Il Sung, Juan and Eva Perón, Pol Pot, Pinochet, Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein. Among the most striking examples are the regimes of Stalin in the USSR, Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Mao Zedong in China, and Kim Il Sung in the DPRK; these leaders were revered as great leaders incapable of error, their portraits hung everywhere, and artists produced praise of their persons in quantity.

In Nazi propaganda Hitler was presented as a divine being under titles such as 'supreme judge of the German people,' 'first soldier of the German Reich,' 'first worker of the new Germany' and 'greatest strategist of all time'; there were organizations named after him and many ceremonies, works of literature, films and songs, and 'Mein Kampf' was required study in schools and universities. Mussolini's personality cult was a binding force of party and classes in the fascist system, and the main slogan of state propaganda was 'Mussolini is always right' (Il Duce ha sempre ragione).

Saddam Hussein's personality cult spread throughout Iraqi society: thousands of portraits, posters, statues and murals were erected, his face appeared on Iraqi currency and in government offices, schools, airports and shops, and he appeared in a variety of dress, from Bedouin and Kurdish traditional clothing to Western suits, in an effort to appeal to different groups in Iraqi society. In Syria, Hafez al-Assad ran a state-led personality cult, placing his picture in public institutions across the country; in schools children memorized his quotations and sang songs of praise, and after his death in 2000 his son Bashar al-Assad inherited the tradition.

In Turkmenistan, Saparmurat Niyazov, while president, encouraged his own glorification and built a cult of personality, erecting monuments honoring himself and his family, renaming months, and making his book 'Ruhnama' a required subject in every curriculum. In the DPRK, the cult of personality around the Kim family has existed for decades, and its universality and extremity surpass the personality cults of Stalin and Mao. It began right after Kim Il Sung took power in 1948 and expanded greatly after his death in 1994, and a Confucian-familyist ideology played a key role in maintaining the cult and the system.

Distinctions and Debates

Unlike Carlyle's 'hero worship,' the personality cult is deliberately built around a head of state and is commonly used to legitimize authoritarian rule. The term is sometimes used analogically for popular reverence toward leaders of social movements such as Marx, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Che Guevara or Mandela. Deification of a great figure and a personality cult are formally similar but are distinguished by whether mass media and propaganda are used, and some views treat the personality cult as part of political religion.

There are diverse views on the definition of the personality cult itself. The historian Jan Plamper set out five features distinguishing modern personality cults from those of earlier periods: they are secular and 'founded on popular sovereignty'; their objects are all male; they target the whole people and not only the ruling class; they use mass media; and they exist where the mass media can be controlled enough to suppress the introduction of 'competing cults.'

Personality cults are not confined to totalitarian regimes. There are cases applied to liberal democracies or to leaders of independence movements, such as the cartes de visite portraits of Napoleon III and Queen Victoria or the reverential following of Mahatma Gandhi. Personality cults were made when totalitarian powers sought to transform society along radical lines, but not every dictatorial power practiced one (the case of Pol Pot), and some dictators minimized their own glorification. In the twenty-first century the spread of the internet and social media has brought the phenomenon back, corresponding to the growth of authoritarian governments.