Sign up to access the complete lesson and track your progress!
Unlock This CourseThe terror made people afraid of Stalin. The cult of personality was meant to make them love him. From the end of the 1920s, and above all in the 1930s, the Soviet people were told every day that Stalin was a genius, a hero and a kind father to the whole country. His face and his name were everywhere.
The party had already done this for Lenin. After Lenin died in 1924 his body was preserved and put on show in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow, and the city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. Stalin's cult copied these ideas, but for a living leader, and on a far bigger scale.
Key terms:
Stalin had not been Lenin's chosen successor. Remember, Lenin's Testament had called him 'too rude'. The cult covered this up. It told people that Stalin had always been Lenin's closest friend and best pupil, so he had the right to rule.
The Five-Year Plans and collectivisation brought long hours, shortages and hunger. People needed something to believe in. The cult gave Stalin the credit for every new dam and factory, while 'wreckers' and local officials took the blame for everything that went wrong.
If Stalin was always wise and always right, then anyone who disagreed with him had to be a fool or a traitor. Criticising Stalin became the same as attacking the Revolution itself. This made the purges easier to accept.
For centuries Russian peasants had been taught to honour the tsar as their 'little father' and to pray in front of icons. The Communists had removed the tsar and attacked the Church. The cult gave people a new figure to look up to in their place.
The cult also united a huge country. The USSR was home to dozens of nationalities with different languages. Loyalty to one leader was something they could all share.
Posters showed Stalin leading workers, greeting farmers and smiling at children. He was drawn bigger than everyone around him. Official pictures made him look taller and hid the smallpox scars on his face.
Statues and busts of Stalin stood in town squares and parks across the USSR. His portrait hung in every office, classroom and factory. Some families put it in the corner of the room where an icon used to hang.
Tsaritsyn became Stalingrad in 1925. Yuzovka, a coal and steel town in Ukraine, became Stalino. Dushanbe became Stalinabad. In the 1930s the highest mountain in the USSR was named Stalin Peak. Factories, farms and streets took his name too.
The best-known picture of all came from 1936. A young girl called Gelya Markizova gave Stalin flowers at a meeting in the Kremlin, and he lifted her up for a photograph. The picture was copied across the country as proof that Stalin loved children. Posters carried the slogan 'Thank you, dear Stalin, for a happy childhood'. The truth was darker. Gelya's father, a party official, was arrested in 1937 and shot.
Pravda, the party newspaper, carried Stalin's name and picture day after day. Reporters gave him grand titles: 'Great Leader', 'Father of Nations', 'Brilliant Genius of Humanity'. Every success was his. The new constitution of 1936 was called the 'Stalin Constitution'. Reports of speeches noted the 'stormy applause' whenever his name was spoken.
Each year, on 1 May and on 7 November (the anniversary of the October Revolution), huge parades crossed Red Square. Marchers carried giant portraits of Stalin, while he watched from the top of Lenin's Mausoleum. His fiftieth and sixtieth birthdays were national events. For his sixtieth, in December 1939, the Stalin Prizes for science and the arts were set up.
One message ran through all of these methods: Stalin was carrying on Lenin's work. Paintings and photographs showed the two men side by side, as if they had always been partners. Banners put their two faces together. A slogan of the 1930s said it in six words: 'Stalin is the Lenin of today'.
Stalin's public image was carefully chosen too. He wore a plain tunic and smoked a pipe, like a modest, hard-working man of the people. Most Soviet citizens never saw him in person, only in pictures, which made him seem calm, wise and far above ordinary life. How books, films, schools and history itself were changed to fit this picture is covered in Censorship, Propaganda and Rewriting History.
Many did. Millions of people, especially the young, truly admired Stalin and wrote to him for help. When a relative was arrested, people often said, 'If only Stalin knew'. They blamed the secret police or local officials, never the leader. Others did not believe a word but clapped and cheered anyway, because staying silent was dangerous.
Don't mix up reasons and methods. A reason is why Stalin wanted the cult, such as looking like Lenin's heir. A method is how it was done, such as posters or renamed towns. Don't say the cult began after the Second World War: it grew from the end of the 1920s and was at full strength in the 1930s. And don't write that everyone was fooled, or that nobody was. Real belief and fear existed side by side.
(b) Explain two effects of the cult of personality on the people of the Soviet Union in the 1930s. [8 marks]
One effect of the cult of personality was that many Soviet people came to trust and admire Stalin. Posters, statues and newspapers such as Pravda presented him every day as the 'Father of Nations' and the heir of Lenin, and gave him the credit for successes such as the new factories and the 'Stalin Constitution' of 1936. Because people saw only this image, they separated Stalin from their own hardships. When relatives were arrested, many said 'If only Stalin knew' and blamed local officials. This meant the cult kept people loyal to Stalin even when life was hard.
A second effect was that criticising Stalin became almost impossible. The cult showed him as a genius who was always right, the 'Lenin of today'. This meant that anyone who disagreed with him looked like an enemy of the Revolution, not just a critic. As a result, people felt they had to join in the praise in public, carrying his portrait in the Red Square parades and applauding his name, whatever they thought in private. This silenced opposition and helped ordinary people to accept the purges.
What lifts this to the top level: there are two separate effects, each backed by precise detail, and each paragraph explains how the cult led to that effect ('because', 'this meant', 'as a result').
This question asks for effects, so don't just describe the posters and statues. Use them as evidence, then say what they did to people: built trust in Stalin, or made criticism impossible. Always write about two effects in two separate paragraphs. One effect alone, however good, cannot score more than 4 of the 8 marks.