JAN PLAMPER. The Stalin Cult

Jan Plamper's book is likely to become the standard work on the Stalin cult. Based on broad and impressive research in archives, the press, film, and painting, it is a masterful analysis of the production of a modern political personality cult. For Plamper, such modern political cults are distinguished from their royal historical ancestors by four factors. They were the products of mass politics, used mass media, existed only in closed societies, and were products of a secular age. This book will stimulate a discussion about modernity in general. Some might argue that Plamper's definition of a modern personality cult is a bit tautological. Mass politics, mass media, secularism, and closed societies were features of the modern age in general, so cults of that era are by definition “modern” simply because that is where we find them. Scholars might thus raise a form versus content question and wonder whether these were just modern tools to promulgate a more ancient and sacred content.

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