Did Soviet citizens believe Stalin’s propaganda?

The short answer

• A leader without rivals needed a public image. Stalin had defeated every rival by 1929, yet he lacked Lenin’s authority and Trotsky’s fame. The cult gave him a legitimacy based on wisdom and success, linking him to Lenin and to every achievement of the plans. His colleagues, who had known him as one leader among several, competed to praise him, because public devotion became a test of their own loyalty. Without it, the sacrifices of collectivisation and industrialisation would have been demanded by a committee; with it, they were demanded by the leader of the revolution.
• A poorly educated society needed simple messages. Millions of new workers and peasants had little schooling, and the regime set out to reach them through posters, radio, film and slogans. A single heroic leader was easier to understand than Marxist theory, and images of Stalin among workers, children and soldiers carried the message without words. Literacy campaigns, which raised literacy sharply in the 1930s, also gave propaganda a larger reading audience, and wired radio loudspeakers in squares and workplaces reached those who still could not read.
• Russian traditions of the ruler as father. Many peasants had grown up with the image of the tsar as a distant father whose officials were to blame for injustice. The cult reused that pattern: Stalin was kind and wise, and local officials were blamed for “excesses”, as in the article “Dizzy with Success” of 1930. Plamper and others argue that this continuity helped the cult take root among people who disliked the regime’s policies but could still hope the leader would correct them.
• The Terror required a new history. Each show trial turned former heroes into traitors, which made existing histories and textbooks obsolete overnight. Libraries removed books by and about the condemned, and owners inked out their faces in photographs. The regime needed a single authoritative account that explained the purges and placed Stalin at the centre of the revolution. The Short Course of 1938, written to Stalin’s instructions and corrected by him, supplied it and became the basis of all teaching.

What it changed

Loyalty to one man became loyalty to the state. Because propaganda presented every achievement as Stalin’s, any doubt about policy became a political crime under Article 58 on “anti-Soviet agitation”. Telling a joke about Stalin could bring a camp sentence, and thousands were convicted for such remarks. The cult therefore reinforced the Terror and the Gulag, which punished what it forbade, and made silence the safest form of loyalty.

Russian patriotism mobilised for war. The return to Russian heroes prepared the population for a national war. In 1941 Stalin invoked Alexander Nevsky, Dmitry Donskoy, Suvorov and Kutuzov, and wartime propaganda appealed to the motherland as much as to socialism. Soldiers went into battle with the cry “For the Motherland, for Stalin!”, which joined the two loyalties in one slogan, and the war completed the turn from revolutionary to patriotic legitimacy.

The cult reached its peak after victory. For his seventieth birthday in December 1949, gifts from around the world filled a Moscow museum and his portrait was lit in the night sky above the city. The cult spread to the new satellite states of Eastern Europe, where cities and streets were renamed for him too, so the cult became one of the exports of Soviet power, imposed along with it.

Its demolition shook the system. When Khrushchev denounced the “cult of personality” in 1956, he attacked the image on which the regime had built its legitimacy for a generation. Cities were renamed again, statues removed and Stalin’s body taken out of the Lenin Mausoleum in 1961. The shock to believers, and the protests it set off in Georgia and Eastern Europe, showed how much legitimacy had rested on one face.