One of the strongest charges made against Stalin after his death was that he had indulged in the cult of personality. He had certainly dominated every aspect of Soviet life, becoming not simply a leader but the embodiment of the nation itself. From the 1930s on, his picture appeared everywhere. Every newspaper, book and film, no matter what its theme, carried a reference to Stalin's greatness. Biographies poured off the press, each one trying to outbid the other in its veneration of the leader. Every achievement of the USSR was credited to Stalin. Such was his all-pervasive presence that Soviet communism became identified with him as a person.
The cult of personality was not a spontaneous response of the people. It was imposed from above. The image of Stalin as hero and saviour of the Soviet people was manufactured. It was a product of the Communist Party machine which controlled all the main forms of information - newspapers, cinema and radio, as Roy Medvedev, a Soviet historian who lived through Stalinism, later explained (see Source P).
Excerpt from Let History Judge by Roy Medvedev, published by OUP, UK, 1989, p. 588.
Everywhere he put up monuments to himself - thousands upon thousands of factories and firms named [after] Stalin, and many cities: Stalinsk, Stalino, Stalingrad more than can be counted. When Stalin was encouraging the cult of his personality he and his cohorts shamelessly falsified party history, twisting and suppressing many facts and producing a flood of books, articles and pamphlets filled with distortions.
World History
