Organ of Alliance Marxist-Leninist (North America)
                                Volume 1, Issue 3; March 2003 $1.00


A L L I A N C E ! ,A Revolutionary Communist Monthly

The Cult of the Individual (1934-1952) by Bill Bland


Modified from articles by Comrade Bill Bland from 1976 onwards

    Nikita Khrushchev; First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, publicly attacked Stalin at the 20th Congress of the Party, in a 'secret speech'  on 25 February leaked to the US State Department; asserting that:

    Yet many witnesses testify to Stalin's simplicity and modesty. The French writer Henri Barbusse describes the simplicity of Stalin's life-style:     True, Stalin had a dacha, or country cottage, but here too his life was equally simple, as his daughter Svetlana relates:     The Albanian Enver Hoxha leader of the Communist Party of Albania (Later the Party of Labour of Albania) describes Stalin as 'modest' and ‘considerate':      The British Fabian economists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their monumental work Soviet Communism": A New Civilisation, rejected the notion that Stalin exercised dictatorial power:     Even observers who are highly critical of Stalin agree with the testimony of the former. The American Ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies remarked on Stalin's simple, kindly manner: Continued on page seven.





    Stalin's daughter Svetlana Alliluyeva is gullible enough to accept almost every slander circulated about her father, but even she dismisses the charge that he himself engineered the 'cult' of his personality. She describes a train trip with Stalin from the Crimea to Moscow in 1948:     She describes the grief of the servants at the dacha when Stalin died:     Furthermore, the facts show that on numerous occasions Stalin himself denounced and ridiculed the 'cult of the individual' as contrary to Marxism-Leninism.

    For example,

Continued on page eight.




    The view that the Marxist-Leninists were in a minority in the Soviet leadership from the late 1920s, is unpopular. But we have seen that, although Stalin expressed strong opposition to the 'cult of personality', the 'cult of personality' continued. It therefore follows irrefutably that:     But if the 'cult of personality' around Stalin was not built up by Stalin, but against his wishes, by whom was it built up?

    The most fervent exponents of the 'cult of personality' around Stalin were revisionists and concealed revisionists like Karl Radek, Nikita Khrushchev and Anastas Mikoyan. The revisionist historian Roy Medvedev points out that:

    At his public trial in January 1937 Radek admitted to terrorism and treason.

    It was Khrushchev who introduced the term 'vozhd' ('leader', corresponding to the German word 'F'uhrer'). At the Moscow Party Conference in January 1932, Khrushchev finished his speech by saying:

    At the 17th Party Conference in January 1934 it was Khrushchev, and Khrushchev alone, who called Stalin: In August 1936, during the treason trial of Lev Kamenev, Khrushchev, in his capacity as Moscow Party Secretary, said:     At the Eighth All-Union Congress of Soviets in November 1936 it was again Khrushchev who proposed that the new Soviet Constitution, which was before the Congress for approval, should be called the 'Stalinist Constitution' because:
Continued on page seven.      It has to be noted that Vyacheslav Molotov, and Andrey Zhdanov, did not mention any special role by Stalin in the drafting of the Constitution.

    In the same speech Khrushchev coined the term 'Stalinism'

    On the occasion of the celebration of Stalin's fiftieth birthday in December 1929, Anastas Mikoyan accompanied his congratulations with the demand:     The Motives for Building up the 'Cult of the Individual'

    Of course, many Soviet citizens admired Stalin and expressed this admiration. But clearly, the 'cult of the individual' around Stalin was built up mainly by the concealed revisionists, against Stalin’s wishes, in order :

    Firstly, to disguise the fact that the Party and the Communist International were dominated by concealed revisionists and to present the fiction that these were dominated personally by Stalin; thus blame for breaches of socialist legality and for deviations from Marxist-Leninist principles on their part could later be laid on Stalin;

    Secondly, to provide a pretext for attacking Stalin at a later date (under the guise of carrying out a program of ‘democratization’, which was in fact a program of dismantling socialism".

    The Finnish revisionist Tuominen in 1935, describes how, when he was informed that busts of him had been given prominent places in Moscow's leading art gallery, the Tretyakov, Stalin exclaimed:

    The German writer Lion Feuchtwanger in 1936 confirms that Stalin suspected that the 'cult of personality' was being fostered by 'wreckers' with the aim of discrediting him:     To conclude, the attack made by the revisionists, on the 'cult of personality' in the Soviet Union was an attack not only upon Stalin personally as a leading Marxist-Leninist, a leading defender of socialism, but was the first stage in an attack upon Marxism-Leninism and the socialist system in the Soviet Union.

    Perhaps the best comment on it is the sarcastic toast which the Finnish revisionist Tuominen records as having been proposed by Stalin at a New Year Party in 1935:

End.