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The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power

ideology. Moreover, Brandenberger argues that just like the ideological canon at large, Stalin’s cult was, although ubiquitous by c.1935, still ‘too disorganized and inconsistent to function effectively as an ideological tribune’ (p. 65). But then came the terror, and the ‘usable past’ created by the successes of mass culture was, in Brandenberger’s term, ‘murdered.’ The recently minted heroes fell in their scores and, in contrast to the tired historiographical orthodoxy that most Soviet citizens were either unaware or untroubled by the mass arrests until it affected them directly, Brandenberger convincingly stresses that the purging of the ‘heroic pantheon’ obviously could not have gone unnoticed by the populace. The terror did not just kill individuals, but destroyed the mobilisational gains made by the propaganda state of the early to mid-1930s. And it was this self-made problem which led to the ‘ossification of the official line’ (ch. 10) – the 1938 publication of the turgid Short Course and the depopularisation of ideology once again. This is where Brandenberger’s earlier monograph, National Bolshevism, comes into play, and he argues that this destruction of the ‘usable past’ and its heroes was likewise the cause of ideology’s reorientation along quasi-nationalist lines in the final pre-war years. There is little to criticise about Propaganda State; even its tendency towards repetition of the central thesis at the top and tail of each chapter helps to maintain clarity rather than cause annoyance. This is an excellent study, written with incisive clarity and engaging (often mordant) analysis; it shines a spotlight on a recently neglected area of Stalinist history and thereby invites us to consider state–society relations in the 1930s in a rather different light. The attention to the popular reception of ideology is particularly effective, for it allows ideology and propaganda to be measured or at least understood in relation to their principal goals – that is, indoctrinating the Soviet population. Combined with Brandenberger’s commitment to returning to the primary sources whenever possible rather than relying on syntheses or historiographical orthodoxies, and to including both Russian and German scholarship, this is a truly impressive piece of work.