But Mum, Don’t You Love Lenin?!

While we’re on the subject of Evtushenko (see the last post) and his sycophantic poem to Stalin (see this post), I’ve had cults of personality on my mind. Via Andrew Sullivan, I’ve read this fascinating theory of cults of personality. I’ll quote a selection to give the gist:

[T]he typical…model of how a cult of personality “works” is one in which…the cult of personality creates loyalty by producing false beliefs in the people, and the best way of combating its effects is by providing alternative sources of information. Even scholars who are well aware of the basic unbelievability of cults of personality often speak as if their function were to persuade people…But this way of thinking about cults of personality misses the point, I think. Not because it is entirely wrong; it is certainly plausible that some people do come to believe in the special charisma of the leader…
Here is where cults of personality come in handy. The dictator wants a credible signal of your support…In order to be credible, the signal has to be costly: you have to be willing to say that the dictator is not merely ok, but a superhuman being, and you have to be willing to take some concrete actions showing your undying love for the leader. (You may have had this experience: you are served some food, and you must provide a credible signal that you like it so that the host will not be offended; merely saying that you like it will not cut it. So you will need to go for seconds and layer on the praise). Here the concrete action required of you is typically a willingness to denounce others when they fail to say the same thing, but it may also involve bizarre pilgrimages, ostentatious displays of the dictator’s image, etc.

I think there’s definitely something to it. But first, as to the fact believing in a cult of personality, I’m a data point so here’s an incident from my early childhood in the USSR. I think we were told about the Greatness of the Great Lenin from kindergarten so I would have been around 5 maybe. My mum and I are on the tram and one of the patriotic national holidays is coming up tomorrow. There’s the dramatic re-enactment.

Me: Mum, tomorrow you’ll put on your best dress and dad will put on a tie, won’t you? And then we’ll go to visit Grandpa Lenin in the mausoleum.
Mum: What? [I guess she would have been especially taken aback by my insistence that dad wears a tie to visit an embalmed murderer.] No, I don’t think so.
Me: But mum…don’t you love Lenin? [Actually in Russian the phrasing is in the negative so the connotation is something like "you don't love Lenin?"]
At this point, my mum looked around the tram and its passangers in embarrassment and horror and made us get off at the next stop and walk. Though things weren’t as bad in the 80s, you do not feel comfortable in a tram full of strangers when your son accidentally accuses you of not loving Lenin.

So it’s definitely true that people do believe cults of personality to an extent. And it’s probably pretty easy to cultivate the type of COP where people just love the leader. After all, kids will generally believe things adults tell them by default — I think all my kindergarten teachers had to do was tell me how great Lenin was and that we should all love him and maybe read a few urban-mythological stories about how honest and kind he was.

But I think all this means is there are two kinds of cults of personality. The first is the more mild version which is the one I was brought up in. There, the leader is simply great. It’s not as implausible since great people really do exist and for that purpose, none of the apocryphal stories (eg. about Lenin) need to be outrageous or implausible. It’s quite possible that Lenin confessed to some misdeed as a child even though he knew he’d be beaten because he was so honest. (Note: I guess this is a common apocryphal story since in the US instead of Lenin it’s Washington and the cherry tree) Even though the story’s probably false it’s not outrageous.

Then there is a whole other category of COPs where the claims are literally ludicrous. North Korea is always the best example. To take just one of the claims, there’s a golf course in Pyongyang where the Great Leader plays. And everyone knows that his best score is 18 — that’s 18 holes-in-one. And there are dozens of similar claims. That type of COP I think fits in with the above theory a bit better. For the more tame version it might still be explained by a genuine desire to convince people.

And just to give you a feel for the difference, here’s another excerpt from the post I got the above quote from. If the “milder” cults of personality are tragic, the ones with the more ridiculous claims are even more horrid.

There is a terrific story in Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea (pp. 97-101), which illustrates both how such control mechanisms can work regardless of belief and the degradation they inflict on people. The story is about a relatively privileged student, ‘Jun-sang,’ at the time of the death of Kim Il-sung (North Korea’s ‘eternal president’). The death is announced, and Jun-sang finds that he cannot cry; he feels nothing for Kim Il-Sung. Yet, surrounded by his sobbing classmates, he suddenly realizes that “his entire future depended on his ability to cry: not just his career and his membership in the Workers’ Party, his very survival was at stake. It was a matter of life and death” (p. 98). So he forces himself to cry. And it gets worse: “What had started as a spontaneous outpouring of grief became a patriotic obligation – The inmiban [a neighbourhood committee] kept track of how often people went to the statue to show their respect. Everybody was being watched. They not only scrutinized actions, but facial expressions and tone of voice, gauging them for sincerity” (p. 101).