The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire, 19451961 [Paperback]

This book examines the construction, dissemination, and reception of the Stalin cult in East Germany from the end of World War II to the building of the Berlin Wall. By exporting Stalins cult to the Eastern bloc, Moscow aspired to symbolically unite the communist states in an imagined cult community pivoting around the Soviet leader. Based on Russian and German archives, this work analyzes the emergence of the Stalin cults transnational dimension. On one hand, it looks at how Soviet representations of power were transferred and adapted in the former enemys country. On the other hand, it reconstructs spaces of agency where different agents and generations interpreted, manipulated, and used the Stalin cult to negotiate social identities and everyday life. This study reveals both the dynamics of Stalinism as a political system after the Cold War began and the foundations of modern politics through mass mobilization, emotional bonding, and social engineering in Soviet-style societies. As an integral part of the global history of communism, this book opens up a comparative, entangled perspective on the ways in which veneration of Stalin and other nationalistic cults were established in socialist states across Europe and beyond.Alexey Tikhomirov is assistant professor of East European history at Bielefeld University.

Stalins cult was a paradox: it should have never existed in a collectivist socialist polity. The export of Stalins cult to East Germany, recently liberated from Hitler and his cult by the Red Army, was the ultimate paradox. Alexey Tikhomirov deftly tells the story of where the East German Stalin cult came from, how it was made, and what the population made of it. Jan Plamper, University of Limerick

Tikhomirov leads his readers on the remarkable journey that saw East Germans replace the cult of the F?hrer with the cult of Stalin. His new archival material offers a fascinating glimpse into the East German reception of the myths, symbols, alC}