Between the late 1920s and the early 1950s; one of the most persuasive personality cults of all times saturated Soviet public space with images of Stalin. A torrent of portraits; posters; statues; films; plays; songs; and poems galvanized the Soviet population and inspired leftist activists around the world. In the first book to examine the cultural products and production methods of the Stalin cult; Jan Plamper reconstructs a hidden history linking artists; party patrons; state functionaries; and ultimately Stalin himself in the alchemical project that transformed a pock-marked Georgian into the embodiment of global communism. Departing from interpretations of the Stalin cult as an outgrowth of Russian mysticism or Stalins psychopathology; Plamper establishes the cults context within a broader international history of modern personality cults constructed around Napoleon III; Mussolini; Hitler; and Mao. Drawing upon evidence from previously inaccessible Russian archives; Plampers lavishly illustrated and accessibly written study will appeal to anyone interested in twentieth-century history; visual studies; the politics of representation; dictator biography; socialist realism; and real socialism.
#2148855 in eBooks 2010-06-01 2010-06-01File Name: B006OR95WM
Review
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful. what is still unrevealedBy sailing up chit speakI was not deeply involved in thinking about Susan Sontag in the twentieth century. Something about Walter Kaufmanns English translation of Nietzsches The Gay Science in 1974 made me think Sontags Notes on Camp might involve the same kind of snappy whiplash upper crustedness. By the time Walter Kaufmann died. on September 4. 1980. I had to look for anyone writing in English who would suffer as I had as a Freudian expert in the humor of the Vietnam war. The analysis by Terry Castle. Some Notes on "Notes on Camp" (pp. 21-31). mentioning a host of intellectual and cultural transformations that would come to fruition over the next four decades. might put me at the end of the most interesting confounding clash of cosmologies in the decade we are having now. such as it is.
