This book explores how the communist cult of the individual was not just a Soviet phenomenon but an international one. When Stalin died in 1953, the communists of all countries united in mourning the figure that was the incarnation of their cause. Though its international character was one of the distinguishing features of the communist cult of personality, this is the first extended study to approach the phenomenon over the longer period of its development in a truly transnational and comparative perspective. Crucially it is concerned with the internationalisation of the Soviet cults of Lenin and Stalin. But it also ranges across different periods and national cases to consider a wider cast of bureaucrats, tribunes, heroes and martyrs who symbolised both resistance to oppression and the tyranny of the party-state. Through studying the disparate ways in which the cults were manifested, Kevin Morgan not only takes in many of the leading personalities of the communist movement, but also some of the cultural luminaries like Picasso and Barbusse who sought to represent them. The cult of the individual was one of the most fascinating, troubling and revealing features of Stalinist communism, and as reconstructed here it offers new insight into one of the defining political movements of the twentieth century.

"Biographical appendix": pages [335]-338. Secret speech of Khrushchev concerning the "Cult of the individual," delivered at the twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, February 25, 1956.

Encompassing five continents and twenty centuries, this book puts ruler personality cults on the crossroads of disciplines rarely, if ever, juxtaposed before: among its authors are historians, linguists, media scholars, political scientists and communication sociologists from Europe, the United States and New Zealand. However, this breadth and versatility are not goals in themselves. Rather, they are the means to work out an integrated approach to personality cults, capable of overcoming both the dominance of much-discussed 20th century poster examples (Bolshevism-Nazism-Fascism) and the lack of interest in the related practices of leader adoration in religious and cultural contexts. Instead of reiterating the understandable but unfruitful fixation on rulers as the cults’ focal points, the authors focus on communicative patterns and interactional chains linking rulers with their subjects: in this light, the adoration of political figures is seen as a collective enterprise impossible without active, if often tacit, collaboration between rulers and their constituencies.

Staging Authority: Presentation and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe is a comprehensive handbook on how the presentation, embodiment, and performance of authority changed in the long nineteenth century. It focuses on the diversification of authority: what new forms and expressions of authority arose in that critical century, how traditional authority figures responded and adapted to those changes, and how the public increasingly participated in constructing and validating authority. It pays particular attention to how spaces were transformed to offer new possibilities for the presentation of authority, and how the mediatization of presence affected traditional authority. The handbook’s fourteen chapters draw on innovative methodologies in cultural history and the aligned fields of the history of emotions, urban geography, persona studies, gender studies, media studies, and sound studies.

In 1965 the Anglo-Belarusian Society began publishing a yearbook - The Journal of Byelorussian Studies. Since 2013, the Journal of Belarusian Studies is published in London by the Ostrogorski Centre in cooperation with the Anglo-Belarusian Society. The 2018 issue of the Journal features articles on the cult of Joseph Stalin's personality in Belarus, the preservation of Pentecostals' faith in Soviet-era Belarus, the processes of Belarus's nation-building, and the history of Belarusian émigrés in interwar Czechoslovakia. The issue also features several book reviews. The Journal is the oldest English language double-blind peer-reviewed periodical on Belarusian studies.

The Russian revolution of October 1917, born of the devastation of the Great War, exerted its influence around the globe. Its massive consequences shaped the Twentieth Century and are still with us. Taking 1917 as a point of departure, this book focus on the consequences of imperial and state collapse after 1917 in spatial and chronological dialogue. The contributors examine how profound institutional change created narratives and representations of national memories. They explore the nationalist movements that shaped the new countries and bring to life the communist activists who helped to transform the old world as a tragedy of terrible dimensions unfolded.

The current conflict which threatens the very existence of the inter national communist movement as a single coherent entity must be looked for in the roots of Marxian philosophy. The central concept of pre-Leninist communism is contained in the notion of "proletarian internationalism. " Yet the emergence of the communist party-states has been squarely predicated on the requirements of single national states, as viewed through the training and experience of the various communist leaders. Thus the Soviet version has been shaped by the nationalism of Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev. The only aberrant case, the internationalism of Trotsky, was doomed to failure. The Chinese version of "communism" has as its root concepts the spirit of "prolonged" struggle against a superior enemy, whose ultimate defeat is ensured through the dialectics of political growth. The non communist societies are by definition "decadent. " The movement came to power by exploiting the nationalism engendered within China by the Japanese invasion. Its mass support was based on the peasantry, although the transparent fiction of "proletarian leadership" was strictly maintained. Further, "communism" is a term which has lost its original encompassing definition. Peking now narrowly defines it as policies consonant with "the thought of Mao Tse-tung. " Thus both the Soviet and the Chinese interpretation of "commun ism" are based on a concept which was anathema to the intellectual founders of the movement.