Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond: Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics 9780367225353, 9780429275432

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics in Ruler Personality Cults: State of the Art and Open Questions
1 “Personality Cults”: The Career of the Contested Notion
2 The Mechanisms of Cult Production: An Overview
3 Making the Cult of Personality from Bottom Up: The Case of Seventeenth-Century Mughal India
4 A Personality Cult against One’s will? Traits and Trajectories of Popular Veneration of Emperor Alexander I (r. 1801–1825)
5 Of Death and Dominion: Queen Victoria and the Cult of Colonial Loyalty
6 The Magic Mirror: Supplicant Letters and the Role of False Equivalences in Shaping Ruler Dominance
7 Father of the People, Face of the Nation: The Premodern and Modern Foundations of Ruler Personality Cults
8 The Image of Josip Broz Tito in Post-Yugoslavia: Between National and Local Memory
9 Deification, Canonization and Random Signaling: Upholding and Sustaining Personality Cults
10 ‘We Thank You, Our Beloved Leader!’ The Origins and Evolution of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Cult of Personality
11 Embodied Practices of Leadership: The Case of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
12 Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics in Ruler Personality Cults: Responding to Questions and Formulating Ideas for Future Research
Index

Citation preview

Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond

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, poli­ tical 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 much­discussed 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. Kirill Postoutenko is Senior Researcher in the Special Research Area 1288 (Practices of Comparison) at Bielefeld University, Germany, and Adjunct Associate Professor (Docent) of Russian Literature and Culture at the Uni­ versity of Helsinki, Finland. Darin Stephanov is Guest Researcher at the Islamic Cultures and Societies Research Unit at Aarhus University, Denmark.

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Ruler Personality Cults from Empires to Nation-States and Beyond Symbolic Patterns and Interactional Dynamics Edited by Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov

First published 2021 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2021 selection and editorial matter, Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record has been requested for this book ISBN: 978­0­367­22535­3 (hbk) ISBN: 978­0­429­27543­2 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by codeMantra

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgements List of abbreviations

vii xi xiii



1 “Personality cults”: the career of the contested notion

6

DM I T R I Z A K H A R I N E

2 The mechanisms of cult production: an overview

21

X AV I E R M Á RQU E Z



4 A personality cult against one’s will? Traits and trajectories of popular veneration of Emperor Alexander I (r. 1801–1825)

64

DA R I N S T E PH A NOV



6 The magic mirror: supplicant letters and the role of false equivalences in shaping ruler dominance E VA GI L OI

104

vi Contents



9 Deification, canonization and random signaling: upholding and sustaining personality cults

163

K I R I L L P O S T OU T E N KO







Index

273

Contributors

Ali Anooshahr  received his B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1998, and his M.A. (2002) and Ph.D. (2005) in Islamic History from UCLA. He is a Professor of History at the University of California, Da­ vis where he has taught since 2008. He is a scholar of “comparative Is­ lamic empires” during the medieval and early modern periods. His books include Turkestan and the Rise of Eurasian Empires: A Study of Politics and Invented Traditions (2018), The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature, edited with Ebba Koch (2019), and The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (Routledge, 2009). Eva Giloi is Associate Professor at Rutgers University­Newark, with a PhD from Princeton University that received the Fritz Stern Prize (German Historical Institute). Currently at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, she is working on the book Authors and Epigones: Navigating Modernity in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Her books include Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950 and Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe. She has also written essays on material culture; visual culture; museums; so­ cialization and childhood; copyright and photography; charisma in the urban space and other topics in urban geography. Charlotte Joppien  is a political anthropologist and affiliated researcher at the Turkey Europe Center (Hamburg University, Germany), where she held the position of managing director in 2017–19. She is the author of several books, edited and co­edited volumes on contemporary Turkey, including the monograph Municipal Politics in Turkey—Local Government and Party Organisation (Routledge, 2018). Manuela Marin received her Ph.D. in Romanian contemporary history in 2008 from Babeș­Bolyai University of Cluj­Napoca, Romania. Since 2010, she has been involved in various teaching and research activities at Babeș­Bolyai University. Her main research interest is related to Nicolae Ceauşescu’s regime and his cult of personality on which she published

viii Contributors two books, Nicolae Ceaușescu: Omul și Cultul [Nicolae Ceaușescu: The man and his cult] (2016) and Între trecut și prezent: cultul personalității lui Nicolae Ceaușescu și opinia publică românească [Between past and present: Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality and Romanian public opinion] (2014). Other areas of interest include the everyday life during com­ munism, national minorities, and religion during communism. Xavier Márquez is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and Political Sci­ ence at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His recent re­ search focuses on non­democratic politics, including authoritarianism, dictatorship, and non­democratic political thought. He is also interested in the history of democracy and democratic thought and has published on Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, John Rawls, and ancient Greek and Roman thought. John Plunkett  is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Exeter; his books include Queen Victoria—First Media Monarch (2003), Victorian Print Media—A Reader, ed. with Andrew King (2005) and Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship 1820–1914, co­edited with Joe Kember and Jill Sullivan (Routledge, 2015). His cur­ rent project is a co­authored book with Joe Kember, Picture Going: Visual Shows 1820–1914, which maps the exhibition networks of visual shows like the panorama, magic lantern and peepshow. Kirill Postoutenko is Senior Researcher in the Special Research Area 1288 (Practices of Comparison) at Bielefeld University, Germany, and Adjunct Associate Professor (Docent) of Russian literature and culture at the Uni­ versity of Helsinki, Finland. He has held research and teaching appoint­ ments at the Universities of Munich and Constance (Germany), Columbia University and University of Southern California (USA), IEA and ENS/ Rue d’Ulm (France), Queen Mary, University of London (UK), Univer­ sity of the Basque Country (Spain), University of Helsinki (Finland) and Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (Denmark). He is the author and editor of six books and eighty articles devoted to the history of Russian poetry and literary criticism, history of media and communication in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, and social history of identity. Darin Stephanov is Guest Researcher at the Islamic Cultures and Societies Research Unit at Aarhus University, Denmark. He has held research and teaching appointments at the Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, the University of Jyväskylä (Finland), the University of Memphis, and the University of California, Los Angeles. His scholarship combines a commitment to macro­historical issues of group mentality formation with a dedication to micro­historical methods of close textual analysis. His present research interest is in com­ parative (Ottoman and Russian) empire. Darin Stephanov is the author

Contributors  ix of Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808– 1908 (2019) and a number of journal articles and book chapters. Alexey Tikhomirov  is Assistant Professor in East European History at Bielefeld University, Germany. His first monograph, “The Best Friend of the German People”: The Stalin Cult in East Germany, 1945–1961 (2014), was published in Russian in the internationally acclaimed series “History of Stalinism”. His articles have been published in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, the Slavonic and East European Review, and the Journal of Modern European History. He is currently completing his second book entitled Forced Trust: Emotional Bonds between People and State in Soviet Russia (1917–1991). Tamara P. Trošt is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the School of Econo­ mics and Business, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from Harvard University (2012) and a M.A. in Political Sci­ ence from Syracuse University. Her research interests include national­ ism and ethnic identity broadly, with a geographical focus on the Western Balkans, and qualitative and mixed methods. She is working on several projects, including the interplay between class and ethnic identity, sports nationalism and symbolic nation­building, memory politics, and every­ day identity. Previously, she was a visiting professor at the University of Graz, and spent the 2015–16 year as a Fung Fellow at Princeton Univer­ sity. She is the co­editor of Changing Youth Values in Southeast Europe: Beyond Ethnicity (Routledge, 2018, with Danilo Mandić) and Europeanisation and Memory Politics in the Western Balkans (2020, with Ana Milošević). Dmitri Zakharine is a Senior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies (Vienna, Austria); he also teaches at the University of Freiburg, Germany. His main research areas are nonverbal commu­ nication and sound media. Zakharine is the author of four books and editor of five collective monographs on sound media, film, linguistics, history and sociology.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies (Aarhus, Denmark) for its hospitality, generosity and the true spirit of dis­ covery. Thanks to all this (and a bit of luck), the editors got a chance in 2016/2017 to meet each other, test and develop the main ideas of the volume, and then convene a workshop that became a stepping stone for the current volume.

Abbreviations

AA AKP AT BaH CHP CJ CPY DS DZ EG GARF GeB GMK GStA PK JP KdB KP KPDS (1) KPDS (2) LaAH MM MSP

Ali Anooshahr’s chapter in this volume. (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi)—the Party for Justice and Development (Turkey). Alexey Tikhomirov ’s chapter in this volume. Henrik Eberle, ed. 2007. Briefe an Hitler. Ein Volk schreibt seinem Führer. Bergisch Gladbach: Bastei Lübbe. (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi)—the Republican People’s Party (Turkey). Charlotte Joppien’s chapter in this volume. Communist Party of Yugoslavia. Darin Stephanov’s chapter in this volume. Dmitri Zakharine’s chapter in this volume. Eva Giloi’s chapter in this volume. State Archive of the Russian Federation (Moscow, Russia). Othmar Plöckinger. 2006. Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf ”. 1922–1945. München: Oldenbourg. Othmar Plöckinger, ed. 2016. Quellen und Dokumente zur Geschichte von “Mein Kampf ”: 1922–1945. Göttingen: Franz Steiner. Secret State Archives, Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, Berlin, Germany. John Plunkett’s chapter in this volume. Kellerhoff, Sven Felix. 2015. ‘Mein Kampf ’. Die Karriere eines deutschen Buches. Stuttgart: Klett­Cotta. Kirill Postoutenko’s chapter in this volume. the introduction to this volume. the concluding chapter in this volume. Helmut Ulshöfer, ed. 1994. Liebesbriefe an Adolf Hitler— Briefe in den Tod. Frankfurt am Main: VAS­Verlag für Akademische Schriften. Manuela Marin’s chapter in this volume. (Milli Selamet Partisi)—the National Salvation Party (Turkey).

xiv Abbreviations PCF PLA PPF

PuP RCP RGASPI RGVA RI RP S SP SPo TT XM

(Parti communiste français)—the Communist Party of France. People’s Liberation Army (China). President’s Personal File 200B (Public Reaction to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chat from September 6, 1936), Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Archives, Hyde Park, NY, USA. Lawrence W. Levine, Cornelia R. Levine, eds. 2002. The People and the President: America’s Conversation with the President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Boston, MA: Beacon Press. the Romanian Communist Party. Russian State Archive of Social and Political History (Moscow, Russia). Russian State Military Archive (Moscow, Russia). (Russkiī Invalid)—a Russian newspaper (Saint­Petersburg). (Refah Partisi)—the Welfare Party (Turkey). (Scânteia)—the official RCP newspaper. ͡ Pchela)—a Russian newspaper (Saint­Petersburg). (Severnaia ͡ Pochta)—a Russian newspaper (Saint­Petersburg). (Severnaia Tamara Trošt’s chapter in this volume. Xavier Márquez’s chapter in this volume.

Symbolic patterns and interactional dynamics in ruler personality cults State of the art and open questions Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov The readers familiar with the notion of a personality cult might wonder why anyone needs yet another book on this topic: after all, the sum of bib­ liographies covering various facets of leader veneration could easily fill up the pages of this book.1 Furthermore, as far as we can see, this immense body of scholarship is not subject to a Eurocentric bias, nor is it excessively focused on modernity at the expense of other historical periods. Indeed, whereas the timeline of studies devoted to personality cults stretches almost continuously from the twenty­third century BC to the twenty­first century AD, their geography encompasses all continents, save Australia and Ant­ arctica.2 However, this astounding scholarly enterprise, driven by genera­ tions of superbly qualified researchers in a dozen of disciplines all over the globe, has yet, in our opinion, to produce a major breakthrough. Appar­ ently, this state of affairs has something to do with the internal organiza­ tion of the personality cult scholarship, including some of its priorities and traditions. Historically, the cults of individual gods, kings, saints, heroes, luminaries and dictators have been studied separately. Although histori­ ans of the Roman Empire, Middle­Age monarchies and twentieth­century totalitarianisms belong, formally speaking, to the same branch of scholar­ ship, they have hardly consulted each other’s writings on the subject. While the recurrent overlaps (Augustus portrayed as Jupiter) have been looked at as expressions of prevailing Zeitgeist, the unusual borrowings (Bokassa I imitating Napoleon I) acquired the status of relevant but isolated curiosities (Ward 1933; O’Toole 1983). The typological parallels between various cults and their elements, unnoticed (or concealed) by their users and pertaining to different epochs (Ancient Rome / twentieth century) or social systems (religion / politics), have received very little treatment so far (Frazer 1890; Brehier and Batiffol 1920; Bloch 1924; Seltman 1953; Kantorowicz 1958, 180–187; Marin 1983; Valensise 1986; Zobermann 2000; Gordon 2001; Ass­ mann and Strohm 2010; Kirchner 2011). The reason for this small­scale approach seems to be the limited inter­ est in the working and functional organization of personality cults beyond specific times and places. The likeness, say, between the glorious adventus imperatoris in Rome (Rudolph 2011) and Hitler’s illustrious arrival to the

2  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov NSDAP Party Rally in Nuremberg (Stiasny 2011) is unmistakable, but it looks like a funny coincidence unless one believes personality cults to be variations of a single, if fairly diverse, social practice. Like all “open sys­ tems” in nature and society, personality cults are bound to evolve while pre­ serving their identities (Bertalanffy 1969, 150). This general order of things explains perhaps why so many cults of religious, political and cultural lead­ ers look so similar while being at the same time fully integrated in their respective social, political, cultural and religious environments. Highlighting this similarity across time and space and against the back­ drop of significant situational variations has been one of the reasons for widening the scope as far as it is possible in a small collaborative project. In an attempt to make up for the scarcity of integrative studies pertaining to personality cults, the volume addresses the emergence, functioning and decay of personality cults in Rome (first century), Russia (sixteenth–twenty­ first century), India (seventeenth century), Serbia, United Kingdom (both nineteenth–twentieth centuries), China, Germany, Iran, Romania, the So­ viet Union, the United States and former Yugoslavia (all twentieth century), Venezuela and Turkey (both twenty­first century). That said, this book is by no means an encyclopedia; its spatial and temporal diversity is but a side ef­ fect of the search for a systemic description of personality cults, which calls for analyses of the phenomenon from many different angles. While connecting dots along the timeline of world history would already be a step toward distilling common elements in various ruler cults, stress­ ing historical continuity does not by itself yield a working model of the phenomenon observed. In our view, such a model can only be built in an open­ended, multi­ and interdisciplinary collaboration of specialists able and willing to look beyond their disciplines and areas of specialization. In practice, this means that nearly every chapter, being solidly anchored in one particular field (usually history, political science or sociology), draws upon another to provide a complementary narrative of the same personality cult: the popular pairs are history / anthropology (MM, DS and AT), and history / media studies (JP, EG), but there are others as well: sociology / communication studies (DZ), political science / economics (XM), communication science / anthropology (KP), anthropology / political science (TT) and communication science / iconology (CJ). As the virtues of inter­disciplinary studies are nowadays extolled in every corner of the natural sciences and the humanities, it would be fair to inquire if there are any specific reasons for the interdisciplinary study of person­ ality cults other than following the hype and emulating the predecessors’ success (Gagé 1961, 47–68; Tucker 1971; Burke 1992; Wintrobe 1998; Auf­ farth 2003, 283–317; Buschel 2004; Rolf 2006; Riall 2007; Leese 2011; Plamper 2012; Halder 2013; Kolb and Vitale 2016). Our hope is that the collabora­ tion results, presented in individual chapters and summarized in KPDS, would  speak for themselves. Besides, we would rather present a coupleof general arguments in favor of synthetic studies of personality cults which,

State of the art and open questions  3 to our knowledge, have not been spelled out elsewhere in any detail. For instance, one could point at parallel developments in personality cult theo­ ries in various branches of scholarship which, to our knowledge, have been taken into account outside of the respective disciplinary boundaries. Thus, in a post­Carlylian world, it has become common practice to saddle subor­ dinates with the responsibility of creating – or at least sustaining – power relationships: despite vast disciplinary differences, the case was made with equal strength in sociology, social history, theology and political science (Weber 1919, 657; Otto 1931, 69; Merton 1969, 2614–2615; Edelman 1988, 37–38; Bechtold 2011, 19; Cohen 2013, 461). To be sure, the vigor of this sum­ mary empowerment of believers, followers and constituencies – all of which personality cult adepts are – was in part a backlash against the top­down causality dominating the social sciences. Its counterbalancing effect helps us to see personality cults as cooperative large­scale enterprises mobilizing major strata of the respective societies. The fact that such a mobilization is observed in this project through the prism of multiple interactional channels and symbolic systems reflects not so much the editors’ interest in media, dis­ course and interaction as it does the modern understanding of society as the communicative network (Luhmann 1984, 191). Before proceeding to individual chapters, in lieu of the usual introductory summaries, it may be helpful to provide a brief overview of the original set of key questions, which guided our workshop discussions so that the reader can get a better idea of the participants’ thought process and angles of approach: I What are the origins, drivers and constituent elements of personality cults? II How the changes of codes, channels and media affect ruler personality cults? III How different are personality cults in monarchies and republics, theoc­ racies and secular states? What continuities and discontinuities can we identify in the history of personality cults – at least during the last five centuries? What are the significant regional differences, if any? IV How “collaborative” are ruler personality cults? Could a ruler person­ ality cult be created “by popular demand”? V How do personality cults die? In what ways and to what degree do they sow the seeds of their own destruction? Zooming out to a bird’s­eye view, these five more or less extensive questions can be aggregated into three conceptual areas. The first one is of definitional nature. The second one pertains to continuity/discontinuity (longitudinal) debates and the idiosyncratic­to­universal (latitudinal) range of possibili­ ties. The third conceptual area concerns the specific drivers of interactional dynamics, which comprise an indispensable/irreducible tool kit for the pro­ duction and perpetuation of ruler personality cults. Clearly, all chapters in this volume touch on one or more, and in some cases all of these three areas.

4  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov Our hope is that both individual responses to the questions I–V scattered throughout the volume and their summary in the concluding chapter may furnish readers with the workable model of interaction in personality cults, or at least convince them that such a model is possible.

Notes



References Assmann, Jan, and Harald Strohm, eds. 2010. Herrscherkult und Heilserwartung. München: Fink. Auffarth, Christoph. 2003. “Herrscherkult und Christuskult.” In Die Praxis der Herrscherverehrung in Rom und seinen Provinzen, edited by Hubert Cancik, and Konrad Hitzl, 283–317. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Bechtold, Christian. 2011. Gott und Gestirn als Präsenzformen des toten Kaisers. Göttingen: V & R unipress. Bertalanffy, Ludwig von. 1969. General System Theory. New York: George Braziller. Bloch, Marc [1924]. 1983. Les Rois thaumaturges. Paris: Gallimard. Brehier, Louis, and Pierre Batiffol. 1920. Les Survivances du culte impérial romain: A propos des rites shintoïstes. Paris: Auguste Picard. Burke, Peter. 1992. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Buschel, Huberthus. 2004. Untertanenliebe: Der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770– 1830. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Cohen, Yves. 2013. Le Siècle des chefs: Une histoire transnationale du commandement et de l’autorité. 1890–1940. Paris: Amsterdam. Edelman, Murray. 1988. Constructing the Political Spectacle. Chicago, IL: Univer­ sity of Chicago Press. Frazer, James G. [1890] 1994. The Golden Bough: A Study of Magic and Religion. New York: Papermac. Gagé, Jean. 1961. “Pouvoir et religion. III. Psychologie du culte impérial romain.” Diogène 34: 47–68. Gordon, Richard. 2001. “The Roman Imperial Cult and the Question of Power.” In Raising the Eyebrow: John Onians and World Art Studies, edited by Lauren Golden, 107–122. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. Halder, Marc. 2013. Der Titokult: charismatische Herrschaft im sozialistischen Jugoslawien. München: Oldenbourg. Herz, Peter. 1978. “Bibliographie zum römischen Kaiserkult (1955–1975).” In Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Teil II 16.2, edited by Wolfgang Haase, 833–910. New York: De Gruyter.

State of the art and open questions  5 Kantorowicz, Ernst H. 1958. Laudes regiae: A Study in Liturgical Acclamations and Mediaeval Ruler Worship. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kirchner, Alexander 2011. “Personenkult.” In Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik 10, Nachträge A–Z, edited by Gregor Kalivoda, and Gert Ueding, 872–886. Ber­ lin: De Gruyter. Kolb, Anne, and Marco Vitale, eds. 2016. Kaiserkult in den Provinzen des Römischen Reiches: Organisation, Kommunikation und Repräsentation. Berlin: De Gruyter. Leese, Daniel 2011. Mao Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luhmann, Niklas. 1984. Soziale Systeme. Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marin, Louis. 1983. Le Portrait du roi. Paris: Minuit. Merton, Robert K. 1969. “The Social Nature of Leadership.” American Journal of Nursing 69, no. 12: 2614–2618. O'Toole, Thomas E. 1983. “Jean­Bedel Bokassa: neo­Napoleon or traditional Afri­ can ruler?” In Cult of Power, edited by Joseph Held, 95–106. New York: Columbia University Press. Otto, Rudolf. [1931] 2014. Das Heilige. München: C. H. Beck. Plamper, Jan. 2012. The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Riall, Lucy. 2007. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Rolf, Malte. 2006. Das sowjetische Massenfest. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Tucker, Robert C. 1971. The Soviet Political Mind. Stalinism and Post-Stalin Change. New York: Norton. Rudolph, Harriet. 2011. Das Reich als Ereignis. Formen und Funktionen der Herrschaftsinszenierungen bei Kaisereinzügen (1558–1618). Köln: Böhlau. Seltman, Charles. 1953. “The Ruler­Cult: From Alexander of Macedon to Elisabeth I of England.” History Today 3, no. 5: 311–320. Stiasny, Philipp. 2011. “Vom Himmel hoch: Adolf Hitler und die Volksgemeinschaft in ‘Triumph des Willens’.” In Hitler und die Deutschen: Volksgemeinschaft und Verbrechen, edited by Hans­Ulrich Thamer and Simone Erpel, 82–98. Dresden: Sandstein Verlag. Valensise, Marina. 1986. “Le sacre du roi : stratégie symbolique et doctrine poli­ tique de la monarchie française.” Annales. Économies, Sociétés, Civilisations 41, no. 3: 543–577. Ward, Margaret M. 1933. “The association of Augustus with Jupiter.” Studi e materiali di storia delle religioni IX: 203–224. Weber, Max. [1919] 1972. Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft. Tübingen: Mohr­Siebeck. Wintrobe, Ronald. 1998. The Political Economy of Dictatorship. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press. Zobermann, Pierre. 2000. “Eloquence and Ideology: Between Image and Propa­ ganda.” Rhetorica 18, no. 3: 295–320.

1

“Personality cults” The career of the contested notion Dmitri Zakharine

The current project aims to work out some systematic criteria to grasp the phenomenon of ruler personality cults throughout history. Like many other political and historical terms, the term “personality cult” may be used in two different contexts. The first context is that of objectifying observation which implies measuring against a scale of distinguishing features. Seen from this perspective, any political phenomenon does exist if something what we come across today fits into a catalogue of initial (one might say: historical) categorizations. The second context is that of evaluative statements which aim to exclude those who do not think like the speakers do. Seen from the second perspective, the term “ruler personality cult” might be applied in a negative sense to anyone who should be humiliated or ostra­ cized. Carriers of the Western values have always been blaming their East­ ern neighbors for the spread of what they called “ruler personality cults”. From the Old Greek point of view, Persians were prone to favoring ruler personality cult, and Soviet people were ascribed the same in the West­ ern historiography of the post­war period (Lukács 1963; Gill 1980; Mon­ tefiore 2003, 27–28; Ennker 2004, 83–101; Brandenberger 2005; Kelly 2005, 199–224; Plamper 2012). In what follows below, it has first to be shown that the evaluative use of the term “ruler personality cult” is characteristic for all main periods of European history. Secondly, it should be determined which historical dilemmas and definitions might justify the use of the term “ruler personality cult” in the context of modern politics. “The difference that makes a difference” between objectifying observations and evaluative statements also pertains to history (Bateson 1972, 459). Thus the history of political reasoning about ruler personality cults makes the central point of the current chapter.

“Ruler personality cults”: the discourse, its meanings and use The normative use of the term “personality cult” takes its origin in the An­ tique historiography that considered adoration and deification of rulers as an essentially alien habit. The Old Greeks believed that the use of particular

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  7 gestures, such as kissing the knee, falling on the face, striking of the earth with the forehead in front of human beings was not of a local origin. Such acts of homage or worship were allegedly introduced by the Persian tsar Cyrus the Great in order to demonstrate the uniqueness of the ruler (Walter 1910; Delatte 1951; Hoffmann 1990, 42–49; Zakharine 2005, 637). Verbal ex­ pressions like prostrating, kissing one’s feet were commonly used in order to emphasize the precarious relation between sovereigns and their subjects. Even prostrations before God could be condemned by philosophers as signs of superstition (Marti 1936). The antique clichés were further developed in the modern times. Disre­ garding the discrepancy between self­observation vs. alien observation, the occidental travelers, warriors and ambassadors of the sixteenth to eigh­ teenth centuries had been blaming their oriental rivals for the spread of cus­ toms that could allegedly evoke associations with a ruler personality cult. We are going to show below that different practices associated with the worship of a ruling person have always been condemned from outside as “Persian”, “Greek”, “Tatar”, and “Russian”, or, later on, as “Soviet”, “Nazi­ German”, and “Fascist Italian”, to name just a few.

Ruler personality cults are “Persian” for ancient Greeks As already mentioned above, the extreme bodily attitudes linked to the divine cults were considered as prejudices of Persians by the Old Greeks. It has to be noticed that even a kneeling veneration of gods was far from self­evident in Old Greek worship practices. A kneeling way of praying con­ veyed an extreme piety (gr. δεισιδαιμονία to be translated as “fear of gods”, but also as “cowardice in front of the divine”), which was incompatible with the philosophy of Stoics and Epicureans (Bolkestein 1929, 17). Plutarch dis­ respectfully writes about pious worshippers who are inclined to “explain all their misfortunes with the rage of wrathful gods” and “who then lie spread­eagled in excrements shouting loudly about their crimes” (De Super. 3). Herodot Halikarnassos describes a goofy relationship between sover­ eigns and subjects, pointing out the servile spirit of the Persians. According to Herodot, Persians were accustomed to “fall down in worship and stretch out their bodies” (gr. προσκυνεῖν “worship” and προσπίπτειν “fall down”) when greeting their sovereign. Comparing peoples’ customs, Herodot re­ counts a story about two Spartan ambassadors who refused to kneel to the ground after being invited to perform a kneeling homage ritual at the Per­ sian court (Hdt. 1, 334, 1 and 7, 136, 1). A similar comparison appears in the tragedy The Persians, written during the Classical period of Ancient Greece by Aeschylus: those who decline a kneeling veneration of the ruler are de­ scribed as heroes. These are keen not to participate in a Persian ritual (Pers. 584–585). Xenophon justifies the Greek victory over Persians by arguing that Greeks did not do prostration in front of any rulers unless it concerned the immortal gods (Anab. 3, 2, 13). Isocrates, one of the most famous ancient

8  Dmitri Zakharine Greek rhetoricians and speechwriters, explains Persian military by the per­ vasiveness of the ruler personality cults in Persia: They [the Persians] keep their minds in a humble state and cringe in fear because they are subject to a single man’s power; they present them­ selves for inspection at the door of the royal palace, prostrate them­ selves (προκαλινδούμενοι—‘roll about’), practice a lowly attitude of mind, and make proskynēsis before a mortal man (θνητὸν μὲν ἄνδρα προσκυνοῦντες), addressing him as a god and showing less respect for gods than for men. (Isoc. 4.151)

Ruler personality cults are “Greek” in the Roman Empire According to the claims of Roman historians, the first evidences of a ruler personality cult should be traced back to the reign of Alexander the Great who allegedly forced the Greeks and Macedonians to adopt the Persian custom of prostration in front of the sovereign. It is said Alexander insisted on adoration (adorari) instead of salutation (salutari) demonstrating the same insolence as the Persian rulers (Justin 12.7.1, compare Schnabel 1925, 118). As reported Alexander also urged the Greek cities to assign him the right of a semi­divine veneration. From that point on, many cities took care of a ruler cult by setting up a temple in which the rulers’ statues were placed. The ruler was thus given the honor of sharing the place of worship with gods. The kneeling veneration of a ruler that was deemed to be “Persian” in Greece became thus a practice of a “Greek” origin in Rome. It was vehe­ mently condemned by the leading Roman philosophers known for their tire­ less criticism of the powerful. Seneca did his best to deter Emperor Caligula (AD 37–41) from introducing Alexander the Great’s ruler worshipping prac­ tice in Rome, claiming that it would not be reasonable to substitute the cus­ toms of liberal citizenship by those of Persian servitude (Sen. Ben. 2.12.1). With the similar vigor, Philon castigated a Greek ruler who let the servile prostration spread over Italy (Legat. 116).

Ruler personality cults are “Mongol” in the old Russia Until the rise of the Tsardom of Muscovy by the end of sixteenth century, Russian nobility tended to consider kneeling in front of the Tsar to have “Mongol” origins. The expression “bit’ chelom” (old Russian for “knocking one’s forehead to the ground”) that triggers the association with a kneeling bowing posture suited for touching the floor with the head, is much older than the corresponding Russian practice related to the veneration of the Tsar (Richter 1825, 334). For the first hundred years of Mongol domination,

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  9 the Russian princes had no choice but to appear as subservient as possible to their overlords and hope for the best. Veselovsky says that every Russian ambassador had to kneel before the Mongolian headman (VeselovskiĬ 1911, 14; Spuler 1943, 360; Silfen 1974, 18; Кrivosheev 1999, 253–271). The Mongols claimed to have taken over the kneeling greeting kow­tow from the Chinese Court (Abe 2018). As to the Great Duc of Muscovy, he was not entitled to receive the same honors as the Holy Roman Emperor or the King of Poland until the end of the seventeenth century. The Venetian merchant Contarini was allegedly the first to draw a comparison between the customs at the Polish and the Russian courts. Contarini had to kneel before the Polish King Casimir IV when performing a ceremonial act of greeting (stando in genocchioni). While greeting the Great Duc of Moscow Contarini remained standing in an up­ right body position (Contarini 1476, 208). The old miniature book painting from the end of the sixteenth century shows boyars approaching Tsar Fedor without falling on the ground (Zakharine 2005, 416). Due to the strengthening of the Early Modern Russian state, western ambassadors were forced to seek politically relevant correspondences be­ tween the statuses of the Tsar and the Holy Roman Emperor. The latter’s ambassador Antonino Possevino, who was commissioned to integrate Rus­ sia into the anti­Ottoman coalition, became allegedly the first who fell on his knees while greeting the Tsar Ivan IV the Terrible. The kneeling posture thus meant that the Great Duc of Muscovy was equal to the Holy Roman Emperor (Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snosheniī 1871, 304). As the art of performance was the Jesuit Order’s claim to fame, Possevino made his best to flaunt his acting skills. There is no evidence that Russian nobility performed any kneeling rituals related to ruler personality cults until the end of the seventeenth century. This means that the Tsar was considered to be primus inter pares (first among equals) by the state elites of that time. It should be recalled that Mikhail Ro­ manov, the first Tsar from the Romanov dynasty (1596–1645) was elected by the Boyars (1613) after the fall of the other boyar dynasty led by Godunov. Until Peter the great, the Romanovs were apparently too weak to be able to impose kneeling worship rituals at the court.

Ruler personality cults are “Russian” for the Western travelers The Antique topos of ruler personality cults was associated with Russia starting from the end of the sixteenth century (Uspenskii 1994, 111). The corresponding evidences can be found in the British, French, German and Dutch sources. Following on the scripts of the Old Greek and Roman ori­ gin, Western travelers brought up to date the popular clichés of “desidaimo­ nia” (engl. “fear of gods”), filling antique formulas with a new content. The British traveler Giles Fletcher reported in a mocking sarcastic tone about

10  Dmitri Zakharine the veneration of gods in Russia: every Russian approaching the icons of God’s Mother or St. Nikolas the Miracle­Maker, would, in his words, “keep knocking his head to the very ground” (Fletcher 1591, 236–237). According to the Holy Roman Emperor’s Ambassador Possevino, mentioned above, prostration in Russia is a typical part of the veneration of God (Possevino 1587, 5). The French captain Margeret remarked that Russians were stretch­ ing their bodies when making their requests at the superiors’ feet. The same gestures, in his words, were performed in front of the holy icons (Margeret 1606, 75). The expression “knock one’s head to the ground” that had re­ ferred to Mongol customs in the Tsardom of Muscovy was increasingly generalized, referring to the typical Russian relation between subjects and sovereigns (Justice 1739, 97). The German mathematician and geographer Adam Olearius who was traveling from Hamburg, Ladoga and Novgorod to Moscow in August of 1634, raised his observations about Russian ruler per­ sonality cult to the status of scientific theory. He found practices similar to slavery and servitude inherent in Russian peasants’ way of life: in his words, Russians would have stretched their bodies before any noble man. It did not escape his notice, however, that foreigners coming to Russia also had to lie prostrate before the Tsar (Olearius 1656, 197–198).

Ruler personality cults are “Soviet” for the Americans “It was always a Western fancy to see Lenin and Stalin as ‘Oriental’ des­ pots” (Chamberlain 2006, 270). Referring to the leadership of the 1930s, Leo Trotsky called the Soviet leader “Genghis Khan with a phone”, high­ lighting the oriental (Mongolian) roots of the Soviet dictatorship. Trot­ sky paraphrased the saying of the other famous Russian emigrant, the nineteenth century London resident Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, about the Tsar Nikolai II: “Genghis Khan with a telegraph” (Montefiore 2003, 85). Nikolai Bukharin’s (the other Stalin’s rival) 1928 definition of Stalin as “a small oriental despot” was well­known within the Communist Party (Petrov 2014, 124). Nikita Khrushchev was one of the first representatives of Stalin’s regime who explained the political system he came from in terms of “personality cult”, alluding to Bukharin’s and Trotsky’s definitions. During the struggle for power triggered by Stalin’s death in 1953, Khrushchev delivered a Secret report, denouncing at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party in 1956 Stalin’s purges and blaming his former boss for cruelty (Khrushchev 2012, 121; see also Crankshaw 1966, 65; Laird 1986). From now on, the expression “personality cult” became a cliché symbolizing all the negative aspects of Stalin’s regime from beyond. Following up on the preexisting logic of his­ toric ascriptions outlined above, the ruler personality cult and the abuse of power were associated in Khrushchev’s speech with the influence of oriental tyrannies. Later on, at the Congress of Communist Parties in Bucharest in

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  11 June 1960, Khrushchev called the founding father of the peoples’ Republic of China Mao Zedung “a New Stalin” (Eliseev 2015).

Ruler personality cults are Roman/Byzantine for the Soviet, Italian and German dictators of the 1930s It goes without saying that the veneration of Stalin in the Soviet Union, the worship of Hitler in Nazi Germany and the cult of Mussolini in Fascist Italy cannot be reduced to the kneeling worship rituals of the fallen Empires. Instead, this analogy was drawn a posteriori by the political rivals of Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin. In the interwar period the cult of Il Duce [leader] of the fascist Italy Benito Mussolini revived associations with the worship of the Roman Emperor. The cult of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany was said to be reminiscent of the Emperor’s cult in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. At the same time the cult of Joseph Stalin in Soviet Russia reminded to proletarian voters of the veneration of the last Tsar (Kosik 2013, 183–193). From the standpoint of conservative pauperized voters who came to power in Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union in the thirties, the ideal ruler was supposed to warrant stability and continuity. After the horror of a num­ ber of proletarian revolutions the idea of “translatio imperii” (from Alexan­ der the Great to the Romans, from the Romans to the Franks, from the First Rome to the Second Rome—Constantinople—and from the Second to the Third Rome—Moscow) was again en vogue, and imperial ruler personality cults were the first thing to get promoted by the new media. To be sure, idea of a New Rome had a number of historical precursors in the tradition of New Modern European monarchies. The term “translatio” understood as “continuity” was first used by fifteenth century scholars to designate the period between their own time and the fall of the Western Roman Empire. After the capture of Constantinople by the mighty Otto­ man Empire in 1453, “Rome” moved to Moscow: the Great Duc of Moscow Ivan III married Sophia Paleologue—a niece of the last Byzantine emperor Constantine XI. Celebrating this event, Russian monks coined the concept of a “Third Rome” or a “New Rome” as related to the territories around Moscow: Filofey of Pskov wrote a panegyric letter about the Third Rome to Ivan III’s son Vasili III (Ivan IV’th father). The letter proclaimed: “Two Romes have fallen. The third is standing. And there will not be the fourth” (Ball 2000, 449; Duncan 2005, 5). During the World War II, Stalin’s government did not make any secret of using the concept of the Third Rome for creating medial images of the So­ viet rulership. Thus production of Sergey Eizenstein’s film “Ivan Groznyj” (1940–1947) was personally controlled by Stalin. Listing the crucial inno­ vations in Russian history, Stalin in 1947 in conversation with the movie director favorably compared Ivan the Terrible to Lenin while “Ivan was the

12  Dmitri Zakharine first to introduce the state monopoly of foreign trade, Lenin was the second” ͡ gazeta 2012). (Rossiīskaia Although Russia made many attempts to part with Stalinism during di­ verse de­Stalinization campaigns (e.g. in the periods 1953–1955; 1974–1979, as well as 1989–1993), it still retained a number of political rituals closely tied to the cult of the Emperor. The list of such rituals encompasses pomp­ ous military parades, establishing bodies of guardians subordinated per­ sonally to the ruler, hanging of the rulers’ portraits in public offices, the spectacular hugs and kisses in public between state rulers and children and the promotion of the ruler’s unmarried status implies his symbolic marriage with “mother Russia” (Belkovskii 2018). Like Russia, German Empire in 1871 also claimed to be the Third Rome through the lineage of the Holy Roman Empire. The title for the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire (until 1806) and then for the ruler of the German Empire (between 1871 and 1918) was Kaiser, the German transliteration for Caesar, the first Roman Emperor. Adolf Hitler used the same historic refer­ ences alluding to the “translatio imperii” when establishing the concept of the Third Empire (das “Dritte Reich”). The so­called “Hitler salute” (or the Nazi salute) performed by extending the right arm from the neck into the air with a straightened hand, was believed to be of Roman origin (Saladino 1995). However not a single Roman work of art – sculpture, coinage, or painting – displays a salute of the kind that is found in Fascism, Nazism, and re­ lated ideologies. It is also unknown to Roman literature and is never mentioned by ancient historians of either republican or imperial Rome. (Winkler 2009, 165) The gesture itself was apparently inspired by Jacque­Louis David’s paint­ ing Oath of the Horatii (1784), so it was the French neo­classical art which supplied to modernity the associations with the Roman Empire. After the release of Gabriele d’Annunzio’s film Cabiria (1914) the salutation was adopted as part of a neo­imperial greeting ritual by the Italian Fascist Party (Winkler 2009, 165). Apart from that, German Nazis used to imitate other Roman customs such as building wide roads (Autobahnen, see Overy 1994), implementing Roman tetrastyle (four supporting columns) and dekastyle (ten supporting columns) in the architecture (Taylor 1974, 270–280; Ghi­ rardo 1980), organizing Olympic games and sport parades (Krüger and Murray 2003), using imperial eagle as the state emblem (Weyss 1986, 78), etc. Like Germany, the interwar Italy had all good reasons for lodging a claim to being the Third Rome. Referring to the writings of Italian nationalists like Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872), Benito Mussolini referred to the Fascist Italy as Terza Roma (the “Third Rome”) that came after the Rome of em­ perors and Rome of Popes (Alföldi 1935, 39). Implementing the concept of “translatio imperii”, Benito Mussolini’s architects built sports facilities for

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  13 the Italian youth following on the patterns of Old Roman Imperial archi­ tecture, and reconstructed old Roman roads such as Via dei Fori Imeriale and Via della Concilianzione. Imitating the way of live associated with Old Romans, the “new Romans” built entire new towns in agricultural lands to the south of Rome (Borutta 2012).

Double “ruler personality cults” in neo-imperial discourse of today: princeps vs. sacred ruler Looking at the use of the formula “ruler personality cults” across centuries, we have to concede that the Antique patterns have not lost their grip on he political discourses of today. Thus we come across a remarkable continuity of stereotypes that were used in the Old Roman historiography to show the difference between secular rulers and sacred rulers, between a princeps on the one hand, and an emperor on the other (Alföldi 1970, 39). The following distinctive features might be taken into consideration to explain the relation between the personality cult ruler (princeps) and the sacred ruler: Power. The princeps leads one ethnicity. The system of power has a dual structure (elites and masses). The sacred ruler leads different ethnicities and different social groups. The system of power has a triadic structure (emperor, elites and masses). Source of power. The princeps’ source of power is based on rational choice (selection and election). The sacred ruler’s source of power is based on irrational choice (contest, inheritance, random choice, the will of gods). Status. The princeps’ status is basically equal to the status of the other repre­ sentatives of the state elites. The sacred ruler’s status is not equal to the status of the other representatives of state elites. Spatial resources. The princeps’ body is subject to the rules of proximity (“close distance”). The sacred ruler’s body is not subject to the rules of proximity (“large distance”) Temporal resources. The princeps can be reached out personally at any time. The sacred ruler can be reached out only at a particular time or cannot be reached out at all. There are vassals that represent the sacred ruler at any time. Material resources. The princeps’ material resources are calculable. The sa­ cred ruler’s wealth is deemed immeasurable. Speech resources. The princeps is entitled to speak in public. The sacred ruler is expected to keep silence. Form—content. The princeps’ form of statements refers to the content. The sacred ruler’s form of statements may not refer to the content. It is pre­ supposed that the content is unknown, ambiguous, magic or hidden. It has to be noted that many of the former monarchies that used to belong to the Union of European Court States until the beginning of the twentieth

14  Dmitri Zakharine century managed “to copy and paste” the two mentioned types of leader­ ship into their modernized political systems. While the British chancellor is required to represent the nation by means of speech, the British Queen is not supposed to give any interviews. While the income of the Chancellor is calculable, the wealth of the Queen’s family is a source of diverse insi­ nuations (Rodriguez 2017). While the Chancellor is subject to the rules of physical presence during his working hours, the Queen may decide more or less freely when she appears in public (Khan 2015). While the Chancellor is exposed to the public view and can be easily observed from a close distance by everyone signed up for the excursion at the British Parliament, the Queen and her family mainly hide behind the curtains of the Buckingham pal­ ace (Andrews 2019). And while the Chancellor’s main preoccupation is the wealth of UK, the Queen is also expected to take care of the wealth of other nations that are connected with United Kingdom in terms of the shared past (Commonwealth), like Australia, Kenya or Canada, etc. According to Brooke Nelson, the British Queen since her first trip in 1952 to Kenya has visited more than 120 different countries (Nelson 2018). Similar symbolic structures of a double leadership (with the respective communicative be­ havior in place) might still be discovered in Russia (President Vladimir Pu­ tin vs. Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin), in the USA (President Donald Trump vs. Vice President Mike Pence) or in Germany (Chancellor Angela Merkel vs. President Frank­Walter Steinmeier). Like kings and queens of United Kingdom or the emperors of Germany, Russian Tsars did not regard public speaking as an obligatory part of politi­ cal self­presentation. The preponderance of lisping, hissing, spluttering and rhetorically inept state leaders (beginning with Stalin, Khrushchev, Malen­ kov, Brezhnev, Podgorny, and Chernenko right up to Gorbachev, Cherno­ myrdin and Yeltsin) appears symptomatic for the Soviet leaders’ speech skills suited more for a sacred ruler than a princeps.

Madonna, Napoleon and Tsar: lineage of some twenty-first century personality cults Even nowadays the term “ruler personality cult” appears quite often in evaluative statements whose origin might be traced back to Antiquity. Thus the German Chancellor Angela Merkel was accused by the member of her own party of presiding over her own “ruler personality cult” once she was spotted shaking hands with Arab refugees on December 3, 2016. By do­ ing so Merkel was apparently lodged her claim to become a sacred ruler who was leading more than one nation (Merkur 2016). Even before the Ger­ man Chancellor was chosen by the Time magazine as “the person of the year” in 2015, mass media began ascribing to Merkel’s gestures some hidden magic content sacralizing her person. Most famous in this context is the so­called “Merkel Rhombus” (Figure 1.1)—a hand gesture made by resting one’s hands in front of the stomach so that the fingertips meet forming a

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  15

Figure 1.1 Angela Merkel, the Chancellor of Germany (Wikimedia Commons).

rhombus with the thumbs. Being asked about this recurrent gesture, Merkel gave an evasive answer claiming that there was always a question what to do with her hands—that’s how it came about (Focus 2013). However, ignor­ ing this self­interpretation, some imaginative commentators linked Merkel’s rhombus to the Secret Catholic Orders (like freemasons) as well as to the Rome of Popes that has always been striving to achieve world supremacy. Being presented in Berlin during Merkel’s election campaign in 2013, the huge poster depicting “Merkel’s rhombus” sparked criticism on the part of the political opposition who claimed the presented image to be a part of “a monstrous personality cult” (Helioda1 2016). The insiders retorted Merkel’s party saw the giant hands as reflecting upon her image as “the mother of the nation taking Germany by the hand and guiding it through the crisis” (The Local 2013). Another cultic association was pondered upon by the psychotherapist Tilmann Moser who claimed that Merkel turned herself into Germany’s

16  Dmitri Zakharine Madonna (Moser 2013). In his view, voters missing the image of Holy Mother were drawn to Merkel who strove to win over the population through the pro­ mise and redemption. Referring to maternal attitudes of the female Chancellor who was short of sexual appeal, Merkel’s rhombus according to this interpreta­ tion, might have symbolized a womb from which voters wish they had sprung. The fact that Merkel is called “Mutti” (Mummy) by thousands of loyal voters lends some support to this psychological explanation (Knight 2013). In its turn, the recent media reports from France show that the public reception of Emmanuel Macron’s election campaign went on in line with the imperial discourse of a “ruler personality cult”. The expectations of mass voters were warmed up by comparing Macron to the French Emperor Na­ poleon; the Reuters news agency even claimed that Macron would become “the mould breaker for he is the France’s youngest leader since Napoleon” (Reuters 2017). Furthermore, the European media channel Euronews found physical resemblance between the leader of modern France and Napoleon Bonaparte (Moisi 2017). Other statements seamlessly follow from the mentioned above: “What really is Napoleonic about Macron is his restlessness, his passion for move­ ment, his sense of destiny…” (Traub 2017); “Both have older women on their sides” (Bodoc 2017); “Mr Macron reviewed the troops in the garden while a 21­gun salute from Les Invalides, a stone’s throw from Napoleon's tomb” (Samuel 2017); “In ceremonies marked by youthful optimism and old­world Napoleonic pomp, Emmanuel Macron swept into office Sunday as France’s new president pledging to fortify the European Union, redesign French pol­ itics and glue together his divided nation” (Traub 2017). As for the leader of the modern Russian state, it goes without saying that mass media of the West are still inclined to see him through the prism of historic references of imperial kind. Writing for the Newsweek, Luke Coffey stated: What the West is dealing with today is an imperial Russia. Under Pu­ tin’s leadership, Russian policy is more like that during the time of the Tsar before the 1917 Russian Revolution. Putin is an imperial leader. […] Also, Putin has far more in common with his tsarist predecessors than he does with any general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union [although the opposite is true ­ DZ]. (Coffey 2016) Tobias Grey in his article of the same year concluded: “after years of capi­ talism, Russia wants a tsar again” (Grey 2016).

Conclusion It could be seen that the images of modern politicians seem to be deeply rooted in the system of collective expectations that might be traced back to

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  17 the Antiquity. Modern societies have changed the modes of self­observation and self­nomination. The ostentatious display of a vertically organized soci­ ety with a monarch on the top of a social ladder has been substituted by the equally ostentatious display of a horizontally organized society, which is be­ lieved to be governed by the left and right wings of the Parliament. However, the decay of national states in the period of globalization and the spread of mass culture determine today the comeback of sacred rulers of imperial ori­ gin. Modern states do not represent any particular nation any longer, stand­ ing for different ethnicities and social­strata which, in their turn, follow different social, religious and political routes. Billions of displaced persons are neither integrated nor empowered to select their rulers. These strata are the basis for the rise of the new soteriological concepts of faith and thus for the new types of the rule sacralization. At the same time, the distinctive features defining personality cults (see above) remain in force, invariant to time and space.

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18  Dmitri Zakharine Chamberlain, Lesley. 2006. The Philosophy Steamer. London: Atlantic Books. Coffey, Luke. 2016. “Putin is Behaving More like a Czar than a Bolshevik.” Newsweek, June 15, 2016. https://www.newsweek.com/putin­behaving­more­czar­ bolshevik­470192 Contarini, Ambrogio. [1476] 1543. Viaggi fatti da Vinetia alla Tana, in Persia, in India et in Constantinopoli, edited by Antonio Manuzio. Venice: Nelle Case de Figlivoli di Aldo. Crankshaw, Edward. 1966. Khrushchev: A Career. New York: The Viking Press. Delatte, Armand. 1951. “Le baiser, l’agenoillement et le prosternement de l’adora­ tion (proskynesis) chez les Grecs.” Bulletin de l’Academie Royale de Belgique 37: 423–450. Duncan, Peter. 2005. Russian Messianism: Third Rome, Revolution, Communism and After. London: Routledge. Eliseev, Aleksandr. 2015. “Kak Khrushchev poterial Kitai. Iz istorii sovetsko­ kitaiskikh otnoshenii.” Stoletie, March 17, 2015. http://www.stoletie.ru/territoriya_ istorii/kak_khrushhov_kitaj_poteral_330.htm. Ennker, Benno. 2004. “The Stalin Cult, Bolshevik Rule and Kremlin Interaction in the 1930s.” In The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, edited by Balázs Apor, Jan Behrends, Polly Jones, and E. A. Rees, 83–101. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Fletcher, Giles. [1591] 1968. “Of the Russe Commonwealth.” In Rude & Barbarous Kingdom. Russia in the Accounts of Sixteenth Century English Voyagers, edited by Lloyd Berry and Robert Crummey, 109–248. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Focus. 2013. “Merkel mag die tiefe Stimme von Männern und beneidet sie ums Holzhacken.” May 5, 2013. https://www.focus.de/politik/deutschland/kanzlerin­ plaudert­ueber­privates­merkel­mag­die­tiefe­stimme­von­maennern­und­ beneidet­sie­ums­holzhacken_aid_978787.html Ghirardo, Diane. 1980. “Italian Architects and Fascist Politics: An Evaluation of the Rationalist’s Role in Regime Building.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 39, no. 2: 109–127. Gill, Graeme. 1980. “The Soviet Leader Cult: Reflections on the Structure of Lead­ ership in the Soviet Union.” British Journal of Political Science 10, no. 2: 167–186. Grey, Tobias. 2016. “After Years of Capitalism, Russia wants a Tsar Again.” Independent, June 10, 2016. https://www.independent.co.uk/world/after­years­of­ capitalism­russia­wants­a­tsar­again­a7074501.html Helioda1 (blog). 2016. “Sind Obama, Putin, Merkel und co. alle Freumauer.” June 10, 2016. http://helioda1.blogspot.com/2016/06/sind­obama­putin­merkel­und­co­ alle.html Hoffmann, Thomas. 1990. “Knien vor dem Thron und Altar. Friedrich Nicolai und die Orthopädie des aufrechten Ganges vor den Kirchenfürsten.” In Der aufrechte Gang. Zur Symbolik einer Körperhaltung, edited by Bernd­Jürgen Warneken, 42–49. Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde. Hummel, Andreas. 2016. “Scharfer Gegenwind für Merkel.” Sächsische, March 12, 2016. https://www.saechsische.de/scharfer­gegenwind­fuer­merkel­3555693.html Justice, Elizabeth. [1739] 2010. Voyage to Russia: describing the Laws, Manners, and Customs of that Great Empire, as govern’d, at this Present, by the Excellent Princess, the Czarinna […]. Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Kelly, Catriona. 2005. “Riding the Magic Carpet: Children and the Leader Cult in the Stalin Era.” The Slavic and East European Journal 49, no. 2: 199–224.

“Personality cults”: the contested notion  19 Khan, Shehab. 2015. “Queen Elizabeth II Becomes Longest Reigning Monarch: What Does the Queen Actually Do Every Day?” Independent, September 9, 2015. https:// www.independent.co.uk/news/people/queen­elizabeth­ii­becomes­ longest­ reigning­monarch­what­does­the­queen­actually­do­every­day­10492992.html Khrushchev, Nikita. 2012. Memoirs 2. Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania State Uni­ versity Press. Knight, Ben. 2013. “Angela Merkel: Germany’s Mother.” Guardian, September 20, 2013. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/20/angela­merkel­ germany­mother Kosik, Viktor. 2013. Molodaia Rossiia [Young Russia]. Moskva: Probel­2000. Krivosheev, Yuri. 1999. Rus i mongoly [Russia and Mongols]. Sankt­Petersburg: Iz­ datel’stvo Sankt­Peterburgskogo Universiteta. Krüger, Arnd, and William Murray, eds. 2003. The Nazi Olympics: Sport, Politics and Appeasement in the 1930s. Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Laird, Roy. 1986. The Politburo. Demographic Trends, Gorbachev and the Future. New York: Routledge. The Local. 2013. “Huge Merkel Poster Sparks Outcry.” September 4, 2013. https:// www.thelocal.de/20130904/51749 Lukács, Georg. 1963. “Reflections on the Cult of Stalin.” Survey 47: 105–111. Margeret, Jacques. [1606] 1983. Estat de l’empire de Russie et grande Duché de Moscouie [The Russian Empire and Grand Duchy of Moscovy], translated and edited by S. L. Dunning. Pittsburg. Kessinger Publishing. Marti, Berte. 1936. “Proskynesis und adorare.” Language 12: 272–282. Merkur. 2016. “Merkel schüttelt in Jena Hände mit Flüchtlingen—CDU­Mann empört: ‘Das ist Personenkult—Treten Sie zurück!’” December 6, 2016. https://www. merkur.de/politik/personenkult­scharfer­gegenwind­fuer­merkel­zr7040590.html Moisi, Dominique. 2017. “View: Is Emmanuel Macron the New Napoleon Bonaparte of France?” Euronews, March 31, 2017. https://www.euronews.com/2017/03/31/ view­is­macron­new­napoleon­bonaparte­of­france Montefiore, Simon. 2003. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Moser, Tilman. 2013. “Merkel vor der Wahl: Mädchen, Mutti, Machtfigur.” Süddeutsche Zeitung, August 5, 2013. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/merkel­vor­ der­wahl­maedchen­mutti­machtfigur­1.1738810­0 Nelson, Brooke. 2018. “The One Country the Queen has Traveled to the Most—and 5 She’s Never Visited.” Business Insider, July 20, 2018. https://www.businessinsider. com/the­one­country­the­queen­has­traveled­to­the­most­and­5­shes­ never­ visited­2018­7?IR=T Olearius, Adam. [1656] 1971. Vermehrte Newe Beschreibung der Muscowitischen und Persischen Reise, Schleswig, edited by Erich Trunz. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Overy, Richard. 1994. War and Economy in the Third Reich. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. Pamiatniki diplomaticheskikh snoshenii s papskim dvorom i italianskimi gosudarstvami 1580–1699. 10. 1871. Sankt­Peterburg, n.p. Petrov, Dmitrii. 2014. Istoriia glazami krokodila [History in the Eyes of a Crocodile] 1. Moskva: XX Century Crocodile. Plamper, Jan. 2012. The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

20  Dmitri Zakharine Possevino, Antonio. [1587] 1970. Antoni Possevini societatis Iesu, Moscovia, Et, Alia Opera statu huius seculi aduersus Catholicae Ecclesiae hostes. North Ryde: Westmead. ͡ o vliianii ͡ ͡ [Study Richter, Aleksandr. 1825. “Issledovaniia mongolo­tatar na Rossiiu of the Influence of Mongol­Tatars upon Russia].” Otechestvennye zapiski 62: 345–371. Rodriguez, Cecilia. 2017. “The British Royal Family Is Worth $88 Billion.” Forbes, November 23, 2017. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ceciliarodriguez/2017/11/23/ the­british­royal­family­is­worth­88­billion/#5d9d38be629c Rose, Michel. 2017. “Macron the Mould­Breaker—France’s Youngest Leader since Napoleon.” Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/us­france­election­macron­ profile­idUSKBN1830XP ͡ gazeta. 2012. “Beseda Stalina s Ėisenshteīnom po povodu fil‘ma Ivan Rossiīskaia Groznyī.” January 25, 2012, no. 5687: 14. https://rg.ru/2012/01/25/ivan­groznyy. html Saladino, Vincenzo. 1995. “Dal saluto alla salvezza. Valori simbolici della mano destra nell’arte greca e romana.” In II Gesto, Nel Rito e nel Cerimoniale dal Mondo Antico ad Oggi, edited by Sergio Bertelli and Monica Centanni, 31–52. Firenze: Ponte alle grazie. Samuel, Henry. 2017. “Cannes or Can­can? Brigitte Macron Upstages Husband at Lavish Inauguration at Elysée Palace.” Telegraph, May 14, 2017. https:// www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/14/cannes­cancan­brigitte­macron­upstages­ husband­lavish­inauguration/ Schnabel, Paul. 1925. „Die Begründung des hellinistischen Königskultes durch Al­ exander“, Klio 19: 113–127. Silfen, Paul. 1974. The Influence of the Mongols on Russia. A Dimensional History. New York: Exposition Press. Spuler, Bertold. [1943] 1965. Die goldene Horde. Die Mongolen in Rußland 1223– 1502. Leipzig: Otto Harrassowitz. Taylor, Robert R. 1974. The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology. Berkeley: California University Press. Traub, James. 2017. “France Has Its Businessman on Horseback.” Foreign Policy, May 7, 2017. ͡ Uspenskii, Boris A. 1994. Izbrannye trudy [Selected Works]. Moskva: Iazyki russkoī kul’tury. ͡ ͡ Veselovskiī, Nikolaī I. 1911. Tatarskoe vliianie na posol’skii tseremonial v moskovskii period russkoi istorii [The Tatar Influence on the Ambassadorial Ceremony During the Moscow Period of Russian History]. Sankt­Peterburg: B. M. Volf. Walter, Otto. 1910. “Kniende Adoranten auf attischen Reliefs.” Jahreshefte des Österreichischen Archäologischen Instituts in Wien 13: 229–244. Weyss, Norbert. 1986. “Der Doppeladler: Geschichte eines Symbols.” Adler 14, no. 3: 78–81. Winkler, Martin. 2009. The Roman Salute: Cinema, History, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Zakharine, Dmitri. 2005. Von Angesicht zu Angesicht. Der Wandel direkter Kommunikation in der ost- und westeuropäischen Neuzeit. Konstanz: UVK.

2

The mechanisms of cult production An overview Xavier Márquez

Introduction False, hypocritical praise has long been thought to be a problem for pow­ erful rulers, as the testimony of political moralists and advisors to princes in both the East and the West indicates.1 Clear­headed rulers have long un­ derstood its dangers;2 a ruler who cannot see through the praises of syco­ phants is at risk of losing power, since flattery is not credible as a signal of their loyalty.3 Yet many ruler “courts”,4 both ancient and modern, appear to be prone to flattery. Indeed, in some cases flattery of the ruler becomes so widespread and excessive that scholars speak of “cults of personality”. Consider just a few examples from several very different modern politi­ cal regimes. In the 1980s, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu was rou­ tinely called “the Giant of the Carpathians”, “the Source of Our Light”, “the Treasure of Wisdom and Charisma”, “the Great Architect”, “the Ce­ lestial Body”, and “the New Morning Star” by major public figures, and “court poets” wrote embarrassing encomiums to his rule (Sebestyen 2010, 161). In Zaire in 1975, Mobutu Sese Seko was hailed as a new “Prophet” and “Messiah”, and his Interior Minister at the time even proposed replacing crucifixes in schools with Mobutu’s image (Young and Turner 1985, 169). Beginning in the late 1930s, Francisco Franco’s sycophants compared him to Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon, El Cid, Charles V, and most of the kings of the “Golden Age” of Spain; routinely praised him as a “military genius” and said he was “providentially ordained” as savior of Spain, a veri­ table “messiah of civic redemption”; called him “the Sun” and the “Father of Peace”; and exalted his intelligence, political acuteness, work habits, physi­ cal stamina, literary acumen, and even his sense of humor and his skills as a hunter, fisherman, and golf player (Fernández 1983, 311–324). And in Syria in the 1990s, president Hafiz al­Assad was praised as the country’s “premier pharmacist”, as well as the country’s premier teacher, doctor, and lawyer, among other things (Wedeen 1999, 1, 12). In many cases, such flattery does not remain confined to elite figures in the media or in the ruler’s immediate court, but gives rise to widespread ritual practices of ruler worship, genuine “cults” of the leader that demand

22  Xavier Márquez the participation of many different social groups to recognize the leader’s exalted status. The cults of Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union, Mao in China, the Kim family in North Korea, Mussolini in Italy, and Hitler in Germany are the most well­known of these,5 but such phenomena can be found elsewhere as well, including in comparatively open political contexts like the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. These forms of flattery seem sometimes humorous or bizarre. Yet they are puzzling, disproportionate to the achieve­ ments or charisma of their object: who could possibly believe that Hafiz al­Assad was indeed Syria’s premier pharmacist, and what could possibly be the point of publicizing this ridiculous claim? In this chapter I identify the mechanisms through which ruler flattery emerges, and the circumstances that transform it into mass rituals of ado­ ration.6 In particular, I note the importance of interactions between mecha­ nisms of loyalty signaling and mechanisms of emotional amplification for the emergence and development of what I call “flattery inflation”.7 Moreover, I argue that the kind of semantic inflation visible in many leader cults is most likely to occur under conditions of relatively unstructured competition for the favor of powerful patrons, and I suggest that the mechanisms identified by this theory better account for the emergence of excessive ruler flattery and mass personality cults than theories emphasizing purely cultural “men­ talities” or the direct promotion of “charismatic” authority. I illustrate this account with ancient and modern examples of personality cults, emphasiz­ ing the continuities between these phenomena across the divide of modern media and communications. The chapter is structured as follows. First, I define a leader cult in terms of its communicative dimensions (which include flattery), and identify the main mechanisms that can give rise to cults. In particular, I point to loy­ alty signaling, direct production, and emotional amplification as the three primary processes that can force the recognition of the ruler’s status and charismatic authority from a large public. I then focus specifically on how loyalty signaling and ritual amplification can produce flattery inflation cas­ cades, and illustrate these processes with a case study of the abortive cult of the Roman emperor Caligula in the context of the broader history of the cult of the Roman emperors, showing how these mechanisms have validity beyond the modern era.

Cult artifacts, cult mechanisms, and cult functions A leader cult is a communicative phenomenon. When scholars speak of a leader cult, or a cult of personality, they point to widespread communicative activity that is understood by participants to express veneration or worship of the rulers.8 This activity is characterized by the concerted production of communicative artifacts (from monumental statues to verbal praise) that signal, express, or recognize the ruler’s exceptional qualities or individual status, his “charisma” in Weber’s sense of the term (Weber 1978, 241–243).

The mechanisms of cult production  23 Three points about this characterization of leader cults as communica­ tive phenomena are worth elaborating. First, the communicative artifacts characteristic of a cult often, but not always, include representations of the leader: paintings and hagiographies, poems and movies, etc. But some cult artifacts at best symbolize a connection to the leader, rather than directly representing him. Early in the Cultural Revolution, for example, some man­ goes came to be treated as sacred artifacts because of their connection to Mao (Chau 2010; Dutton 2004); but the mangoes themselves did not strictly speaking represent Mao. These mangoes can be considered cult artifacts because in some communicative contexts, activities connected with them (bowing before replicas of the mangoes, placing them in special places, drinking the boiled juice of the mangoes, reproducing them in commercial products) signaled veneration or worship of Mao, and were understood as such by participants. The mangoes referred to Mao, but did not describe his exceptional qualities; activities connected with the mangoes did, however, express recognition of Mao’s charisma. Second, while individual praise of rulers is common in all political re­ gimes, it is only in the case of cults that such activity is interpreted as worship or veneration. In politically significant cult phenomena, worship is also widespread and coordinated in some fashion, not just sporadic and local­ ized. Widespread veneration or worship indicates the normative recognition of the ruler’s exceptional qualities, his or her “charisma”. It is because cult artifacts are widespread, and because they are interpretable as worship of the leader, that we can speak of the social (rather than merely individual) recognition of the leader’s charisma. Finally, despite the fact that cults involve the social recognition of a lead­ er’s charisma, this social recognition is not a description of the sincerity of individual participants in cult practices. Though cult communication, like all communication, can be sincere, it can also be hypocritical or deceptive. The key point for our purposes is that cult artifacts make recognition of the leader’s charisma (his exalted status and exceptional qualities) normative, and thus transform it into authority.9 Insofar as people follow the social norm to worship or venerate the leader (i.e., to recognize the leader’s excep­ tional qualities in a variety of practices) then the leader will have some char­ ismatic authority, regardless of whether this recognition is sincere or not. And not following a public norm to recognize the charisma of the leader in turn leads to more or less severe consequences for the individual (depending on the context). Generally speaking, cult communicative artifacts work as public signals of the social recognition of the charisma of the leader. They provide “com­ mon knowledge” that others recognize the charismatic authority of the leader, both explicitly, insofar as cult artifacts visibly acknowledge and de­ scribe the leader’s exceptional qualities; and implicitly, insofar as the mate­ rial value and the effort involved in the production of cult artifacts serve as costly public signals of this recognition. The social recognition of charisma

24  Xavier Márquez is in turn intensified the more cult communicative artifacts pervade pub­ lic spaces: if alternative characterizations of the leader are not visible (e.g., communicative artifacts that belittle the leader, or describe him or her in or­ dinary ways are prohibited or forcibly marginalized), the normative default appears to be the recognition of the leader’s charismatic authority. The communicative artifacts produced in a cult convey the ruler’s ex­ ceptional qualities, charisma, or status in three different ways. First, they directly express some association between the leader and other ideas. Di­ rect expression can be in the form of descriptions of the leader’s personal qualities (for example, the epithets of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu mentioned above), or associations with more abstract concepts (e.g., in the 1930s Stalin was typically called the “Father of Peoples” and associated with the authoritative interpretation of Marxism­Leninism). We can speak here about the “express content” of cult artifacts: the particular ideas that are expressed (verbally or visually or in other media) in connection with the leader, and which provide meaningful content to his charisma.10 Second, cult artifacts can have material value that communicates sta­ tus. The most obvious example of this is the material value of paper money printed with portraits of the leader (e.g., the portrait of Mao in Chinese Yuan notes), but it is also possible to speak of the material value of a statue, or of a gift to the leader (e.g., the gifts to the Kim family rulers in the Inter­ national Friendship Exhibition museum in Pyongyang).11 Finally, cult artifacts can also recognize or express the leader’s high status and exceptional qualities by displaying the impressive effort of their produc­ ers. A monumental statue; an extravagant display of praise; “stormy and prolonged applause”; these are all potential ways in which an otherwise or­ dinary communicative artifact might be used to recognize the leader’s high status or exceptional qualities by credibly establishing that the producers of the artifact have devoted costly resources to honoring him.12

The mechanisms of cult production We can speak here, with Muller (2019), of the different kinds of “value” of cult artifacts for the recognition of a leader’s charisma. This value can be derived from their semantic content (“semantic value”), their material composition (“material value”), and/or the costs to their producers (“signaling value”). The utility of particular kinds of cult artifacts for the recognition of the leader’s charismatic authority will depend on a combination of these forms of value; but whether a particular artifact has one or another of these forms of value will depend in part on the mechanism through which it is produced. In historical cases of leader cults, cult artifacts have been created through three distinct mechanisms. First, there is direct or centralized production, the intentional use of the bureaucratic authority of the state or other or­ ganizations to produce articles praising the leader, commemorative statues

The mechanisms of cult production  25 and paintings, hagiographic biographies, propaganda posters, etc. Direct production of cult artifacts standardizes the semantic value of cult artifacts, allowing for particular kinds of associations between the leader and other ideas while prohibiting others. Second, there is loyalty signaling, which moti­ vates individuals to express praise of the leader and to publicly recognize his charisma in order to take advantage of opportunities for advancement or to avoid social sanction. Loyalty signaling primarily determines the signaling value of cult artifacts, but it may also affect their material value insofar as the latter serves as a credible signal of support for the leader. Finally, there is ritual amplification, in which communicative cult artifacts are produced within a ritual context as part of a process of amplification of pre­existing emotional attachments to the leader. Ritual amplification affects all three forms of value. These mechanisms do not necessarily work independently of each other in particular cases. The competition for power at the highest levels of a regime can lead to costly loyalty signaling by leading figures that in turn results in the redirection of the state’s bureaucratic apparatus toward the production of cult artifacts and the promotion of rituals of worship that amplify emotion and lead individuals to produce more cult artifacts. For example, the cult of Stalin in the Soviet Union emerged partly as a result of the competition for power within the Politburo of the Communist Party, in which Lazar Kaganovich’s attempts to consolidate his position against oth­ ers in the inner circle by signaling his extreme loyalty to Stalin led to the use of state and party authority for the production of cult artifacts and rituals (e.g., the organization of Stalin’s 50th birthday celebrations). This, in turn, prompted large­scale loyalty signaling among Soviet citizens and the ritual amplification of their attachments (Ennker 2004; Márquez 2018). Similarly, the cult of Mao during the cultural revolution intensified as a result of competition at the highest levels of the Chinese Communist Party, where loyalty signaling by multiple figures (including Lin Biao and mem­ bers of the Central Cultural Revolution Group) led to the redirection of resources toward the production of cult artifacts (e.g., millions of copies of the “Little Red Book”) and the encouragement of groups (like the Red Guards) whose actions then induced millions to engage in loyalty signaling by participating in rituals of worship (Leese 2011; Márquez 2018). Nevertheless, each of these mechanisms works via different processes and has different implications for the functions of leader cults. In what follows I explain each mechanism, provide examples, and note their different conse­ quences for the politics of leader cults. Direct production Direct production is the simplest mechanism of cult production. We can understand direct production as the attempt to use the bureaucratic author­ ity of organizations to increase the charismatic authority of the leader by

26  Xavier Márquez directing state or party agencies to produce representations of the leader calculated to persuade audiences of the leader’s charismatic qualities or his exalted status. Many leader cults, including the cults of the Kim family in North Korea and the cults of many of the leaders of Eastern European Com­ munist parties, have been partly produced by the direct use of state power to create such representations.13 Writers’ Unions, propaganda departments, and other organizations have been enlisted to create artwork, produce hag­ iographies, and prevent the production of unauthorized representations of the leader. Great care is taken by these organizations to ensure that leader representations and leader praise have a consistent ideological content. The attempt by state institutions to produce or increase the charismatic authority of leaders is usually interpreted as a way of increasing their legitimacy, especially in times of crisis. For example, Stalin’s cult is conven­ tionally dated to his 50th birthday celebrations in December 1929 (Plamper 2004, 21), during the collectivization drive, when the legitimacy of the young Soviet regime would have been greatly endangered, while the Franco cult in the 1940s emerged under conditions of severe scarcity during and imme­ diately after the Spanish Civil War (Payne 1987, 118). And it is plausible to think that ‘states beset by economic failure and by social conflict invaria­ bly respond by seeking to strengthen symbolic legitimation’ (Rees 2004, 4), though whether an increase in legitimation through cult­building accrues to the state, the regime, or the leader is not always clearly specified in scholarly work that emphasizes the legitimating functions of cults and the direct pro­ duction of cult artifacts.14 Strictly speaking, the direct production of communicative cult artifacts can only make use of organizational rational­legal legitimacy (as found in the bureaucratic authority of well­functioning state or party agencies) to increase leader charismatic legitimacy. While it is possible that increases in the legitimacy of a leader achieved through the direct production of cult artifacts may redound to the legitimacy of state or party organizations, sometimes increases in leader legitimacy can come at the expense of the legitimacy of other organizations. Thus, for example, during the Cultural Revolution in China, increased adulation of Mao went hand in hand with attacks on the authority of the Party and many state institutions. Because direct cult production activities may increase the legitimacy of the leader rather than that of the state or the ruling organization as such, they will tend to be associated with the consolidation of personal power within a regime (Svolik 2012, 80–81), i.e., the process through which a ruler becomes progressively less constrained by other regime leaders. Thus, the emergence of the Stalin cult was not only associated with the collectivization crisis, but also with the consolidation of Stalin’s personal power within the Politburo; and similarly the Franco cult was at its height while he was consolidating his power during and immediately after the civil war years.15 It is worth stressing that direct cult production can only work to legiti­ mate the leader if the descriptions of the leader’s qualities or exceptional

The mechanisms of cult production  27 status are credible to their intended audiences, and hence actually persua­ sive; incredible claims do not produce legitimation, even if they saturate public space or are repeated ad nauseam.16 To the extent that leaders are aware of the need for credibility, they will attempt to tamp down the more implausible claims made on their behalf, or to associate themselves with unverifiable or vague narratives of national pride. Thus Stalin’s “editorial” interventions in his own cult texts tended to soften the language used by his sycophants (Davies 2004); and North Korean cult propaganda tends to associate the leader with the unity of the nation (Myers 2010), though it also sometimes promotes incredible claims for signaling reasons. In any case, although a state, particularly an authoritarian state, can usu­ ally flood public space with representations and praise of the leader, including artifacts that represent the leader in association with particular ideological content, the saturation of public space with these communicative artifacts, even if accompanied by punishments for the production of unsanctioned cult artifacts, need not result in the amplification of popular emotional attach­ ment to leaders, or in the internalization of the ideological content of propa­ ganda. As Paul Veyne once noted, much propaganda of this sort is “without viewers” (or at least without attentive viewers); ordinary people do not nec­ essarily understand the nuances of the ideological messages being communi­ cated, or even pay much attention to them (Veyne 1988).17 Nevertheless, the permeation of public space with centrally produced cult artifacts can create normative expectations for the recognition of the leader’s charisma. The very omnipresence of communicative cult artifacts produced by the state acts as a powerful signal that people are expected to recognize the charisma of the leader in public settings. They make praise of the leader normative, and exemplify the language to be used when recogniz­ ing his charisma. As the historian Steven Kotkin has noted in the context of the 1930s in the Soviet Union, people reacted to all­encompassing Bolshevik propaganda by learning to “speak Bolshevik” (Kotkin 1995), using the cues of official discourse to navigate a difficult political environment. Mutatis mutandi the same is true of cult propaganda; as Lisa Wedeen documents in the case of Syria (1998), during Hafiz al­Assad’s rule Syrians learned to use the language of the cult to avoid sanction and get ahead even when it was entirely impossible for authorities to verify their belief in it; and much other cult propaganda elsewhere is scrutinized in everyday life merely for clues to the right sort of language to use in “official” situations to avoid po­ tential punishment. Omnipresent cult propaganda can thus lead to loyalty signaling. Loyalty signaling Cult­building via loyalty signaling typically emerges when there is common knowledge that there are rewards or punishments arising from credibly and publicly recognizing (or failing to recognize) the leader’s exceptional qualities.

28  Xavier Márquez This expectation may be bureaucratically induced by the activities of state or party agents,18 or it may be generated by a small group that is particularly attached to the leader for independent reasons (e.g., the Red Guards during the early Cultural Revolution, see Leese 2011). But once this expectation is in place, people will be incentivized to signal their loyalty to the leader; and the credibility of these signals will be directly related to the observable cost people incur when they produce communicative cult artifacts. This cost need not be purely material. Voluntarily engaging in behaviors that incur in peer disapproval or loss of dignity can credibly indicate one’s loyalty, as when people repeat obviously absurd flattery of the leader in pub­ lic. Willingness to publicly say that Hafez al­Assad was Syria’s “premier pharmacist” (Wedeen 1999, 1, 12) or that Kim Jong­il had mastered telepor­ tation to avoid being tracked by American satellites (Hassig and Oh 2009, 55) served as a credible signal of submission to these leaders (cf. Svolik 2012, 80–81), since those uttering the praise were implicitly violating social norms against speaking nonsense to emphasize the unbridgeable status distance between themselves and these leaders. Even the violation of a norm against leader worship may serve to indicate the seriousness of a person’s commit­ ment to the leader, as those who violate the norm lose face among their peers. “Nauseating displays of loyalty” constitute costly signals of support for a leader precisely because they are frowned upon by others; and there is evidence that such costly signaling is partly responsible for cult­building behavior in contemporary China (Shih 2008). It is worth noting in this respect that the cult artifacts produced via loy­ alty signaling can be quite different in their semantic content than those produced by direct means. Direct cult production by the state will tend to produce cult artifacts calculated to persuade audiences of the charisma of the leader, and hence will emphasize otherwise believable representations, whereas credible loyalty signals may be effective precisely insofar as they express unbelievable views of the leader. Sufficiently extravagant praise— flattery—is not persuasive to others (and hence cannot legitimate the leader), but it can be credible as a signal of commitment to the leader. Moreover, in these circumstances the semantic content of such signals can be subject to a process of inflation that pushes them further and fur­ ther away from believability. Because people have incentives to signal loy­ alty to gain rewards or avoid punishments, both people who are genuinely committed to the leader, and people who just want to gain the rewards of signaling loyalty (or avoid the punishments) will produce cult artifacts.19 In order to sharpen distinctions between those genuinely committed and opportunists, leaders may thus encourage ever more elaborate displays of flattery—in essence increasing the “cost” people must pay to signal their loyalty—while the very scarcity of rewards may in any case incentivize in­ dividuals to produce such displays. The “signaling value” of any particular cult artifact—that is, its value as a means of gaining rewards or avoiding punishments—will thus be dependent on its scarcity: overproduction of

The mechanisms of cult production  29 particular cult artifacts “cheapens” them. Those wishing to present them­ selves as genuinely loyal must then spend more effort increasing the “sign­ aling value” of their cult artifacts, which often involves the production of ever more extravagant or unbelievable flattery—at least until the costs of self­abasement or norm­breaking equal the symbolic and material benefits of being seen as a genuinely loyal supporter of the leader. The early period of the Cultural Revolution in China is particularly abundant in examples of this inflationary dynamic. Highly committed Red Guards established an expectation that ordinary people needed to visibly show support for Mao (and recognize his extraordinary qualities) to avoid harassment or worse. This expectation in turn incentivized ordinary peo­ ple to memorize quotations from the “Little Red Book”, to participate in spontaneous displays of support for Mao, like “loyalty dances”, or to wear Mao badges (Leese 2011). At the same time, Red Guards competed among themselves to show their radicalism and commitment to Mao, leading them to punish ever more minor infractions of the norm. The overall effect of this process was to ratchet upwards the effort required to be safe from harass­ ment, and to devalue common signals of support over time. For example, when everyone wore Mao badges, wearing them became less credible as a signal that the person genuinely and sufficiently recognized Mao’s charis­ matic authority. People wishing to “stand out” for their commitment to Mao (earning the rewards for this commitment, or avoiding the punishments for insufficient respect) thus started to wear more badges, or larger badges, or to wear these badges directly on their skin (Leese 2011, 216–217). A similar, if less dramatic, example of this inflationary dynamic can be found in contemporary China, where party efforts to promote the exalted status of Xi Jinping (Luqiu 2016), a form of “direct cult production”, have induced some degree of grassroots signaling. For example, the Chinese government recently introduced a smartphone app called “Study the Great Nation”, which provides access to Xi Jinping’s latest speeches, quizzes on his latest pronouncements, and other study tools for “Xi Jinping Thought”. The app has been apparently highly successful, with more than 100 million downloads. Yet though some people have clearly embraced it out of com­ mitment to Xi Jinping, it is clear that the vast majority of people are using it because the party has ordered officials to promote the app and to penalize people who do not use it. According to reporting in the New York Times, “schools are shaming people with low app scores” and “Government offices are holding study sessions and forcing workers who fall behind to write re­ ports criticizing themselves” (Hernández 2019), leading people to use the app more in order to avoid sanctions.20 At the same time, because the app “allows users to earn points”, users can compete with each other to show their commitment to Xi Jinping and the party—points that may be useful in other material ways, such as promotions at work. Both the sanctions and re­ wards artificially increase the effort involved in using the app, lending high “scores” in the app “signaling value”.

30  Xavier Márquez As these examples make clear, loyalty signaling differs from direct cult production also in that it is a decentralized process. People produce commu­ nicative cult artifacts because there are social norms that provide rewards for doing so (or punishments for not doing so), which may in turn lead to the development of markets in cult paraphernalia. Today, for example, there is a lively market in Putin cult objects (Cassiday and Johnson 2013), which the state does not tightly regulate, simply because there exist social rewards in some contexts from visibly displaying loyalty to Putin (and because some people participate in ritual contexts that amplify their attachments to Pu­ tin). One result of this is that cult artifacts produced through loyalty signa­ ling are less standardized than those produced by the centralized processes described in the previous section; thus, for example, grassroots artifacts of the Lenin cult are immensely various, while the productions of the state tended to have a far narrower ideological content (Tumarkin 1983). Nevertheless, because cult­building through loyalty signaling requires the existence of expectations of rewards or punishments for recognizing the charisma of the leader, much of it emerges in the context of patronage net­ works, where career advancement depends more on the credibility of client loyalty than on meeting explicit legal­rational criteria or achieving realistic objectives. This was often the case in Leninist parties, where cadres com­ peted to offer ever more elaborate flattery to reassure their superiors of their loyalty in a treacherous ideological climate or to bid for resources allocated on the basis of indeterminate or particularistic criteria (Ennker 2004; Gill 1980, 1984; Rolf 2004a). At the extreme, the fear of losing one’s career or one’s life drove cult be­ havior among party cadres. For example, during the Great Terror, fear of denunciation may have unreasonably increased the amount of applause given to Stalin’s speeches, as cadres feared being denounced as insufficiently loyal.21 Other people who depended on state patronage, such as Soviet scien­ tists, were also highly affected by the expectations of the Stalin cult. For ex­ ample, when Stalin intervened in the dispute over Soviet linguistics in 1950, attacking the views of N. Ia. Marr on language and class (which had been dominant in the Soviet Union until that time), other linguists quickly dis­ owned Marr, and immediately sent telegrams and letters to journals asking that their work (previously following Marr’s line) be modified or retracted.22 Stalin’s judgment even on fields remote from his ostensible expertise was ev­ idently impossible to challenge publicly, as terrified scholars feared the loss of career opportunities or worse from being seen to oppose Stalin; he was “the coryphaeus of science”. But patronage relationships can generate cult­building incentives even where the consequences of non­compliance are less dire. Thus cult building through loyalty signaling appears to be common in what Juan Linz called “patrimonial” or “sultanistic” regimes (Chehabi and Linz 1998), where pa­ tronage relationships pervade the state (Márquez 2016a, chap. 4). We thus find cult­building behavior in the Duvaliers’ Haiti (Diederich and Burt

The mechanisms of cult production  31 1973); Mobutu’s Zaire (Young 1994, 168–172); Nguema’s Equatorial Guinea (Decalo 1985; Sundiata 1990, 129); Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda and Bokas­ sa’s Central African Republic (Decalo 1985); Trujillo’s Dominican Repub­ lic (Wiarda 1968, chap. 7); and Gaddafi’s Libya (Pargeter 2012, chap. 4), all of which are commonly considered patrimonial regimes. While in some of these cases cults were sometimes produced in more or less centralized ways—for example, Trujillo devoted bureaucratic resources to producing school textbooks extolling his rule—their most excessive manifestations typically came from people attempting to signal their loyalty (or attempting to prevent others from denouncing them for insufficient loyalty). In Trujillo’s Dominican republic, for example, it became common knowledge that paint­ ers who created flattering representations of Trujillo were well­rewarded (Wiarda 1968, 133), while newspaper columnists who failed to mention his achievements were often the object of vilification through anonymous let­ ters (sometimes written by Trujillo himself). In these circumstances, it is unsurprising that sycophants prospered, and cult content became highly exaggerated, with comparisons between Trujillo and God becoming quite common. Ritual amplification Loyalty signaling often occurs in ritual contexts, such as mass meetings where people are aware of one another’s reactions and wish to distinguish themselves as especially loyal to the ruler. But the production of cult artifacts can occur in ritual contexts for reasons other than loyalty signaling. In par­ ticular, successful rituals can produce what I call emotional amplification: the intensification of emotional attachments to the central symbols of the ritual, and the consequent production of communicative artifacts express­ ing such emotional commitments.23 Following Randall Collins, I shall call an “interaction ritual” any activity where people are co­present, jointly focused on some set of symbols, and aware of each one other’s attentional focus (Collins 2004; cf. also my more extended discussion in Márquez 2018). Much sociological research since Durkheim’s pioneering studies (Durkheim 1995) indicates that ritual par­ ticipation helps amplify emotional commitments to particular sets of sym­ bols that are the focus of the ritual and to the group through processes of physical synchronization (Lang et al. 2015; Xygalatas et al. 2011). This defi­ nition of ritual is capacious enough to encompass the wide variety of par­ ticipatory practices found in leader cults, from large­scale mass meetings (the Nuremberg rallies, the eight “Mass Receptions” of the Red Guards, electoral rallies in Chavez’ Venezuela) to regular rituals in workplaces or other contexts, to informal and ad hoc practices (like “loyalty dances” in China). Participation in rituals of worship may be encouraged by the state, or by elites in a regime, or it may be induced by the need to signal support for, and recognition of the charisma of, the leader; but once people come to

32  Xavier Márquez participate their attachment to the leader and their sense of belonging to a particular community united around the leader may be amplified, at least if the ritual is successful.24 The production of cult artifacts in ritual contexts is especially important in low­coercion environments. While the state can use its authority to co­ erce participation in rituals of worship, and there can be strong social pres­ sures to signal support by means of ritual participation (as, for example, in the Cultural Revolution, when many people feared that lack of participation in “loyalty dances” and “quotation gymnastics” would lead to harassment or worse—see Leese 2011), in less coercive contexts where neither the state nor social pressures provide especially strong incentives to produce cult ar­ tifacts, the main producers of cult artifacts will tend to be participants in interaction rituals centered on the leader. For example, the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela seems to have emerged mostly through processes of ritual amplification rather than costly signaling and direct production, though both costly signaling and direct production played an important role in the later intensification of the cult (Márquez 2018). During Chávez’s years in power his constant electoral campaigns (there were 13 major elections in his 14 years in power) provided plenty of opportunities for interaction rituals focused on his person, and Chávez was a skilled practitioner of these ritual forms, able to draw on pre­existing symbols of communal identity and “genealogical” narratives connecting the present to the revolutionary past of Venezuela to generate intense expe­ riences of belonging (Michelutti 2017). People who already had some rea­ son to like Chávez gravitated not only toward these electoral rituals, but to a variety of other popular organizations (e.g., the “Círculos Bolivarianos” and later on the “Unidades de Batalla Electoral”, both composed of small groups dedicated to the Bolivarian project and to Chávez personally) whose activities allowed for the emergence of Chávez­focused interaction rituals where emotional attachments to his person were renewed and amplified (Hawkins and Hansen 2006; López Maya and Lander 2011).25 As a result, by the end of his time in power, a sizable minority of the pop­ ulation was intensely attached to Chávez, to the point where on his death spontaneous, intense mourning was widespread, the mausoleum where Chávez is interred became a site of pilgrimage (with government encour­ agement), and several public Chávez shrines appeared in popular sectors in Caracas (Ultimas Noticias 2013). The point here is not that there was no encouragement by the government to the production of cult artifacts; if nothing else, the fact that by the end of Chávez’ time in power the govern­ ment controlled the airwaves, allowed it to produce cult artifacts very effec­ tively. Moreover, struggles for power at the top of the ruling party hierarchy also intensified signaling dynamics among Venezuelan leaders, leading to inflationary pressures on the production of cult artifacts (Márquez 2018). But many other cult artifacts (Chávez­themed mural painting in poorer ar­ eas, the creation of Chávez chapels, visits to the Chávez mausoleum, tweets

The mechanisms of cult production  33 saying “I am Chávez”) were more spontaneously produced by people whose voluntary participation in rituals with Chávez at their center renewed and amplified their emotional commitments to him, and who did not have a pressing need to signal support to gain resources or avoid punishments. Another example of the role of ritual amplification in producing cult ar­ tifacts can be found in the cult of Maurice Thorez, the leader of the French Communist Party (PCF) during and immediately after World War II (Mor­ gan 2016). The cult of Thorez among members of the PCF cannot be ex­ plained by the state’s use of coercive authority, or by an expectation that members needed to credibly signal support of Thorez, simply because the party was not in power and the most severe sanction it could use against people who did not participate in cult activities was exclusion. The cult grew mostly because the PCF was what Anne Kriegel has called an “oppositional microsociety” (cited in Morgan 2016, 8), and cult rituals provided an op­ portunity for party members to affirm their belonging together in a hostile climate.

Flattery inflation and the Cult of Caligula The mechanisms of cult production discussed above are not dependent on particular features of modern society or culture. They have also produced cult­building behaviors in temporally and culturally distant contexts. In what follows, I illustrate the operation of these mechanisms with a more ex­ tended discussion of the (failed) cult of Caligula in the early Roman Empire, set in the context of the broader history of the Roman imperial cult. The Roman imperial cult was a “literal” cult, in the sense that the deified emperor became the object of a formal ritual practice, supported by state resources. Such cults were rare for living people; most emperors were only formally deified in the Roman core of the empire after death, though living emperors were often the object of cultic practices in the Greek­speaking provinces (Hammond and Price 2003, 1338). For our purposes in this chap­ ter, however, we will focus on the broader set of “cult­building” practices in the Imperial period, including the production of extravagant flattery and the awarding of extraordinary honors. These were practices that exalted the status of the emperor far above the status of other members of the elite, without necessarily creating literal cult rituals. In any case, the distinction between sacred and secular honors was less marked for Roman culture than our own: as Gradel puts it, “divine cult was an honor, differing in degree but not in kind from ‘secular’ honors” (Gradel 2002, 3), and as such only one of many honors that helped increase the status of the emperor and made the recognition of his charisma normative. Roman society in the late Republic was not, by modern standards, an egalitarian society, though Republican ideas provided a counterweight to its more inegalitarian tendencies. In particular, the senatorial elite had a strong sense of its political significance, and members considered themselves each

34  Xavier Márquez other’s equals. Senators jockeyed over relative status in the many rituals of Roman life (marked by such things as the seating order in the circus or the theatre, the order of voting in the senate, the lavishness of their hospital­ ity in their private parties, elections to political office, the number of their clients, etc.) but they remained notional social equals. Struggles for power from the time of the Gracchi onwards weakened these intra­elite egalitar­ ian norms, since by the end of the Republican period, very powerful and wealthy individuals controlled enough resources to induce loyalty signaling by other members of the elite, including the granting of divine honors to living individuals. For example, though the evidence is somewhat controver­ sial, it appears that Julius Caesar was granted divine honors by the Senate during his lifetime (Hammond and Price 2003, 1338). The end of the civil wars, and the rise of Augustus, changed the balance of power between senators and powerful military leaders decisively in favor of the imperator. But although from Augustus (Caligula’s great grandfather, the first emperor) onward, the imperator was the most powerful person in Rome, he continued to depend on the senatorial aristocracy to rule the empire. The senate constituted the group from which the emperor drew the people who could command the legions, coordinate the taxation of the provinces, and in general govern the empire and keep him in power. It was also the group that constituted the greatest threat to his position, since segments of the senato­ rial aristocracy could also conspire against him and potentially overthrow him, selecting a different emperor, especially since principles of hereditary succession were not clearly institutionalized. The cooperation of the senate, in turn, depended in part on maintaining the fiction that senators remained the emperor’s equals. It is significant in this respect that Augustus was known as the princeps, literally the “first cit­ izen” (hence the early Roman Empire is normally called the “principate”). During his time, the standard republican offices were filled more or less normally and retained their meaning as markers of status (though elections were often rigged, when they were held at all, to produce the results decided in advance by the emperor); the senate voted triumphs and special festivals in honor of particular people and events, including voting divine honors to the dead emperor (Price 1987), and confirmed the emperor’s own position. Even the title imperator originally meant nothing more than military com­ mander, though it came to be applied exclusively to the princeps or certain members of his family (Momigliano and Cornell 2003). Most importantly for our purposes, the first two emperors (and many later ones as well) did not compel the sorts of marks of obeisance typical of earlier Hellenistic monarchies, where the “status distance” between the rulers and the mem­ bers of the traditional elite had been much larger than in Rome: proskynesis (prostration), kissing the feet or the robe, worship as a god, elaborate forms of address, clear hereditary succession, etc. Augustus in particular went out of his way not to signal any sort of in­ tention to become a “king”, that is, a ruler like the Hellenistic monarchs

The mechanisms of cult production  35 (Winterling 2011, 9–11), despite the fact that the Roman polity had become a “monarchy” in all but name, something that was common knowledge among all members of the elite. He lived in a relatively small house on the Palatine hill; stood for office in the normal way, and sometimes resigned it; and let the senate conduct the business of the republic in appearance, clev­ erly signaling his intentions so that senators could reach the “right” result (i.e., the result Augustus wanted). The reason for this cautious behavior is that signaling an intention to become a king (that is, to widen the status dis­ tance between himself and the senatorial aristocracy) increased the ability of disgruntled senators to conspire against him. This was, after all, what happened to Julius Caesar (Augustus’ adoptive father). By behaving in ways that signaled an intention to become a king in the Hellenistic sense (a rex), he threatened to destroy the foundations of senatorial status in the Repub­ lic. Rex was a status symbol that could still mobilize passions against those who tried to claim this status. Yet the strong norm against the appropriation of kingship symbols by powerful individuals was not enough to prevent the emergence of the cult of Caligula a few decades after Augustus’ death. The problem was that the social status of the emperor was not fully commensurate with the resources he controlled. Senators as a group preferred this situation of status equality. But individual senators could benefit (both materially and in status terms) from credibly signaling special loyalty to the emperor, who was of course “patron in chief”, and controlled status and material resources that only he could allocate to the senators. Such signaling could take two forms. First, senators could inform on each other. Yet excessive denunciations also increased the risk of actual conspir­ acies (as senators anticipating that they might be denounced could attempt to take power) and devastated the elite on which the emperor relied, so early emperors often attempted to curb excessive conspiracy mongering (Win­ terling 2011, 26–28, on Tiberius). But senators could also directly flatter the emperor, attempting to show how much they valued his person by costly acts that increased his status relative to theirs. The problem was that any particular form of flattery quickly became devalued, and the emperor lost the ability to distinguish genuine supporters from non­supporters. Moreo­ ver, flattery inflation tended to diminish the collective social status of the senatorial aristocracy: the more the emperor was praised, the more the sen­ ators were abased. For example, in Roman elite society the morning salutatio was an im­ portant indicator of status: friends and clients visited their friends and pa­ trons in the mornings, and the more visitors a senator had, the higher his status. But nobody could afford not to visit the emperor every morning, or to signal that they were not really “friends” with the emperor, since every member of the senatorial aristocracy was in a sense the emperor’s client. So the morning salutatio at the emperor’s residence turned into a crush of hundreds of senators, all of them jostling to gain the emperor’s attention

36  Xavier Márquez (Winterling 2011, 23). And while in principle the senate retained some dis­ cretion in allocating honors to the emperor (triumphs, titles, etc.), individual senators could always sponsor extraordinarily sycophantic resolutions in the hopes of gaining something from the emperor (offices, marriages, etc.), and other senators could not afford not to vote for such resolutions due to the risk of potential denunciation by other senators. In sum, flattery inflation was, from the point of view of the senators, a tragedy of the commons: as each senator tried to further his relative social status within the aristocracy, they tended to devalue their collective status. This was not necessarily a good thing from the point of view of the emper­ ors either, who could not easily distinguish sycophantic liars and schemers from genuine supporters, and who often disliked the flattery (Winterling 2011, 26–28, on Tiberius). So the emperors tried to dampen it or manage it to their advantage. Three potential responses to this problem can be distinguished. First, emperors could try “ostentatious humility”. As noted earlier Au­ gustus lived in a relatively ordinary house by aristocratic standards, and refused to publicly usurp the Senate’s business. This strategy attempted to tamp down inflationary pressures by providing a more or less credible fic­ tion of equality between emperor and senators. But the fiction could work only if it did not come into conflict with the emperor’s power. Senators needed to do what the emperor wanted, but the emperor could not explicitly order them to do so without undermining this fiction. This required a great deal of political skill and clever indirection, so less able political operators than Augustus (such as Tiberius, Augustus’ immediate successor) were less successful at maintaining this fiction. Tiberius instead tried a strategy of withdrawal, moving to Capri to avoid contacts with the senatorial aristocracy (Winterling 2011, 26), and comple­ mented this strategy by explicitly banning the senate from granting him cer­ tain honors. Yet by banning the more public forms of flattery and removing himself from Rome, he inadvertently incentivized ambitious senators to de­ nounce each other as a means of advancement. The more denunciations, moreover, the less actual conspirators had to lose, leading to a poisoned and dangerous atmosphere, especially as factions of Tiberius’ family schemed over the succession. Most potential heirs did not live long; Caligula was the last man standing. Caligula first tried the Augustan policy of indirection and ostentatious humility, and was reasonably good at it. But for reasons that are not entirely clear (though Winterling suggests they were related to attempts on his life— see Winterling 2011, 64), he seems to have changed tack in the third year of his reign to deliberately encourage flattery. He did this, in part, by taking the senators literally: when they said that he was like a god, he demanded proof of this, thus forcing them to worship him as a god and humiliating the particular senator. Or when he was invited to dinner, he forced senators to ruin themselves to please him. And he demonstrated contempt for their

The mechanisms of cult production  37 status by the way he behaved in the circus and elsewhere. (The famous story of how he named his horse a consul can be understood as one such insult.) Yet the senators could not retaliate by revealing their true feelings; their co­ ordination costs had increased and their individual incentives were always to flatter Caligula. Strategically speaking, the point of this seems to have been to lessen his dependence on the senatorial aristocracy and to move the regime toward a Hellenistic model. For example, there is some suggestive evidence that Caligula might have been planning to move to Alexandria, an obviously symbolic move to the historic capital of the Hellenistic dynasts (Winter­ ling 2011, 97–98). Encouraging runaway flattery inflation made conspiracies harder to pull off (since even the most innocuous comment could be used to betray the other conspirators) but also succeeded in completely humiliating the flatterers (in this case the senatorial aristocracy) and lowering their col­ lective social status vis à vis the ruler. At the endpoint of this process (rep­ resented here by the status hierarchy of the Hellenistic dynasts), ambiguous language is no longer necessary to manage the relationship between the patron and his clients; their competitive self­abasement has widened their status distance so much that direct orders are no longer out of the question. This was a high­risk strategy: deliberate humiliation, by striking at the core of the symbols of senatorial identity, also made some senators more willing to run the risk of conspiracy; even as these risks increased, the costs to their identity of allowing Caligula to humiliate them so directly also in­ creased. In fact, according to Winterling, the humiliation of the aristocracy not only led to the downfall of Caligula, but also contributed to his charac­ terization by later (aristocratic) writers as the “mad emperor” (Winterling 2011, 187–191): Caligula symbols had become objects of hatred, since they never had a ritual context that charged them with positive emotional energy. In sum, the cult of Caligula in Rome emerged through a process of loy­ alty signaling, and died when he was killed in AD 41. But the processes of loyalty signaling that incentivized flattery inflation in his time did not stop then. The disparity in power between emperor and senators led to a gradual increase in the status distance between senators and emperor, to the point that by the time of Diocletian (AD 284–305) elaborate ceremonies of ven­ eration were common among the aristocracy (Winterling 2011, 192). Even though Claudius, Caligula’s immediate successor, tried again the Augustan strategy of ostentatious humility, the elite’s incentives for both flattery and conspiracy that made Caligula’s choices comprehensible remained in place and led to a further erosion of the senatorial aristocracy’s status (Winterling 2011, 192–193). In any case, the broader emergence of cults of (living) emperors outside of the Roman elite (including cults to Caligula himself) cannot be fully ex­ plained by the same incentives to produce flattery that the senatorial elite faced. Instead, we need to turn to the ritual context of such cults (Price 1984, chap. 1). As noted above, cult rituals articulate meanings and amplify

38  Xavier Márquez emotion. The cults of the Roman emperors in the many Greek­speaking cities of the empire, like the earlier cults of the Hellenistic kings, were responses to the unaccountable power of these new rulers, whose place in the community (at once outside of it, yet not rejected as alien and hostile) could at best be ar­ ticulated in the familiar terms of divinity, and expressed in cult rituals (Price 1984, chaps. 1 and 2). The emergence of such cults, however, also responded to the incentives inherent in the fact that the emperor controlled enormous economic resources. Cities in Asia Minor could offer cult to the emperor as an expression of gratitude for benefits received, and to help secure further benefits from a power that could not be easily influenced in other ways (Price 1984, 66). While this strategy did not always work (cult offers were not al­ ways approved, and benefits were not always forthcoming, especially if the particular city did not follow through on completing a temple or endowing a priesthood), it was one means to compete for the patronage of the Imperial household, implicating the emperor in a “gift economy”.26 The benefits—in prestige and sometimes material resources—gained from being allowed (by the Senate or the emperor) to offer cult to the em­ peror were considerable enough that there is even evidence of competition among cities to do so, at least in Asia Minor (Price 1984, 64). It is also sig­ nificant that, with few exceptions (mainly the cult of Augustus), cults to in­ dividual emperors tended to disappear with the death of the emperor (Price 1984, 61–62); there was little point in maintaining a cult to an emperor who could no longer provide resources to a city. And within a particular city, wealthy people could offer to endow an imperial priesthood as a way to gain prestige within the community (Price 1984, 63–64); the imperial cult, after all, involved the production of festivals and other rituals that must have enhanced many people’s ordinary lives. To be sure, some of the later cult rituals appear to have been rather pro­forma, and we know very little about their reception by participants. But at least some festivals would have mean­ ingfully integrated the emperors into the community’s self­understanding, and exploited emotional amplification to “routinize” the charisma of the emperor (Price 1984, 58–59)—that is, make recognition of his charisma nor­ mative for everyone. The normative recognition of an individual emperor’s charisma dimin­ ished over time; there is a trend in the sources toward generic cults of the autokrator, the generic emperor (Price 1984, 58). It is a safe bet, too, that the emotional power of such rituals also decreased over time; the sources suggest that only the cult of Augustus had a genuine basis in Augustus’ own charismatic authority, which was in turn rooted in his success pacifying the empire. But loyalty signaling by Roman and provincial elites kept the cults going, though ritual amplification must also have helped, especially in the early period; little “direct production” seems to have been needed, with few exceptions (including, interestingly, Caligula’s cult—Price 1984, 68). The specific form of the emperor cult in the Greek­speaking provinces of the empire—divine honors to a living emperor, administered by a priest

The mechanisms of cult production  39 and involving sacrifices at regular calendar dates—disappeared when its meaning came into conflict with emerging but central self­understandings of Greek and Roman culture. The coming of Christianity thus first under­ mined and then finally ended the explicit ritual aspect of the cult of the em­ perors (Price 1987). But the disappearance of cults granting explicit divine status to emperors did not, of course, mean the disappearance of rituals exalting the status of rulers. It only meant that the interaction rituals where this status was recognized changed, articulating the meaning of royal or imperial status in different symbolic terms. Loyalty signaling, direct pro­ duction, and ritual amplification remained important mechanisms that in­ creased or decreased the status of the ruler relative to the elite, and made recognition of his charisma more or less normative.

Conclusion: patterns of cult production As we have seen, leader cults can be produced by different mechanisms, though all these mechanisms are evident in different times and places, and are not tied to specific cultural formations. The specific meaning of the cult will, of course, be dependent on the cultural materials available (e.g., divine honors in Greek and Roman antiquity or association with the authoritative interpretation of Marxism­Leninism in the Soviet Union), but the mecha­ nisms that mobilize these cultural materials, transforming honors into flat­ tery and flattery into cult rituals, are of a more general kind. The primary mechanisms at work in any particular cult cannot be determined a priori: whether a leader cult emerges primarily because of direct production, loy­ alty signaling, or ritual amplification is a matter for empirical investigation. Nevertheless, some general patterns can be discerned within the historical evidence discussed above. First, high material inequality tends to induce loyalty signaling, especially in patronage relationships that are poorly institutionalized. If the stakes are high enough, loyalty signaling at the elite level (flattery) can turn into mass direct production of cult artifacts, which in turn can induce ritual partici­ pation beyond the elite. Second, ritual amplification as a mechanism of cult production tends to be most important in situations where coercion is lim­ ited, and punishment for non­participation in cult rituals is rare. In such circumstances, only people with pre­existing commitments to a leader are likely to participate in cult rituals, and these rituals will become especially important to them if participants have other reasons to feel part of a distinct group in opposition to the rest of society. Finally, the direct production of cult artifacts is most likely when there is a conscious attempt to increase the legitimacy of a leader during crises, and whenever leaders succeed in consolidating power. The particular effects and function of a leader cult depend on whether it is produced primarily via direct production, loyalty signaling, or ritual am­ plification. For example, while direct production corresponds to attempts

40  Xavier Márquez to consciously boost the legitimacy of a leader, in the absence of mass loy­ alty signaling its effects are unlikely to be large. And while flattery inflation through loyalty signaling may force the widespread recognition of a lead­ er’s charisma, its long­term effects are unlikely to be large in the absence of non­coercive ritual contexts where these loyalties can be constantly re­ newed. More generally, whether a cult serves as a durable means for increas­ ing the legitimacy of a leader or a state will depend in part on how the cult is produced.

Notes I advise you, not all of your subjects are loyal to you. Perhaps most of them are loyal but maybe a small number only verbally wish you ‘long live,’ while in reality they wish you a premature death. When they shout ‘long live,’ you should beware and analyze [the situation]. The more they praise you, the less you can trust them. This is a very natural rule. (quoted in Leese 2011, 186)

The mechanisms of cult production  41

10 11 12 13

14

15 16 17

18

19 20 21

22 23

24 25

26

this recognition must be public: there must be common knowledge that others recognize the leader’s charisma. Muller (2019) speaks of the “ideological value” of cult artifacts in this connection. I take the idea of the “material value” of cult artifacts from Muller (2019). Muller (2019) speaks similarly of the “focal value” of cult artifacts, though does not emphasize the degree to which such value comes from personally costly dis­ play by the producers of the artifacts. See, for the North Korean case, Tertitskiy (2015); the memoirs of Jang Jin­sung, a former member of a North Korean propaganda department, are also worth consulting (Jin­sung 2014). For a discussion of the organizations involved in cult production in several Eastern European cases, see Klimó (2004); Main (2004); and Mocanescu (2004). Work that assumes cults legitimate leaders and/or regimes includes Rees (2004); Plamper (2004); Strong and Killingsworth (2011); and Cohen (2007). I have sur­ veyed the many problems with scholarly uses of the concept of legitimacy in Márquez (2016b). On the dating of the consolidation of Stalin’s personal power, see Khlevniuk (2005). On the dating of the consolidation of Franco’s power, see Payne (1987, 126). On the importance of credibility to legitimation, see Márquez (2016b). Mercier (2017) surveys the extensive literature on gullibility and propaganda and finds that “incredible” propaganda is typically rejected by its intended audiences. Consider how little attention we pay to the images of political leaders in cur­ rency; they are part of the background of interaction, not meant to be studied closely, even if these pictures often also have some ideological content. Veyne notes that much monumental art glorifying ancient rulers was physically inac­ cessible to most people, and not meant to be studied closely. For example, state agents may police adherence to certain rituals of worship, as in North Korea during mourning rituals for Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, when members of the Inmiban (neighborhood committees) ensured that people participated in these rituals (Demick 2009, 101). Economists call this a “pooling” rather than a “separating” equilibrium. These competitive dynamics have also created incentives for cheating, and accordingly an entire industry of cheating software (allowing people to earn “points” without engaging with the app) has also arisen (Hernández 2019). Solzhenitsyn dramatized this behavior in a well­known anecdote (Solzhenitsyn 1973, 69–70). While the anecdote may be fictionalized, it seems clear that such fears existed; Stalin himself expressed annoyance with the practice of “over­ clapping” during his speeches (Davies 2004, 35, 40). A full account of the linguistics affair can be found in Pollock (2005). For more on the panicked reactions of linguists to Stalin’s intervention, see Zubkova (1998, 127). Rituals not only amplify emotion, but also articulate meanings, and in particu­ lar articulate meanings that give shape to a community and place it in a larger context, as many theorists of ritual have noted (Rappaport 1999). I focus here on the capacity of ritual for emotional amplification, noting only that this is an important way in which feelings of belonging to a community are strengthened. Unsuccessful rituals may produce boredom and a sense of alienation, leading to detachment from the central symbols of the ritual. Small group “study circles” (like some of the Chavista organizations mentioned above) have often played a role in promoting leader cults; group study rituals of Mao’s “Little Red Book”, for example, played a role in promoting his cult within the PLA (Leese 2011, 97–102). For a similar process, see Rolf (2004b) on how Soviet institutions used renaming proposals to extract resources from the center.

42  Xavier Márquez

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Making the cult of personality from bottom up The case of seventeenth­century Mughal India Ali Anooshahr

An important aspect of personality cults in the modern era is its appeal to mass populism combined with a paradoxically top­down propagandistic reinforcement of the cult through the instruments of the state. Pre­modern imperial cults provide some interesting contrasts to this model. This paper will analyze some aspects of the formation and the functioning of the impe­ rial cult of personality in Mughal India. I will argue that this process was not merely a top­down invention and imposition. Rather, in the absence of mass media, a substantial part of the task was delegated to the subjects of the empire. In order to argue this point, I will study the Baharistan-i Ghaybi the memoirs of a seventeenth­century Mughal officer, Mirza Nathan, who served in the Bengal frontier as a disciple of the imperial cult of the emperor Jahangir (d. 1627). The events described in the memoirs fall between 1607 and 1624 and mainly revolve around the conquest and administration of the province by a participating officer. Nathan had gone there along with his father who was the commanding admiral of the imperial fleet. Mirza Nathan’s description of how he was enrolled as a disciple (murīd) of the Mughal emperor has already been used by modern scholars as one of the few pieces of evidence in describing the imperial cult. Specifically, John Richards first argued in 1978 that under Emperor Akbar, the Mughal court created a new political authority, embodied by the emperor, which included unprecedented spiritual paramountcy. The rituals and symbols connected to this authority, which Richards described as “imperial ideo­ logy” and “propaganda”, eventually came to elicit similar responses down the hierarchy of service. Richards however did not explain how this “ideo­ logy” percolated to the bottom of the imperial ranks. Nor did he resolve the paradox of how an avowedly esoteric spirituality connected to this cult was supposed to be used as a tool of mass control (i.e. the purpose of ide­ ology and propaganda) (Richards 1998, 128–129, 141, and 156–167). These problems arise from an anachronistic backward projection of the political norms of modern nation­state to Mughal state which was quite different in its nature and composition. More recent scholarship since Richard’s pioneering paper can help ex­ plain the process of downward diffusion and reception of the imperial cult

The cult of personality from the bottom up  47 in a pre­modern setting. To this point, Sanjay Subrahmanyam argued in 1992 that studies of the Mughal state too often focus on an ideal “structure” and overlook the “processes” of state building, centralization, and so on (1992). Some years later, Farhat Hasan claimed that the Mughal state should not be reified but seen “as a process in constant negotiation with the local power relations” that significantly “created intricate linkages between im­ perial ideology and the local framework of norms and values” (2004, 1–2). Following Hasan, Tripurdaman Singh recently reasoned that the contesta­ tion over imperial and local norms would have extended to the very defi­ nitions of sovereignty, kingship, and ritual (2019, 16, 29). For the purpose of the present chapter, I would argue that the imperial cult too by nature followed the same type of relational dynamic that characterized all other aspects of Mughal rule—namely, a negotiation with and even delegation to local actors. A comparison and contrast with scholarship on the nature of “propa­ ganda” and “ideology” in the modern nation state will help clarify this assertion. As the contribution of Plunkett in this volume shows, modern personality cults of leaders function within majoritarian modern political systems where the image of the leader is propagated, in a kind of marketing campaign, to the citizens of the nation state. It depends heavily on an indus­ try (mass media) and an audience (large populations concentrated in cities thanks to rapid urbanization). The Mughal state was not majoritarian but elitist, it was mostly agrarian, and obviously lacked a print and media indus­ try. Moreover, as Márquez stresses in his chapter (XM), a distinction needs to be made between strategies of legitimation through massive campaigns of persuasion vs. ritual dimensions which depend on the power of coordination of the public. In Mughal India we see elements of both. In terms of coordination of the public, we know of regular ritual gazing (darshan) of the populace upon the emperor once a day at the time of sunrise. However, by Jahangir’s reign, most people did not have regular access to the person of the emperor at any given time, certainly not in the provinces, as the emperor held the darshan in only four cities: Ajmer, Agra, Mandu, and Srinagar (Lefèvre 2018, 155). In terms of persuasion campaigns, we see attempts to control the image of the emperor through positive depictions in paintings and in chronicles. While the best­known examples of this material can be found in courtly chroni­ cles and albums with limited circulation (on which most modern scholar­ ship is based) (Franke 2005, Koch 2001, Moin 2012), we will see below that the Mughals indeed disseminated the image of the emperor to a fairly large larger subset of non­elite but still chosen individuals. So then what roles did the subjects, especially those in the provinces, play in this relationship? How were they supposed to understand the new vision of monarchy? Mirza Nathan’s memoirs help us precisely toward this querry. It seems that as far as more ordinary members of the imperial system were concerned, the point of the Mughal cult was not so much charisma, but

48  Ali Anooshahr mystique. The emperor was a distant and saintly figure, and association with him was a unique privilege granted to a deserving few. But how was this useful for managing the population? A most important but underused chronicle from this period, the Tarikh-i Alfi or the “Millennial History”, commissioned by Akbar to commemorate the first Islamic millennium, sheds more light on this phenomenon. The text states that The current millennium [ending in the sixteenth century CE] is the age of prophet­hood. Because of this, numerous rulings have been the norm in this age which has led to divergences among various sects and schools. After this will come the age of Sainthood (vilāyat) and one of its requirements is unity. (Tattavi et al. 2003, I: 242) What this means is that the emperor Akbar and his son Jahangir were to be seen as Sufi saints who would unite the diverse population in imperial ser­ vice not as vassals or subjects but as disciples. This practice continued with some modification to the end of the reign of Emperor Jahangir. However, this process was not micro­managed or diffused from the center. Rather, it was up to the disciple, and not the imperial master, to define the relationship between them without very many direct instructions from above. The disciples had to draw upon their own religious experiences in order to construct the sublime persona of the master. In other words the Mughal system actually delegated some of its “ideology” down to the au­ dience members for whom it was intended, forcing them to forge credible, direct, and vertical ties of loyalty to the emperor. The theoretical underpinning of this system was provided by the Mughal court at the end of Akbar’s reign. In a letter to Akbar’s son and Jahangir’s brother Prince Murad, the minister Abu al­Fazl wrote that the emperor’s goal was essentially to appear to be belonging to all groups in his domains so that, each faction lives according to his method. The Uzbek faction imagines that ‘he is like us’. Those belonging to the Chagatay lineage think, ‘he is with us’. The people of Iraq and Khurasan are sure that ‘he is one of us’. The Rajputs fancy that ‘he is one of us’. The sons of shaykhs and sayy­ ids believe, ‘he is exactly like us’. The sons of Brahmins, Seoras, Jogis, and Sanyasis suppose that ‘he is establishing our religion’. The Franks [Europeans] reckon that ‘he follows our law’. (Abu al­Fazl 1900, 27)1 We can clearly see here how the power of the emperor and the devotion of the subject to him were predicated on the [religious] understanding of the subjects themselves. Mirza Nathan’s memoirs provide us with a first­rate

The cult of personality from the bottom up  49 view into how such a relationship was created from below. I will begin with an analysis of the author’s religious views as a whole, and then draw out the connections between them and his orientation toward the emperor. I will close by comparing the mirza’s worldview with a courtly expression of the same values that show while his beliefs and practices were in general agree­ ment with the vision of the court, they were not exactly the same. Mirza Nathan was a Muslim. God for him was a transcendent and mys­ terious being without an actual physical presence. The mirza does not speak to God directly, does not see or hear him, and does not try to un­ derstand him through the reading of the Quran. God basically functions as a power similar to fate or destiny. The power of God is manifested in human affairs through earthly intermediaries. A good example of this is the anecdote about the mirza’s father Ihtimam Khan’s illness and recovery in 1607. After seeing his father ail and suffer for several days, Mirza Nathan summoned a local Bengali physician by the name of Kabiraj to Ihtimam Khan’s sick bed. Kabiraj arrived on a boat and first resorted to astrology in order to ascertain that “the thread of the man’s life had not yet broken”. The physician then asked the mirza to grant him full control, saying, “The fate of this great man is in the hand of God. If you give him up for lost and then leave him to me, I can cure him. But it mostly depends on God’s will”. Kabiraj subsequently administered medicine to the unconscious Ihti­ mam Khan (a red powder mixed with lemon and ginger water) that brought him back to health and consciousness within three days (Nathan 1936, I: 39/1641, 14a­b.).2 We can see in this episode that human affairs are affected by earthly and supernatural forces. Ihtimam Khan’s disease has debilitating physical symptoms. The signs of the recovery are physical as well. The physician too uses his human ability and knowledge of medicine to cure his patient. On the other hand, a host of powers beyond human reach are involved in the affair. The stars will reflect the fate of the sick man, whether he is destined to live or die. God is the ultimate decision­maker and must will the recovery in order for the treatment to work. As Muslim thinkers of the period often stated, the workings of human mind (tadbīr) had to be in harmony with di­ vine predestination (taqdīr) for things to work out well. Also noteworthy is a vague sense of a very abstract pantheon of sorts in which God rules over other powerful beings that can affect earthly affairs. In the example cited above, this power is projected by the stars. In other cases, the power is manifested through forces that control fate. For exam­ ple, when during a river expedition pirates chased after and fired on the fleet under Mirza Nathan and Ihtimam Khan’s command, the mirza reports that they survived the attack thanks to “the will of the True Knower and the protection of the guardians of fate” (Nathan 1936, I: 8–9/1641, 3b).3 It is certainly interesting that in this passage the author is distinguishing be­ tween God, or the “True Knower” [dānā-i ḥaqīqī], and other figures, namely the “guardians of fate” [ḥārisan-i qażā va qadar]. While “fate” in Islam is

50  Ali Anooshahr understood as divine predestination, here it seems that there are other forces that exert control over it. A similar allowance for multiple supernatural forces is extended to non­ Islamic gods as well. The basic justification for this is understood in terms of conceding the belief of Rajput officers in divine beings that are obviously part of their Hindu religion but are in fact understood by the mirza as as­ pects of the one Islamic God. So for instance, in 1607 the imperial officer Ira­ dat Khan commissioned his men to purchase elephants in Orissa. On their way back they were ambushed by the adversarial Afghan officer Kamardin Pani who attempted to rob them of their animals. The commander of Iradat Khan’s forces, an officer by the name of Raja Kalyan, decided to give battle in spite of having a smaller force at hand than the enemy. Mirza Nathan de­ scribes the Raja’s decision in these words, “He entrusted his heart to the True God and placed his resolve on his permitted god’s power to get him out of a bind” [dil dar khudā-i ḥaqīqī va himmat bar gushāyish-i kār-i khudā-i mujāzī-i khud bast] (Nathan 1936, I: 10/1641, 4a). Much meaning and significance is packed in this short phrase. The mirza knew perfectly well that Raja Kalyan would pray to divine powers accord­ ing to his own non­Islamic beliefs. Mirza Nathan did not suppress this fact but still fitted in into his own monotheistic Islamic cosmology. He recon­ ciled the contradiction inherent in this incorporation by describing the Ra­ ja’s god as a “permitted” god that was presumably a function, aspect, or manifestation of the One God of monotheism. This act did not contradict the author’s overall understanding of the divine realm. As we saw above, he himself believed in the existence of other powerful forces that coexisted with God (such the guardians of fate) without challenging monotheism. We will see below how the emperor functions for the mirza as one such being. However, before viewing the religious role of the emperor for the mirza, we should certainly consider the most obvious human agents of the divine in Mirza Nathan’s world—the Sufi shaykhs. Despite being a disciple of the imperial cult, the mirza maintained regular contact with popular shaykhs, living or dead, took refuge with them, and participated in the economy of Sufism in Bengal. So for example, while it is true that Mirza Nathan recovered from an illness thanks to the appearance of the emperor in his dream, when the mirza’s fa­ ther (Ihtimam Khan) recovered from illness through the efforts of the Ben­ gali physician Kabiraj, the mirza expressed his thanks by visiting a local Sufi shrine. He states that he had in fact made a vow to do so while his father had lain ill in bed. After Ihtimam Khan had recovered sufficiently, Mirza Nathan proceeded to the shrine of Shaykh Nur Qutb in Pandua. He arrived there at night, during heavy rains and spent the night at the Friday mosque. The next day, he met with the holy man’s living descendants, and then made his pilgrimage to the shrine where he paid for a great feast in order to feed the poor and to distribute alms. The whole time, he continued paying secret vis­ its to Shaykh Qutb’s mausoleum (Nathan 1936, I: 42–43/1641, 5a­b). It is clear

The cult of personality from the bottom up  51 from this description that the mirza primarily drew upon common forms of popular religion for his needs: in exchange for the recovery of his father, the mirza attempted to honor his intermediaries (the shaykhs) and to pay the favor forward by dispensing charity. We see him engaging in similar behavior at the time of his marriage. While proceeding by boat from his camp to the provincial capital of Dacca (Ja­ hangirnagar), the mirza stopped outside Gawr (the old royal capital of Ben­ gal), visited the Shrine of Shah ‘Ala Gawri outside the city, then proceeded to Gawr, made pilgrimage to a popular shrine that housed a relic from prophet Muhammad (the impression of his footprint), kissed it (qadam-būsī), and arranged a celebration (‘urs) for Shaykh ‘Ala and the Prophet Muhammad (Nathan 1936, I: 145–146/1641, 58a). All this parallels the mirza’s first pil­ grimage described above. In repayment of a blessing from God (his mar­ riage) the mirza pays respects to the relics of God’s human intercessors (saints and the prophet), and engages in charity. All in all, the Baharistan-i Ghaybi provides numerous examples with which we can reconstruct the religious universe of its author. The primary contact­points with the divine consisted of saints, shrines, and relics. God himself was not tangibly present in the mirza’s life, though his power was felt through significant life events. Alongside God, other supernatural beings, including non­Muslim gods, exercised power in human affairs. In short, Mirza Nathan’s religiosity shared much with those of his contemporaries as well as predecessors all over western Eurasia. We can find similar beliefs and practices in histories, verse narratives, and hagiographies in Persian at least as far back as the Mongol period. However, our author had to deal with new developments as well. Into this sacred realm, he had to incorporate the relevant aspects of the newly developed imperial cult of the Mughals. The emperor is shown in the narrative to fulfill roles similar to the ones listed above, even for those officers who were not his disciples. The language describing the behavior of the officers toward God and his intermediaries was seamlessly applied to Emperor Jahangir as well. For example, just as the mirza had gone to kiss the relic of Prophet Muhammad’s footprint, he also referred to visits to the emperor as “kissing the foot” (pāy-būsī) (Nathan 1641, 59b). In other words, appearing before the emperor was parallel to appearing before a sacred shrine. Elsewhere, just as Kabiraj, the physician, could channel and interpret heavenly powers (his case being more humble and only extending to the stars), the emperor too was seen as an interpreter of heavenly mysteries. Of course Jahangir’s powers were far superior to a mere physician because his words indeed translated God’s message. For instance, Nathan refers to an imperial decree as “the most sacred command which is the interpreter of divine secrets” [ḥukm-i aqdas ki tarjumān-i asrār-i ilāhī ast] (Nathan 1936, I: 143/1641, 57b). Such an attitude toward a text from the emperor also further explains the reverence shown to it in the scene cited above. Through chan­ neling the divine, the text gains scriptural status.

52  Ali Anooshahr The implication of near­divinity is not incidental. Throughout the nar­ rative the emperor also fulfilled a similar role to the Hindu god on whom Raja Kalyan had relied for victory earlier. A milder version of this outlook is found in the instances where Mirza Nathan hopes for victory based on “God’s regard and the emperor’s fortune” [‘ināyat-i ilāhī va iqbāl-i pādshāhī] (Nathan, I: 85/36a). Such a pairing of God and the emperor may be rather conventional. A stronger language is used when the mirza specifically de­ scribes his determination to give battle in this way: “I entrusted my heart to God’s path and placed my resolve on my earthly and spiritual qiblah to get me out of a bind” [dil dar rāh-i khudā va himmat bar gushāyish-i kār-i qiblahh-i ṣuvarī va ma‘navī-i khud bāz basta{m}] (Nathan 1936, I: 66/1641, 22a). This is a formula that echoes almost verbatim Raja Kalyan’s deter­ mination to fight the Afghan forces that wanted to rob his commander’s elephants. The only difference is that while the raja had placed his resolve on his “permitted god”, Mirza Nathan instead depends on his qiblah which technically and normally refers to the prayer niche in a mosque that is built in the direction of Mecca and toward which Muslims conduct their daily prayers. In other words, the mirza implies that both the emperor and Hindu gods functioned as more tangible manifestations that direct the worshipper toward the more abstract and intangible One True God. Moreover, such an understanding further sacralizes the body of the emperor as he, like the House of God [Kaaba] in Mecca, symbolizes divine presence and the divine throne around which angels circumambulate. Mirza Nathan took this quite literally and at some point upon meeting Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan, actu­ ally began walking around him seven times (Anooshahr 2019, 61–62). It is little wonder then that in such a role, the emperor is portrayed not as a person who merely rules over his subjects, but in fact as special being that can see through their souls and indeed decide their fate. A good case in point is an episode in the Baharistan that follows after one of the numerous cases of disputes between Mirza Nathan and the governor Islam Khan. Is­ lam Khan, we are told, had treacherously captured and imprisoned a serv­ ant and a eunuch of Mirza Nathan’s. The furious mirza worked out a plan to break into the governor’s house, free his men, and then head over to the im­ perial court to have his insubordination be dealt with directly by Jahangir. He explains the situation to his father in these words, “Afterwards, since there is no pretension or ungratefulness with the master and the qiblah, I will present myself to him as a slave with a clean conscience. He could kill me if he wants or he could set me free” (Nathan 1936, I: 164/1641, 64a). The emperor then is not merely the ruler to whose authority his officers submit. Rather, he is a spiritual master that can see through into the very heart of his disciples. We must realize the uniqueness of this divinization and its political and historical specificity. Not everyone agreed with it. This can be seen in the way that later readers reacted to such passages in Nathan’s memoirs. For ex­ ample, in a passage where the author stated that the emperor had predicted

The cult of personality from the bottom up  53 the complete conquest of Bengal and he described it as one of the “imperial miracles” [mu‘ jizāt-i shāhashāhī], a later reader of the manuscript had writ­ ten in the margins in protest, “miracles belong to prophets only. How can they be ascribed to permitted kings?” (Nathan 1936, I: 6–7/1641, 3a). This marginal gloss is in an interesting intervention. On the one hand, the reader did not think it was appropriate to ascribe miracles to kings. But there is even a stronger censure as the reader does not use the title “emperor” for Jahangir but the less aggrandized “sultan”, most likely reflecting thereby an agreement with an Islamic idea, expressed again in reaction to Mughal claims, that the title of shahanshah, or more literally “king of kings” can only be used for God and not for any earthly being (Anooshahr 2006, 290). And still, the author of the marginal gloss goes a step further and even mod­ ifies the lesser title of sultan with the adjective of mujazi or “permitted”. In other words, where Mirza Nathan had obliquely paired the emperor with a non­Muslim “permitted god”, his reader is implying that even being a king is itself a status subject to legal or theological stipulation. In short, the im­ perial cult as reflected in Baharistan was a historically specific phenomenon dating to the turn of the sixteenth to the seventeenth centuries. The mirza’s initiation into the imperial cult was quite crucial for his par­ ticular perception and portrayal of Jahangir. The details of this even have been reported by the mirza and modern scholars have been aware of its sig­ nificance for a while now. Basically, Mirza Nathan writes that he had fallen sick early on during the campaign. After the doctors abandoned all hope of curing him, the author saw the emperor in a dream, then woke up and found himself on the path to recovery. When the news of this dream was re­ ported to the emperor, he had the mirza be enlisted as a disciple, giving him a small portrait of himself to hang around his neck. Modern scholars who have dealt with this episode usually consider it to be a part of an expanding imperial ideology that was meant to tie the ruler to his subjects (Richards 1998, 156–157; Moin 2012, 176). What is implied in these explanations is that the imperial cult was intended for mass diffusion either among the elites or even further to a larger public. However, a closer look at this particular episode shows that the Mughal cult of master and disciple did not function as a modern state ideology de­ signed for mass politics. It seems that the entry into this relationship was similar to membership of Sufi orders in so far it gained its prestige precisely for its exclusivity and elitism. Mirza Nathan writes specifically the emperor had decided to enlist him as a disciple because “he [Jahangir] had heard of the services/sacrifices [ jānsipārīhā] of Mirza Nathan which had been fre­ quently reported to His Holiness and the aforementioned dream of His Maj­ esty which has been reported at the beginning of the narrative” (Nathan 1936, I: 74/1641, 29b). The mirza’s summary of what had been announced from the court makes it quite clear that the dream itself would not suffice for being admitted into the “circle of disciples” [ jargah-i murīdān] (Nathan 1936, I: 74/1641, 30a). He had to prove his devotion by risking his life on the

54  Ali Anooshahr battlefield. Discipleship of the emperor was difficult to achieve. Its power lay in its mystique as a distant prize, unique honor, and ultimate reward for the select few who might covet it and aspire to it in exchange for extraordinary service. It should be noted that despite their symbolic proximity to the emperor, these disciples did not have total authority in the realm. Again, Mughal pol­ itics were not primarily “ideological” and those with high social standing, numerous followers, and of course outstanding service in war and ability to generate revenue, in other words men such as Islam Khan, were still highly valued by the emperor. In fact Mirza Nathan describes an episode in which Islam Khan grew angry with the arrogance of another disciple (an old friend of his by the name of Shaykh Husayn), and had his soldiers remove Shaykh Husayn’s imperial portrait (shabīh-i aqdas) from around his neck, force him  to bow down before Islam Khan, and administer a sound thrashing to him (Nathan 1936, I: 132–133/1641, 53b). The mirza could be exaggerat­ ing here, but obviously his own treatment from the Khan still showed that the governor was not at all intimidated by Nathan’s rank as a devotee of the emperor. All in all then, as far disciples like Mirza Nathan were concerned, the imperial cult paralleled popular religion (specifically Sufism) in many of its structures and beliefs. The Mirza does not seem to have received any particular manual from the court or been exposed to constant reminder and training. The emperor might have sent a few indications of what he expected through his decrees. As Athar Ali pointed out some years ago, Jahangir himself only mentions that he would advise the disciples with few minimal instructions, (chand kalamah ba ṭarīq-i naṣīḥat), though these mainly involved admonishment for the avoidance of religious strife and the abstention from slaughtering animals with one’s own hands (Ali 1990, 288; Jahangir 1980, 36). It is also possible that some of the senior officers in Ben­ gal (such as Ihtimam Khan) might have provided guidance about the proper attitude of disciples. However, for the most part, Nathan appeared to be in charge of figuring out what his particular role was as a disciple through prayers, dreams, rituals (as in prostration before Jahangir’s farmāns), and self­sacrifice. In other words, the imperial cult was constructed as much from the bottom up as from top down. One might rightfully wonder if the emperor exercised relative little con­ trol over this phenomenon, how he benefitted from it. Again, whatever the court’s intention may have been, from Nathan’s memoirs we can see how the imperial cult functioned in a disciple’s life. As stated above, it amplified the emperor’s mystique, sublimated loyalty and service to him, and finally provided a sense of transcendent value and incentive to men of otherwise commonplace lineage. But there is a fourth aspect to this cult which I have not discussed so far. That is, the cult of the emperor in fact functioned to appropriate the potentially subversive and militant aspects of Sufism for the benefit of the empire.

The cult of personality from the bottom up  55 The starkest example of this possibility occurs in an episode where Mirza Nathan, after suffering some kind of humiliation at the hand of Islam Khan, decided to quit his post and become a mendicant (qalandar). He returned home from the governor’s house, shaved his head, and put on a coarse cloak. This act of insubordination may not have caused too much concern had it not set off a chain of events at the mirza’s campgrounds. He writes that upon learning of this news, four thousand and eight hundred soldiers and musketeers, plus a large number of vagrant boatmen and camp followers also shaved their heads as a sign of loyalty and also declared themselves to be faqīrs and qalandars. The next day, a riot broke out in the streets and markets (Nathan 1936, I: 151–152/1641, 59b­60a). It is worth noting that both Mirza Nathan and Islam Khan were frightened by the unintended conse­ quences of Nathan’s decision to become a Sufi. Once in the garbs of Su­ fis, the soldiers and other subsets of population clearly posed a threat that would have been difficult for the officers to manage. It was therefore in part necessary to blend the structures and sentiments of Sufism with imperial loyalty in order to control its militant potential. In short, imperial discipleship operated at the lower levels of the rank of imperial servicemen as a delegated phenomenon, handled by the disciples themselves who had little contact with the emperor. As such, they were forced to draw on their most immediate experience of religious discipleship— namely, Sufism. The widespread appeal and familiarity with Sufism among the general population liberated the imperial court from the need to micro­ manage and actively propagate the cult of the emperor in order to achieve the desired effect (unity and loyalty). This phenomenon created further con­ trol and cohesion as it tied the potentially subversive aspects of Sufism into the pyramid of imperial hegemony. At the same time, we cannot imagine that the process of discipleship was a free­for­all at the lower levels. Otherwise, the whole purpose of the project would simply collapse in an anarchic and disintegrative process at various campgrounds across the vast landscape of the state. Did the vision of the court roughly harmonize with the local level in certain key aspects? The simple answer is yes, as the courtly vision of the cult was expressed through the same discourse of Sufism that had informed the local interpretation. Although interestingly, the imperial vision itself was not expressed directly by the court, but by individuals who saw themselves as disciples and had the rare privilege of direct access to the master. As other scholars have noted, the emperor’s spiritual pretensions were not expressed in his official memoirs the Jahangirnamah.4 Rather, the most explicit assertions of the imperial cult can be found in a recently discov­ ered text entitled the Majalis-i Jahangiri (“Jahangir’s assemblies”). In fact, Corinne Lefèvre has written that the Majalis can be said to function “as a manifesto of the emperor’s universal ambitions in what was commonly referred to as the ‘invisible world’ (ʿālam-i maʿnawī)” (Lefèvre 2017b, 319). The author of this text was a courtier of fairly low rank by the name of ʻAbd

56  Ali Anooshahr al­Sattar Lahuri. He had gained access to the Mughal court as a scholar who had learned Portuguese on the order of Emperor Akbar and had trans­ lated books on the Catholic Faith, including the Gospels and accounts of Christian Saints (Alam and Subramanyam 2009). The author began record­ ing the sessions at the new emperor’s court from 1608 to 1611, and stopped apparently when Jahangir began dictating his own official memoirs (Kollatz 2014, 234). Although familiar with Christianity, ʻAbd al­Sattar’s primary mode of writing was heavily informed by Sufism. He specifically stated that he had modeled this work on the fourteenth century Fawā’id al-Fu’ād by Amir Hasan Sijzi who as a disciple of the famous Chishti Sufi Saint Nizam al­Din Awliya, had recorded the conversations and discourses of his master into a book (Kollatz 2014, 236–237). This was no coincidence as both Akbar and Jahangir were devoted to a contemporary Chishti master by the name of Shaykh Salim Chishti (Lefèvre 2018, 157; Alam 2011, 148). In fact it was through his veneration of Shaykh Salim that the young Akbar had gained his first son and heir, prince Salim, later called Jahangir. In short, ʻAbd al­Sattar was the disciple to the imperial master very much in accordance with contemporary Sufi practices. This was significant because it showed the task of creating the cult of the emperor at court was also delegated to the disciple, similar to the situation in the provinces. Moreover, in both cases the disciples drew on a common repository of religiosity (Sufism) to accom­ plish their goal, a fact that guaranteed some basic homogeneity in their be­ liefs and rituals despite their physical distance from one another and the master. This can explain, for example, the importance of Jahangir’s ability as a seer as well as the significance of dreams in both narratives (Lefèvre 2017a, 124). As Lefèvre has stated, in the Majalis Jahangir’s oneiric experiences all convey to him a single message: He has been elevated by God to the highest level of mystical knowledge and chosen to act as an intermediary between the invisible and the visible worlds; he is, in other words, a saint (walī). (Lefèvre 2017b, 321) However, beyond a basic modicum of Sufism, both Nathan and ʻAbd al­ Sattar elevated the emperor’s sacrality rather beyond the mere saint. Again, similar to his counterpart in Bengal, the disciple in the capital also referred to Jahangir as “aqdas”, the “qiblah” of world and religion, considered him omniscient, and believed his name to have the miraculous power of stopping danger, for example a charging elephant (Kollatz 2014, 238, 241, 248). All these attributes can also be found in Mirza Nathan’s narrative. How do we account for the similarity of these beliefs that may hint at a level of holiness beyond what is found in Sufi narratives? Here, the ideas may have been introduced or reinforced to the provinces at the moment of initiation. We know from Mirza Nathan’s account that the

The cult of personality from the bottom up  57 incorporation of the disciple into the imperial cult involved the bestowal of an image (shabīh) of the master. While earlier scholars were doubtful of this practice, Lefèvre’s recent work has shown otherwise. For example, ʻAbd al­Sattar specifically refers to a thousand ceremonial gold coins, bear­ ing the emperor’s image, that were distributed across the empire (Lefèvre 2018, 175; ʻAbd al­Sattar, 255). Additionally, there is evidence that miniature paintings were also circulated (Lefèvre 2018, 176–177). In Mirza Nathan’s case, his description of the image he received makes it very likely that it included a painting as well. He referred to it as “shabīh bā anvāʻ-i shajarah” which is translated by Borah as “portrait adorned with a genealogical tree”, although it can also be read as “portrait with various genealogical trees” (Nathan 1936, I: 74/1641, 29b). Either way, this was more than a single gold medallion. In fact there has survived at least one miniature painting from the reign of Jahangir in which is depicted the portrait of the emperor, his sons, his grandsons, and his Timurid ancestors, each encircled in a small round frame, and each bearing the name of the royal individual along with the word shabīh next to it.5 In another miniature specimen, as Heike Franke has shown, the portrait of the emperor was accompanied by some lines of poetry that drove home the hint of divinization. I am referring to the famous portrait of Jahangir sitting on a chair and holding an orb in his hand which includes lines of poetry that state, “whoever sees his portrait/face [ṣurat] will become a por­ trait/face­worshipper”; or “whoever sees his soul­nourishing portrait/face will say, ‘the emperor moves gracefully, with magnificence, grandeur, and radiant majesty’”; or “The face/portrait of victory and triumph has been illuminated by his name” (Franke 2014, 126–127).6 If the image that was sent to Mirza Nathan also contained (or was accompanied by) such lines of poetry, we can explain how the author of the Baharistan shared some of his conceptual vocabulary about a divinized emperor with ʻAbd al­Sattar. The lines of poetry are not emphatic, but they are suggestive enough to establish what is expected of the disciple. If the emperor’s face is to be worshipped, then he must be a conduit for God as an object of devotion (as is the qiblah) who is also sacred (aqdas). If his name illuminates victory, then it make sense to call to him along with God while in battle or when confronted with a charging elephant. I should note here that the dissemination of the emperor’s image with accompanying messages still should not be equalized with modern mass propaganda. While this action signals a remarkable innovation and accom­ plishment as compared to the medieval period, it still relied on exclusivity and selective initiation and not on relentless and widespread distribution as in the modern case. An illustration from the Assamese chronicle Kamrupar Buranji bears out this point. According to this text, one of the kings of As­ sam by the name of Raja Parikshit had agreed to acknowledge the overlord­ ship of Jahangir and had asked in exchange for a portrait of the emperor. Jahangir’s answer is very relevant as he had stated, “We do not present [the

58  Ali Anooshahr portrait] to anybody and everybody. However we present it to you. You shall not be enemical [sic] to our dynasty. If you do so you shall ruin yourself”.7 Now, in addition to similarities, there are also divergences between Mirza Nathan’s and ʻAbd al­Sattar’s writings about Jahangir. In particu­ lar, the Majalis seems to brim with a stronger chiliastic overtone than the Baharistan. For example, ʻAbd al­Sattar refers to Jahangir as a “manifes­ tation of divine secrets (mahẓar-i asrār-i ilāhī)” and “Mahdi of the time (mahdī-i vaqt)” by whom “the ancient laws were destroyed and the foun­ dations of justice renewed” (Lefèvre 2017b, 319, 321, 333). Elsewhere ʻAbd al­Sattar states that when the emperor spoke on a number of occasions, it was actually the “Holy Spirit (ruḥ-i quddus)” that was flowing out of his tongue (Kollatz 2014, 329, 341). The Christian coloring of this terminol­ ogy is noteworthy. As stated above, ʻAbd al­Sattar had translated the bible and was in contact with the Jesuits at court. It is worthwhile to note that another Catholic European traveler at Jahangir’s court, the French jew­ eler Austin de Bordeaux who also received the imperial image in 1619, had compared the Mughal imperial cult to the “Order of the Holy Spirit in France” (Whitehead 1929, 18). The Order of the Holy Spirit was an exclu­ sive knighthood formed by Henri IV in France in 1579 (Strong 1959). The comparison by Austin de Bordeaux was not quite accurate. I only men­ tion it because the convergence of terminology between ʻAbd al­Sattar and Austin suggests that ʻAbd al­Sattar may have known something about the French counterpart of Jahangir’s cult (see also Subrahmanyam 2017, 11–15; and Maclagan 1932, 69–98). Finally, ʻAbd al­Sattar believed that Jahangir’s essence was endowed with an inherent light which was coexistent with God for eternity (Kollatz 2015, 242–243). The prevalence of such ideas in the Majalis as opposed to the Baharistan is understandable as ʻAbd al­Sattar was present at court and was exposed to them as they had been propounded by Abu al­Fazl as well as by Jesuit priests whose Christian scriptures he had translated. By contrast, Mirza Nathan had not heard of teachings about the “Holy Spirit” nor ap­ parently of the designation of the emperor as the mahdi. What is also signif­ icant for the present argument is that whether they agreed or differed with one another, imperial disciples primary drew upon their own individual re­ ligious experiences with few direction from above. This phenomenon was in harmony with the emperor’s religious views as he believed that individuals could attain the same sublime truths while fol­ lowing different paths. He wrote in his memoirs that during a stay in Ah­ medabad in Gujarat, he visited and spoke with a Sanyasi (Jain ascetic) who “has total cognizance of the fundamentals of Sufism based on the teachings of his own religion” (Jahangir 268). In short, just as the emperor believed that ascetics from different religious tradition (Islam and Jainism) could at­ tain the same spiritual truths, he was also comfortable leaving his disciples to try to attain the truths of his spiritual status by following their own indi­ vidual paths.

The cult of personality from the bottom up  59

Conclusion The term “cult of personality” has a pejorative connotation today, espe­ cially as it often applies to strongmen who obtain power through legitimate means but then subvert democratic rule, equate their persons with the state as a whole, and draw on mass action (rallies, plebiscite, or festivals) for sup­ port. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, the imperial cult in antiquity often served as the basic political norm. In the Roman Empire, the imperial cult comprised outright worship of the emperor, with temples dedicated to him in the provinces, with rituals performed by the flamen (priest), and with a body of laws regulating the whole system (Fishwick 2002; Price 1984).8 The early modern case is rather different from these two but shares some elements with both. While the emperor was somewhat sanctified, he was not worshiped systematically as in antiquity. On the other hand, the bonds formed directly with him were not extended to the masses at the expense of the state, since the majority of the population was not politically significant as in a modern electoral nation­state. Rather, they were meant to reach select individuals in imperial service to balance the power of noble and influential lineages. In other words the coexistence of disciples in Bengal alongside Is­ lam Khan Chishti who was of a noteworthy lineage shows that the imperial cult was not simply there to create unity, or to “bridg[e] kinship, ethnic, and religious distinctions among the nobles” as John Richards put it (Richards 1995, 48). The goal was to create alternative loyalties to the emperor as a balancing act against the still prevalent lineage loyalties. This was an important change from the previous eras, especially the pe­ riod of Lodi rule in north India that lasted until 1527. The Lodi state was made up of a dominant lineage (that of the ruling Lodi family) that worked alongside of rather equally mighty allied lineages (the Nawhanis, Sarwanis, Farmulis, etc). With the establishment of the Mughal Empire, those particu­ lar families fell from power, but co­equal lineages continued to dominate politics alongside Babur and his sons. It was not until the later sixteenth century that the imperial court was able to coopt the military labor market of India, including armed peasants, Rajputs, and newer immigrants from Iran and Central Asia, and thus free itself from overreliance on manpower provided through kinship groups (Khan 1968; Gommans 2002, 67–81). The imperial cult helped solidify the position of the emperor with newcomers of lowly position vis­à­vis the representatives of other principal lineages that continued to be active in Mughal politics. Still we should resist viewing this phenomenon in a simplistic manner. Most discussion of Mughal imperial “ideology” restricts itself to its expres­ sion by prominent courtiers, such as Abu al­Fazl. Otherwise the testimo­ nies of European travelers (mainly Sir Thomas Roe) are brought to bear on this issue. As I have tried to show, Mirza Nathan’s account, rare as it is, still helps complicate the seamless image derived from imperial courtly

60  Ali Anooshahr chronicles or paintings. Taking our clue from Philippe Buc, we should avoid succumbing to the seduction of written description of the ritual of the cult as described in major imperial sources (Buc 2001).9 For one, and this should be obvious, each author describing the rituals of discipleship was writing with a contemporary audience in mind. The de­ scriptions are therefore always tendentious: trying to project a positive image of the emperor to his subjects or to other Persianate courts (in Abu al­Fazl’s case), trying to display the Sufi/Messianic standing of the emperor to curry favor from the court (in ʻAbd al­Sattar’s case), or trying to get reincorporated into the body­politic after leaving it through supporting a princely rebellion (while decrying the bad behavior of other imperial servants) (as in Mirza Na­ than’s case). Needless to say, the disciples had a vested interest in professing a level devotion and enthusiasm that they did not necessarily always feel. To make matters even more complicated, each author may have described these rituals as they should have been performed not as they actually were. It would not be possible, nor I think desirable, to reduce all such depictions of the im­ perial cult to an ideal type that perhaps never existed, since its meaning, and hence its performance would have changed from place to place and from time to time, even during its relatively short existence. Furthermore, the very culture of many of the participating members, the Indo­Persian service elite, would have led to multiple interpretations, and even over­interpretation, of the rituals involved. The strong association of the imperial cult with Sufism, which was the shared religious background of most of the Indo­Muslim officers, would prod the disciples to look beyond super­ ficial appearances (ẓāhir) for deeper meanings (bāṭin or “interiority”). They might have read meaning into the imperial cult not originally intended by the emperor. As we saw above, Jahangir describes his guidance to the initiates as fairly minimal and mainly involving harmony with animals and people. Nor did he make much of his own spiritual status in his memoirs. Mirza Nathan, and for that matter ʻAbd al­Sattar were obviously trying to attach much more significance to their membership than the emperor himself. As I argued above, such delegation of interpretation to the subjects was probably intentional. Or at least, it was not seen as a problem by the court. This should not surprise us. The Mughal concept of unity, mentioned above, was different than modern values of uniformity and consistency. Akbar and Jahangir did indeed claim supreme authority over differences of opinion and viewpoints, but they had no wish to eliminate or even streamline them. The emperor would embody sovereignty and the state for each of the various groups in his domain in their own image. What would prevent those com­ munities from being reified and calcified was the practice of delegation of interpretation to the individual subjects themselves.

Notes

The cult of personality from the bottom up  61

References Abu al­Fazl, Allami. 1900. Ruqaʻat-i Abu al-Fazl. Kanpur: Nawal Kishore. Alam, Muzaffar. 2011. “The Debate Within: A Sufi Critique of Religious Law, Tasawwuf and Politics in Mughal India.” South Asian History and Culture 2(2): 138–159. Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2009. “Frank Disputations: Catholics and Muslims in the Court of Jahangir (1608–11).” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 46(4): 457–511. Ali, M. Athar. 1990. “The Religious World of Jahangir.” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 51: 286–299. Anooshahr, Ali. 2006. “Mughal Historians and the Memory of the Islamic Con­ quest of India.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 43(3): 275–300. Anooshahr, Ali. 2019. “No Man can Serve Two Masters: Conflicting Loyalties in Bengal during Shah Jahan’s Rebellion of 1624.” In The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art, Architecture, Politics, Law and Literature, edited by Ebba Koch in collaboration with Ali Anooshahr, 54–63. Mumbai: The Marg Foundation. Bhuyan, Suryya Kumar. 1930. Kamrupar Buranji or an Account of Ancient Kamarupa; and a History of the Mogul Conflicts with Assam and Cooch Behar, up to A.D. 1682. Guwahati: Department of Historical and Antiquarian Studies. Buc, Philippe. 2001. The Dangers of Ritual: Between Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fishwick, Duncan. 2002. The Imperial Cult in the Latin West. Studies in the Ruler Cult of the Western Provinces of the Roman Empire. Volume III (Provincial Cult), Part 2: The Provincial Priesthood. Leiden: Brill.

62  Ali Anooshahr Franke, Heike. 2005. Akbar und Ǧahāngīr: Untersuchungen zur politischen und religiösen Legitimation in Text und Bild. Schenefeld: EB­Verlag. Franke, Heike. 2014. “Emperors of ṣūrat and maʿnī: Jahangir and Shah Jahan as Temporal and Spiritual Rulers.” Muqarnas 31: 123–149. Gommans, Jos. 2002. Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and the Highroads to Empire 1500–1700. New York: Routledge. Habib, Irfan. 2018. “Review of Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign.” Studies in People’s History 5(2): 235–237. Hasan, Farhat. 2004. State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jahangir, T. 1980. Jahangirnamah: Tuzuk-i Jahangiri [The Book of Jahangir: Ja­ hangir’s Memoirs], edited by Muhammad Hashim. Tehran: Intisharat­i Bunyad­i Farang­i Iran. Khan, Iqtidar Alam. 1968. “The Nobility under Akbar and the Development of his Religious Policy.” The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland 100(1/2): 29–36. Koch, Ebba. 2001. Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Kollatz, Anna. 2014. “The Creation of a Saint Emperor: Retracing Narrative Strat­ egies of Mughal Legitimation and Representation in Majālisi Jahāngīrī by ʻAbd al­Saṭṭār b. Qāsim Lāhōrī (ca. 1608–11).” In Narrative Pattern and Genre in Hagiographic Life Writing: Comparative Perspectives from Asia to Europe, edited by Stephan Conermann and Jim Rheingans, 227–265. Berlin: EB Verlag. Lefèvre, Corinne. 2017a. “Beyond Diversity: Mughal Legal Ideology and Politics.” In Law Addressing Diversity: Premodern Europe and India in Comparison (13th– 18th Centuries), edited by Thomas Ertl and Gijs Kruijtzer, 116–141. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Lefèvre, Corinne. 2017b. “Messianism, Rationalism and Inter­Asian Connections.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 54(3): 317–338. Lefèvre, Corinne. 2018. Pouvoir impérial et élites dans l'Inde moghole de Jahangir (1605–1627). Paris: Indes savantes. Maclagan, Edward. 1932. The Jesuits and the Great Moguls. London: Burns, Oats, and Washbourne. Moin, A. Azfar. 2012. Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kinship and Sainthoot in Islam. New York: Columbia University Press. Nathan, Mirza. 1641. Baharistan-i-Ghaybi. Manuscript, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Supplément persan, mss. 252. Nathan, Mirza. 1936. Bahāristān-i-Ghaybī: A History of the Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa during the Reigns of Jahāngīr and Shāhjahān. Translated by M. I. Borah. Gauhatti, Assam: Narayani Handiqui Historical Institute. Price, Simon. 1984. Rituals and Power: The Roman Imperial Cult in Asia Minor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, John F. 1995. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Richards, John F. 1998. “The Formation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir.” In The Mughal State, 1525–1750, edited by Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, 126–167. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

The cult of personality from the bottom up  63 Singh, Tripurdaman. 2019. Imperial Sovereignty and Local Politics: The Bhaduria Rajputs and the Transition from Mughal to British India, 1600–1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, Roy C. 1959. “Festivals for the Garter Embassy at the Court of Henri III.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22(1/2): 60–70. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 1992. “The Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflec­ tions on Recent Western Historiography.” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 29(3): 291–321. Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. 2017. Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tattavi, Ahmad, Qazvini, Jaʻfar Beg Asaf Khan, et al. 2003. Tarikh-i Alfi: Tarikh-i Hizar Salah-i Islam [The Millennial History: Thousand­Year History of Islam], edited by Ghulam Riza Tabatabayi Majd, 8 vols. Tehran: Shirkat­i Intisharat­i ʿIlmi va Farhangi. Whitehead, Richard B. 1929. “The Portrait Medals and Zodiacal Coins of the Em­ peror Jahāngīr.” The Numismatic Chronicle and Journal of the Royal Numismatic Society 9(33): 1–25.

4

A personality cult against one’s will? Traits and trajectories of popular veneration of Emperor Alexander I (r. 1801–1825) Darin Stephanov

A beautiful song from the score of the Soviet film “Shield and Sword” (1968) opens with the question “What does Motherland begin with ͡ Rodina)?” This question has underwritten my work (S chego nachinaetsia over the past two decades and led me further and further back in time so that in the Russian case today I find myself not at the Great Fatherland War of 1941–1945, which inspired this song and film in the first place, but at the Fatherland War of 18121 almost a century and a half earlier. Along the way, I have developed an elaborate argument that Motherland begins with the gradual shift in modern ruler visibility, conveyed via multiple channels, but centered on the annual secular celebrations (birthdays, patron saint name­ sake days, accession and coronation days, etc.) of the Russian Emperor and members of the royal family. This widening range of proliferating, inten­ sifying, and ever more pervasive ceremonial events acculturated and con­ ditioned the populace in unprecedented ways to be swiftly employed later in the service of the nation (Stephanov 2016). In this chapter, I will sketch some preliminary reflections on an elusive subset of this phenomenon and re­phrase the above question to “What does the cult of personality begin with”? My analysis is centered on a close reading of the annual runs of three different official or semi­official imperial newspapers with two intervening gaps of nine and seven years, respectively, in the following chronological ͡ Pochta (The Northern Mail) for the year 1809, Russkiī Inorder: Severnaia ͡ valid (The Russian War Veteran) for the year 1818, and especially Severnaia Pchela (The Northern Bee) for the years 1825–1826. The choice of particular years has been informed on the one hand by my curiosity to compare (a) the domestic ceremonial climate before the Fatherland War of 1812 (though following the first Napoleonic wars with Russia’s participation) to (b) the climate a few years after, and (c) the last year of Alexander I’s life and reign as well as the year following his death. Here is my preliminary definition of “a personality cult,” which I will re­visit at the end – a set of ritual practices and attendant rhetoric signifying an extreme power/status differential be­ tween the celebrant/ruled/subject and the celebrated/ruler/object; it is chan­ neled through acts of homage, related to the object’s body and persona,

A personality cult against one’s will?  65 especially in his/her absence, and involving higher degrees of creative ab­ straction over time. The main body of this chapter interweaves and analyzes in a loose chronological order a variety of ritual acts and rhetorical state­ ments arranged around the following crude binaries: subjects vs. object, ci­ vilian vs. military, individual vs. group, and Russian (religio­linguistically) vs. non­Russian restricted to Alexander I’s lifetime and the year following his death. As a point of departure, let us take the meeting in Moscow in late 1809 between Alexander I and members of the Moscow Noble Assembly whereby the Tsar requested membership for himself and some family members re­ sulting in the issuance of the respective cards. The Assembly elders, “be­ ͡ ing encouraged by such a great mercy, became emboldened to ask (vospriiali smelost’ isprosit’) the Emperor for the award of the portrait of His Majesty for the house of that [Noble] Assembly” (SPo, 18.12.1809 old style).2 The antiquated, flowery language notwithstanding, this anecdote suggests that such markers of Alexander I’s direct visibility as portraits were probably still infrequent, conferred by special permission and therefore status mark­ ers rather than being in general circulation. The Assembly’s next related act was to shift the dates of the membership card renewal and of the annual festivity from January 1st and 3rd, respectively, “from now on forever” to December 12, “the most joyous birthday of Emperor Alexander I.” It fur­ ther stated that this was done “in commemoration [of the fact] that in this year 1809 it pleased the Master Emperor to spend this precious to the sons of Rossiia3 day in this Capital4 [Moscow] …”5 Since the initial meeting had taken place on December 7, five days prior to the royal birthday, there was no compelling reason to embark on what I have referred to elsewhere as cross-dating.6 Yet that is exactly what transpired. What is worth pointing out about this case is that (1) not two, but three dates were merged, a rare instance, (2) not as a one­time act, but as a recurring annual open­ended practice, which, moreover, was (3) tied to the actual royal visit to Moscow. All three of these symbolic maneuvers involving time and space would soon become established practices aiding the growth of the ruler’s aura. Regarding the initial motif, a much more interactive and sophisticated use of the royal portrait emerges from an 1825 description of the ceremony of laying the foundation of the Cadet Corps (Military School for Nobles) in Kharkov (Kharkiv in present­day Ukraine). For their festive breakfast, the regular troops assigned to build it, who had just participated in a related religious procession and sanctification services, were seated in a square in plain view of “the portrait of the Emperor, decorated on both sides with mil­ itary arms trophies, interwoven with greenery and flowers” (SP, 07.07.1825).7 In the course of the breakfast, every instance of toasting the health of the Emperor was accompanied by salvos, soldier hoorahs, and a choir singing “a prayer for many years (mnogoletie).” Shifting to more remote regions and non­Russian populations, one can observe still more creative improvisations on the same theme. For example,

66  Darin Stephanov in the town of Obdorsk (Salekhard in the Yamalo­Nenetskii Autonomous District of present­day Russia), the 1825 birthday of Empress Elizaveta (January 13) was cross­dated with a special awards ceremony for the “pre­ cise payment of the yasak”8 by the Samoed9 elders. The ceremony took place in the main square before a crowd of more than 1000 “Asiatics (inorodtsy)”. The bestowal of these “monarchic gifts” was arranged by the Governor­ General of Western Siberia and the Civil Governor of Tobolsk and accepted by a deputation led by Prince Taishin. In all, three elders were honored with kaftans of bright red cloth with a gold lining, and five more – with daggers in silver frames. Here is the choreography of their gift reception – “step­ ping forward to the portrait of the Most August Monarch [Alexander I] with reverence they declared their devotion by way of the habitual bows” (SP, 24.02.1825). In the evening, a transparent decorative set consisting of the royal couple’s monograms was publicly illuminated in addition to the illu­ minated imperial coat of arms gracing Prince Taishin’s house. Once more, the paper correspondent felt obliged to point out that “the newly awarded ones expressed their boundless joy and in their every look at the portrait of the Master Emperor their special reverence (blagogovenie) to the Supreme Person was evident.” Similar ceremonies targeting non­Russian peoples took place on both sides of the Caucasus on the occasion of Alexander I’s name day (August 30).10 In a military camp somewhere across the Kuban River along the steep shores of the smaller Shaguash River, Major­General Veliaminov, Chief of Staff of the Caucasus Corps, “gave away rich gifts to the Nagai Tatar elders  – Mamat Girai, Ismail Aliev, and Yüzdenü Lakaü(?), who were present in the camp and devoted to the Russian Government” (SP, 29.10.1825).11 Nor was such treatment exclusively reserved for members of the elite. A commoner described as “a simple­hearted Svan12 by the name of Khirgen, having come to the camp voluntarily after capture by the Abadzehians13 and having shown his devotion to the Russians, also received as a gift two silver roubles from the General.” When the meaning of “all that he saw” was explained to him, he allegedly “started jumping with admiration (voskhishtenie), kissing the ground, pressing the roubles to his heart, and exclaiming: Allah! Allah! General Dzhigit!14 Urus15 Dzhigit!” On the other side of the Caucasus, the town of Shusha in present­day Nagorno­Karabakh (de jure Azerbaijan, de facto Armenia) witnessed some of the largest name­day celebrations presided over by Prince Valerian Ma­ datov (1782–1829) and his wife, drawing in the entire town population as well as prompting 800 begs (nobles) to come all the way from Shirvan in present­day Azerbaijan. Festivities included a military review, local wres­ tling and shooting games, horse races between Karabakhians and Shirva­ nians, inter­confessional music and dancing, singing (a 400­strong Russian/ Cossack female choir), a special meal for all Muslims, etc. There was a spe­ cial kind of illumination: above several thousand oil lamps enormous oil pillars were lit, shedding bright light far and wide. Once more, Alexander

A personality cult against one’s will?  67 I’s monogram, this time placed on a shield, was at the center of magnificent fireworks (SP, 27.10.1825). There were other, less literal ways to capture the evolving, ever closer re­ lationship between the ruler and the ruled in this period which were clearly visible in ceremonial settings not centered on Alexander I. An 1814 donation of 600 roubles by the Nizhnii Novgorod Infantry Regiment to its war vet­ erans as well as the widows and orphans of the deceased ones contains an especially vivid symbolic snapshot in this regard. It suffices to mention the ruler’s “pouring, with a generous hand, an abundance of benefactions (bla͡ ͡ on His subjects.” One rhetorical question in particular conveys in godeiania) a most condensed form the terms of the ruler­ruled interaction: What can be more pleasing in this world to a faithful subject (vernopoddannyī) than being under the roof of the wise Monarch, the child­loving, tender Father of the fatherland, Who, while extending His embraces ͡ to everyone, pushes [one] to the degree of virtue?16 (obyiatiia) (RI, 12.03.1818) The concepts of wisdom and virtue more broadly, which were intimately connected to the royal persona in eighteenth­century allegorical representa­ tions of power deployed in restricted, top­echelon settings (Wortman 1995; Levitt 2011), were hereby subtly being repurposed and redirected to the general populace under the guise of an elaborate father­children metaphor. Some of the same motifs were taken up and developed further in a speech by Deacon Nazarov at an 1825 ceremony of laying the foundation of an Armenian church (financed by the government) in Nizhnii Novgorod, cross­ dated with the annual town fair, in the presence of the Civil Governor, civil servants, and a great multitude: The Most August Monarch, while pouring His generous gifts (shtedroty) on the faithful subjects, did not forget to pour those on us as well. His beneficent hand is open to all and everyone. His compassionate heart cares for all, who are under His scepter. … The intention of the Most August Monarch [to finance the church] is most praiseworthy. It ori­ ginates from a love of the faithful subjects. … Children of the church! Sons of Armenia! Let us raise warm prayers to God for Him… And so let us imprint this gratitude of ours on the hearts forever, from genera­ tion to generation… (SP, 10.12.1825) The theme of accessibility of the monarch (“open to all and everyone,” “cares for all”) is quite striking as is the explicit acknowledgement of his love for his subjects and the hitherto unknown heart­to­heart dynamic (“compas­ sionate heart” vs. “the hearts”). This dynamic was restored to its previous one­way bottom­up version, only enlarged exponentially, in the opening

68  Darin Stephanov ͡ Pchela on the eve of Alexander I’s lines of an editorial article in Severnaia name day in 1825: From the ends of icy Lapland to blooming Tauride [the Crimea], from the shores of the Wisla [in Poland] to North America, from the Car­ pathian Mountains to the Caucasus, August 30 is a family feast for peo­ ple of different descent, language, and Faith … More than fifty million people are animated on this day by the same feelings: love and gratitude to their serene Father­Master. (SP, 29.08.1825) Having traversed in half a sentence the enormous length and breadth of the Empire, the author17 closed the editorial with a similarly all­encompassing movement along the temporal axis: “Tracing in the imagination all disasters suffered by Rossiia from the time of Alexander Nevskii’s victories to Peter the Great…, every inhabitant of Rossiia, Slav and other (lit. “belonging to another tribe”), sweeping a glance (okinuv vzorom) at the past, the present, and the future, will exclaim with a heartfelt tenderness (umilenie) at the first peal of the festive bell: God Save the Tsar!” The kin connection and the tribal distinction, the heroic lineage and the legendary timeline, affirmed through suffering, are all motifs of the modern mindset I have analyzed else­ where (Stephanov 2019, 2020), which in any case lie beyond the scope of the present chapter. The thread I wish to pick is the play on the imagination ͡ Pchela editor explicitly encouraged, and which later un­ which the Severnaia derwrote most aspects of modern belonging including personality cults. But how did it start and how did it spread at the popular level? And what role did the monarch play in this process? Rhetoric such as the above would have little value if it simply stayed on the perishable pages of capital newspapers and dissolved with them. But it did not. One major avenue of dissemination of the monarch’s appeal to the masses was an offshoot of his personal visits to the countryside. In fact, it is present on the front page of the same 1818 Russkiī Invalid issue, which featured the regimental donation and rhetoric discussed above. Immediately below it, there is a similar announcement of a donation to the war veterans in the amount of 50,000 roubles (with a first installment of 5,000) by a Kaluga noble landlord (pomeshtik) by the name ͡ of Poltoratskii “wishing to monumentalize (oznamenovat’ pamiatnikom) the Emperor’s visit to his village of Avchurino in 1816 (RI, 12.03.1818).” A few lines below, the charitable committee receiving the gift expressed its con­ siderable gratitude to the donor after having reported the act to the Em­ peror. While this is still a one­time act, which might at best be mentioned on the pages of the paper at each successive installment without directly affecting events and actors on the ground, the practice quickly became con­ tagious serving as a vehicle for an ever more rampant imagination. Eight months later, the front page of the same newspaper detailed another such instance of a bottom­up cross­dating between, on the one hand, a royal visit

A personality cult against one’s will?  69 to a hospital in Kharkov in 1817 and, on the other hand, a donation in the amount of 300 roubles by a hospital doctor by the name of A. E. Meier (RI, 13.11.1818). Only this time, Dr. Meier became fixated on the date of the visit – September 18 – choosing to employ the number 18 as a symbolic kernel rip­ pling through the specific provisions for the administration of his donation. Thus, the donor mandated that a percentage of the annual interest from the capital in question in the amount of 18 roubles be used on September 18 every year in the following manner. Four roubles would be allocated for a hospital service for the health of the Emperor and the royal household by the priest and the remaining 14 roubles – for roasted meat and wine for the patients above and beyond the regular daily ration. Dr. Meier made sure no one was left out. When the first anniversary in 1818 fell on a Wednesday, a fasting day in the Orthodox Christian calendar, he stepped in and provided “a considerable quantity of freshly caught fish.” Finally, Dr. Meier, whom the article referred to as “the founder of this feast,” provided an additional donation to the poor, orphaned, and insane patients of the same institution numbering 133 individuals in the amount of, predictably, 18 kopeks each. Although this is an early and particularly colorful example, similar exam­ ples coming from all corners of the empire appeared with a rising regularity on the pages of central newspapers. While in the vast majority of cases it is not possible to trace such activities directly back to the ruler, a closer look at Alexander I’s own conduct while travelling throughout the empire can be quite instructive. To begin with, the standard narrative maintains that on his many and long­lasting domestic trips the Emperor preferred to move simply and quietly, often incognito. In fact, Richard Wortman made a list of Alexander I’s various attempts to minimize his own visibility including the occasional prohibition of monogram and portrait displays as well as the attendant local ceremonial (Wortman 1995, 239, ft. 71). While there is suf­ ficient evidence to support this claim, one should not lose sight of the fact that simplicity and humility can be just as if not more inviting grounds for personal magnification when viewed from the opposite side. Drawing on front­page ceremonial descriptions from a Baltic trip of the Emperor in the summer of 1825, one can gauge the two­way interaction without undue rhe­ torical “noise.” Upon arriving in Bausk (present­day Bauska in Latvia) on June 3, 1825, Alexander I stayed in the private home of a certain Captain Geiking (?) causing the nearby market square to “fill with a numerous crowd uttering, at the emperor’s every appearance on the window, joyous exclamations (SP, 02.07.1825).” Twice, he spoke to the lady of the house, who also received an expensive gift. On June 7, “it pleased the Emperor to listen, from 6 o’clock in the morning, to numerous supplicants streaming from nearby and far­ away places and did not let anyone go without hope and comfort.” Upon his departure, Alexander I was “accompanied by the ardent benedictions of the grateful faithful children.” Afterwards, the townspeople organized a night­long vigil.

70  Darin Stephanov In Pernov (Pärnu in present­day Estonia), the Emperor sought out the family in whose home he had stayed during his first visit to the town 21 years earlier. When told that the husband (Peter Garder) had since passed away and that his widow lived in an adjacent village, he expressed a wish to visit the family. Upon meeting her, Alexander I “was pleased to remember all, even the smallest circumstances from that time, how one of the daughters, being still in early childhood, gave Him flowers and a greeting in Russian.” The Emperor concluded by stating his interest in the fate of this family (SP, 02.07.1825). Finally, on June 10, “this eternally unforgettable day,” Alexander I arrived in Revel (Talinn in present­day Estonia) where in the evening he “several times satisfied the ardent desire of the faithful subject people (narod) to enjoy the sight of Its August Monarch and every time [he] was met with the vociferous expressions of faithful­subject love and devotion.” During his stay, Alexander I permitted the so­called Black Heads, Revel’s Townsman Guard, to keep watch outside his premises thereby providing yet another local mooring of his own veneration. Allegedly, “the expressions of popular delight (vostorg) did not die down neither during the day, nor at night (SP, 02.07.1825).” What comes across clearly in these excerpts is the Emperor’s active and, at least at times, willing part in shaping the modes and scale of his own cele­ bration. This impression becomes much stronger upon closer examination of descriptions from an earlier tour of his across the Grand Duchy of Finland in 1819 as well as from his last trip to the south of the Empire in October 1825. In the summer of 1819, Alexander I undertook an extensive trip through the Grand Duchy of Finland which Russia had acquired from Sweden in 1809. A portion of the trip, from Nissilä to Kajaani, included some of the most remote, impassable, and thinly populated patches of land in the entire duchy. Thanks to an 1828 travelogue by a companion of his, Captain Sebas­ tian Gripenberg, one can get a glimpse of the Emperor’s behavior in the lo­ cals’ presence precisely in those parts which should in principle matter least. Thus, we find that Alexander I was prone to bowing to crowd gatherings, an act he performed a number of times.18 Once he shook hands with everyone who met him.19 On another occasion, during a simple dinner, the Emperor personally handed out bread and butter to children who stepped forward.20 Alexander I’s alleged attitude to his Finnish subjects was best captured in the following statement by which he addressed “with feeling” the crowd at Kajaani: I cannot present you with a more convincing proof of My love and be­ nevolence (blagovolenie) to you and your compatriots (sootechestvenniki) than [my] having decided to ignore the dangers posed by the elements (stihii) in order to spend a few minutes among you!”21 By attempting to rhetorically reverse the extreme power/status differential between the two sides, Alexander I provided, whether willingly or not, a

A personality cult against one’s will?  71 symbolic kernel for his own veneration by the populace in this remote cor­ ner of the Empire irrespective of the significant linguistic and cultural bar­ riers.22 Even if we assume that the relatively low number of people could account for a simplicity of the encounter and therefore lead to a perception of a private affair (placing the Emperor at ease), it is impossible to deny that this simplicity could be all the more touching and useful in the con­ struction of a personality cult. A detailed example from Alexander’s visit to Starocherkassk23 in the south of the Empire in October 1825, barely a month before his death, provides a case in point. In a manner similar to the Baltic and Finnish trips, the Emperor’s iti­ nerary included visits to the homes of people he personally knew.24 When he visited Colonel Efremova on October 14, Alexander I exclaimed: “So I fulfilled your wish and called in (SP, 26.11.1825)!” This admission was so unexpected that it allegedly left the hostess speechless, overcome with tears of joy. This motion of rhetorical reversal quite similar to the one discussed above leaves no doubt as to the Emperor’s premeditation. Whereas his mo­ tives might be open to debate, the maintenance of a web of clear indivi­ dual connections between the ruler and many of his subjects, both high and low, spread across vast distances, is undeniable. The same visit provides yet another indication of Alexander I’s intention to cut the distance between himself and his hosts. When offered the seat of choice on a brocaded sofa, Alexander I refused. Instead, he opted for a simple chair and motioned the rest to do the same. What the Emperor paraded as a personal or even com­ mon touch did not at any point entail a loss of status by him. For exam­ ple, a preceding private visit from that same day to Maria Ilovaiskaya, the mother of the Cossack army chief (ataman), provided, at least in the eyes of the reporting journalist, an unspoken example of the healing royal touch. When the Emperor left after taking the bedridden hostess by the hand, ask­ ing her several questions and wishing her recovery, she felt “as if in renewed strength (SP, 26.11.1825).” The motif of simplicity, prominent in private encounters, carried over to Alexander I’s interaction with the masses of his subjects. “It pleased the Emperor to travel quietly” and “[he] mercifully greeted the people (narod) gathering and running after the carriage (SP, 26.11.1825).” The reporter felt obliged to note what must have been a common denominator among Ale­ xander I’s various target audiences that day, namely, “the greatest delight (vostorg).” This remark followed a description of a scene where thousands of people threw themselves toward the monarch with joyous exclamations. Some kissed his hands, others his feet or the hem of his uniform. The multi­ tude accompanied Alexander I even on his personal visits covering his path with fresh wreaths. Outbursts of popular veneration such as these were not limited to cere­ monial events in the Emperor’s presence, although they could be inspired by them. In late 1824, Alexander I visited the town of Perm. As it hap­ pened, the visit took place on October 2, the day of the religious feast of the

72  Darin Stephanov Shroud of the Holy Virgin Mary, a fact which was not lost on the locals (SP, 21.11.1825). Therefore, in an act of what may be called a continuous or micro cross-dating, in agreement between the religious and civil authorities, a new local annual festivity was established. In 1825, on the eve of October 2, at the exact hour when Alexander I had arrived in Perm the previous year an all­night vigil in the local cathedral and all other churches commenced. On the day itself, prayer services of gratitude for the health and long life of the Emperor and the imperial household, with genuflection, were performed. Upon their completion, a procession of the cross commenced. During its course, the Gospel and prayers were read in front of the house where Alexander I had stayed. A similar reading of prayers, to Virgin Mary and St. Stephen, Bishop of Perm, took place at the main square where the Em­ peror had observed a military change­of­guard ceremony. In an act of what I have called elsewhere a myth of naming (Stephanov 2019, 151), a church dedicated to Alexander I’s saintly namesake – Alexander Nevskii – was to be erected. Upon completion, it would be incorporated into the annual ceremonial activities by way of a procession of the cross. In commemora­ tion of the Emperor’s visit to and approbation of the House of (Orphan) Education, a public examination of its all­female students was conducted at the Civil Governor’s house, attended by church leaders and civil servants. In the evening, the town was illuminated. In conclusion, the reporter felt obliged to point out: All inhabitants, from the lesser to the greater, were in similar motion as in the time of the Supreme presence here of His Imperial Majesty. A remembrance never to be erased from the faithful subjects’ hearts was depicted on all faces and the eyes of everyone, it seemed, met the ador­ able Monarch with the words: “He was among us!” This passage provides a vivid example of a high degree of creative abstrac­ tion in the terms whereby the ruled related themselves to the ruler, normally expected from cults of twentieth­century personalities. By choosing to per­ form a step­by­step theater (“in similar motion”) every year, Permians chose to periodically relive their enchanted (“depicted on all faces”) encounter with Alexander I. What is remarkable in this process is the ruler’s assigned (entirely passive) role and the mode of his contact with the people. Appa­ rently, Alexander I’s “Supreme presence” was a sufficient dimension of the Emperor on his 1824 visit motivating those in attendance then to undertake extreme ceremonial gestures afterwards. Even more striking is the seamless blending of memory and imagination, reality and impossibility at the pas­ sage’s end. When the people’s eyes “met the adorable Monarch,” this contact occurred outside of space and across time. Finally, the element of totaliza­ tion (“from the lesser to the greater,” “all,” “everyone”) gives this scene of popular veneration an added weight.

A personality cult against one’s will?  73 The final section of this chapter covers the year after Alexander I’s un­ timely death. An evaluation of what may amount to a posthumous person­ ality cult in this period necessitates a brief discussion of the contributing factors. What did not change was the popular fascination with the figure of this emperor. In fact, it was catapulted to new heights after his death, fre­ quently along the lines of the Permian example above, as it will be demon­ strated shortly. This line of impact was coupled with and reinforced by the new emperor Nicholas I (r. 1825–1855)’s strategy of co­optation of the image of his elder brother and its close integration into his own scenario of power. It suffices to say that Nicholas I had come to power after a 25­day interreg­ num and his crushing of the Decembrist constitutionalist revolt. Therefore, this section will also examine some of the multi­pronged short­term policies of Nicholas I in response to the acute legitimacy deficit surrounding his rise to power. Third, at the intersection of royal and popular attitudes, there was space for a rampant commercial exploitation of Alexander I’s image, which did indeed take place and further fuel his glorification. To begin with, in a departure from precedent, Nicholas I staged a 2,000­km­long funerary procession for Alexander I from the town of Ta­ ganrog in the south of Russia where he had died to St. Petersburg lasting several months. It was followed by a weeklong lying­in­state, and a grand funeral.25 During the lying­in­state in the cathedral of Kazan’s Mother of God, every day at specially appointed morning hours the lower rank of the Life Guard regiments would be brought in battalion by battalion and squadron by squadron “for the fulfillment of this holy duty (SP, 13.03.1826).” The remaining slots were given to civilian subjects from all walks of life who could enter the church and pay obeisance by touching their heads and/ ͡ the coffin in the manner normally reserved for or kissing (prikladyvat’sia) icons. According to the reporter, “many hastened to satisfy a strong incli­ nation (vlechenie) of the hearts overbrimming with love and gratitude to the deceased Tsar and Liberator of Russia.” Twice a day, a memorial service in the presence of the royal family would take place. The same commitment of the military and civilian populations to Alexander I’s memory would be on display at the first anniversary of his death when memorial services were held in all regimental and parish churches in St. Petersburg (SP, 20.11.1826). On the day of the funeral, all buildings along the entire route of the pro­ cession were decked with festoons made of black cloth bearing the late emperor’s monogram. Once more, a reporter noted that “the memory of Him will live in the hearts of His faithful subjects (SP, 16.03.1826).” Several days later, in an act of cross­dating, Nicholas I held a major military review in St. Petersburg. It took place on March 19, the day of Alexander I’s entry into Paris in 1814 at the head of the victorious anti­Napoleonic alliance. All Russian troops, from soldier to general, who had taken part in that feat, wore silver medals with the image of Alexander I illuminated by the rays of the Eye of Providence on one side and the phrase “For taking Paris,

74  Darin Stephanov March 19, 1814,” on the reverse. In this way, clearly, Nicholas I wished to partake, if only ceremoniously, of his dead brother’s glory and while bask­ ing in the reflected light of Alexander I’s accomplishments also bond with his own subjects.26 Such ceremonies were not limited to St. Petersburg and Moscow, which implies a degree of communication, coordination, and even centralization in ceremonial planning. Here is a description of an elaborate decorative set, “a transparent picture purposely prepared by the Government on this oc­ casion [of the coronation] and placed opposite the Army Chancellery (SP, 09.10.1826).” The place in question is Novocherkassk, the base of the Don Cossacks in the far south of Russia. In the words of the reporter, worth quoting at length: ͡ mighty, militant, surrounded by This picture portrayed Russia (Rossiia) emblems of abundance, justice, etc., sitting in the temple of Glory; on one side, Minerva and Themis, on the other, genii brought her wreaths. Above the temple burned a monogram of our Beloved Master (Gosudar’) with a crown and a genius announced to Russia the God­performed anointment. In the clouds, the face of the late Emperor Alexander could be seen pointing Russia to the newly Anointed one (Pomazannik) and blessing Him. The light of the All­Seeing Eye illuminated the Master’s crown. This exceptionally evocative passage demonstrates in the most direct and compelling way yet the connection and continuity between Alexander I and Nicholas I that the latter so wished to emphasize. This link was doubly reinforced – Alexander not only pointed to Nicholas, but also blessed him. The presence of a Roman goddess (of military power) and a Greek Titaness (protector of justice), a legacy of Alexander’s and earlier reigns, was another addition to Nicholas’s rich repertoire of symbolic anchors in the popular mind. The by­now familiar all­seeing eye was similarly employed. It seems that when it came to coronation festivities in Novocherkassk, nothing was left to chance. In another act of cross­dating, even the announcement of the exact date of Nicholas I’s coronation in Moscow (August 22) was held off until a very significant date – September 15 – Alexander’s coronation date, a detail which did not escape the reporter’s attention. The fact that, upon coming to power, the new emperor had announced a mourning period of a year for Alexander I all across the Empire had a range of effects on the public mood, conduct, and enterprise. Newspapers came out with black lining framing the pages. Dress codes and fashion were profoundly affected. For example, upper­class men dressed in black from head to toe with the exception of a white necktie (SP, 15.12.1825). Commer­ cial establishments reacted swiftly taking their cues from the royal house­ hold. A phrase from a letter of Alexander I’s widow, Elizaveta Alekseevna, to her mother­in­law, the dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, “Our angel

A personality cult against one’s will?  75 is in heaven,” (in French) became an instant hit. Jewelers had these words painted in gold on gold­and­black mourning rings in high demand by both men and women. Other rings carried a cross or a portrait of Alexander (SP, 15.12.1825). The same phrase adorned various new lithographic portraits of the late emperor, which were produced in different sizes, from medal­ lion up (SP, 31.12.1825, 09.02.1826). In the changed climate of the new reign, the artists, many of them foreigners, were praised for “engaging in mostly domestic (lit. “fatherland”) Russian subjects.” To them, Russians owed a “duty of gratitude (SP, 31.12.1825).” Already in the early months of Nicholas I’s reign, his scenario of power centered on a turn away from the West and its values (including constitutionalism), toward the native Russian character and culture. This implied an allegedly unique relationship between ruler and subjects and a natural justification for an autocratic tsarist rule. The shift in mood began to be felt on the pages of the periodical press in subtle ways, once more in connection to Alexander I. For example, an article which advertized Alexander I busts made of marble, bronze, and alabaster for the widest possible consumption did not omit the artist’s biographical details. Fedor Kovshenkov was a former serf liberated by Alexander I due to his exceptional talent and appointed among the master builders of the Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St. Petersburg. Hence, when chiseling the Alexander I busts, his tool must have been guided by “the noblest feeling, gratitude (SP, 12.12.1825).” The same sudden estheticization of the simple and the domes­ tically rooted can be observed in music where “a remarkable folk Russian composition in memory of the late Emperor Alexander Pavlovitch” featured in a concert of many highbrowed works. A novel hybridity can be noted in the fact that this was “a sorrowful aria in the accompaniment of a large or­ chestra (SP, 22.04.1826).” A final, most explicit example of this type of spe­ cial connection between subject and ruler, which made its way to the pages of the same St. Petersburg newspaper, concerns a peasant from the pro­ vinces [a patrimonial estate in Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk in present­day Russia)]. When asked if he had loved Alexander I, the man, with tears in his eyes and “a heartfelt tenderness (umilenie),” drew the analogy between a soldier per­ forming a faultless military service of 25 years and the late emperor whose reign of glory and honor had also lasted for 25 years. If the former was re­ spected and loved, how could the latter be otherwise? The correspondent felt that the words of the Russian peasant should be respected even if they had “neither the gloss, nor the artificiality of oratorical expressions.” He went further and named what stood behind these words as “soulful integrity and common sense, this fundamental distinction of the Russian people (narod) (SP, 09.03.1826).” Finally, here is an example of the confluence of top­down and bottom­up measures toward Alexander I’s posthumous glorification. In the summer of 1826, Captain Sebastian Gripenberg returned, along with a landscape painter, to the same remote corners of Finland he had accompanied Alex­ ander I to in 1819 for the sake of memorializing them into lithographs for his

76  Darin Stephanov forthcoming travelogue. While doing so, Gripenberg purchased the stable where the Emperor had had lunch. Allegedly, before he could make up his mind about what to do with this “building precious to the Fatherland,”27 Gripenberg received a letter from the Kajaani county (uezd) judge by the name of Flander, who had been mayor of Kajaani back in 1819. In it, Flan­ der asked, on behalf of the inhabitants of the Paltamo parish, to be given the stable so that under their charge it could be passed to later generations in perpetuity. Touched by this “commendable patriotic intention,” Gripenberg agreed. Subsequently, Flander notified him about a meeting of all inha­ bitants of the Paltamo parish including a large part of the peasants on July 3, 1827 at the parish’s chief pastor Dr. Eymeleus’s. The assembly decided on the relocation of the stable from Haapalankangas to the parish’s main church. This was accomplished by “the unanimous wish and position of them all.” The act opened the floodgates. The Civil Governor, Schernskans, who was in the congregation, “taking part with great excitement and feeling in this solemn undertaking,” took it upon himself to acquire and deliver the boat in which the Emperor had crossed the Vuolijoki river, the bed in which he had slept on his return from Kajaani, and the cart, which he had used to travel part of the way from Saaresmäki to Nissilä. Judge Flander delivered the table and the bench used during the royal lunch in the sta­ ble, whereas the Kajaani postmaster, Montgommery, delivered the saddle in which Alexander I had travelled through the wilderness. In conclusion, Gripenberg commented that “all of these precious by their memorability (dostopamiatnost’) things” were then kept in the stable “worthy of the same great memory.”28

Conclusion Based on a careful examination of a broad range of evidence from across the empire over several select years, I believe we can speak of a personality cult centered on Alexander I. In other words, all components of the tenta­ tive definition provided at the outset of this chapter are present in this case. Broadly speaking, such a conclusion can be distilled from the increasing sophistication of the use of visual proxies of the ruler, from monograms, portraits, and busts to illuminated decorative sets and their embedding into ever more complex ceremonies. Most importantly, the ritual acts and atten­ dant rhetoric focused on the emperor exhibited higher degrees of creative abstraction over time which further increased the power/status differential between the two sides. Whether genuine or not, Alexander I’s simplicity, humility, and accessibility and his deliberate attempts to rhetorically re­ verse this power/status differential seem to have only increased it resulting in more intense adoration. So the answer to the original question is both yes and no. On the one hand, not entirely unwittingly, Emperor Alexander I sowed the seeds of his own personality cult which was already beginning to bloom in the provinces even before his sudden, untimely death. On the

A personality cult against one’s will?  77 other hand, the constantly rising popular demand and the circumstances of Nicholas I’s sudden and traumatic rise to supreme power amidst an acute le­ gitimacy deficit helped propel his elder brother’s cult to new, unprecedented, and yet to be properly evaluated levels.

Notes





78  Darin Stephanov







References Gripenberg, Sebastian. 1828. Opisanie puteshestviia Gosudaria Imperatora Alexandra I, iz stantsii Nissile v gorod Kayanu, vo vremia posledniago voiazha Ego Velichestva v Velikoe Kniazhestvo Finliandskoe, letom 1819 goda. Sankt Peterburg: Voennaia Tipografiia Glavnago Shtaba Ego Velichestva. Levitt, Marcus. 2011. The Visual Dominant in Eighteenth-Century Russia. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press. Stephanov, Darin. 2016. “Public Celebrations of Emperor Nicholas I (1825–1855) in the Grand Duchy of Finland: Typology, Dynamics, Impact.” in 400th Anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty, 1613–2013. The Politics of Memory and the Monarchic Idea [in Russian]. Eds. Vladimir Lapin and Yulia Safronova. Saint Petersburg: European University Press, 89–103. Stephanov, Darin. 2019. Ruler Visibility and Popular Belonging in the Ottoman Empire, 1808–1908. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Stephanov, Darin. 2020. “The Beautiful and the Brutal: Bulgarian Images of Od­ rin (Edirne) and the Contours of the Ethnonational Mindset” in The Heritage of Edirne ın Ottoman and Turkish Times: Continuities, Disruptions and Reconnections, Eds. Birgit Krawietz and Florian Riedler, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 347–379. Wortman, Richard. 1995. Scenarios of Power: Myth and Ceremony in Russian Monarchy. Vol. I. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

5

Of death and dominion Queen Victoria and the cult of colonial loyalty John Plunkett

The bicentenary of Queen Victoria’s birth was 24 May 2019. Her image, painted and sculpted, still dominates public spaces scattered throughout every continent. More than any other historic individual, places, institutions and squares still bear her name. Biographies and biopics continue to pro­ liferate; the hugely successful period drama produced by ITV/PBS, Victoria (2016–), which has so far completed three series, attracts millions of viewers in Britain, America and beyond. The monumental nature of her imperial presence continues to enrage as well as fascinate and habituate however: in the run­up to Commonwealth Day in Canada, on 14 May 2019, Victoria’s statue in Montreal was covered in red paint by the Montreal May Anar­ chists (Montreal Gazette 2019). It had been covered in green paint only two months earlier by an anti­colonial group, the Brigade de solidarité anticoloniale Delhi-Dublin. In a statement published initially in French, the group declared that the statue is an ‘insult to the struggles for self­ determination and resistance of oppressed peoples worldwide’ (Montreal Star 2019). This followed three previous attacks on the same statue in 2018, and a similar defacement of Victoria’s statue in Georgetown, Guyana, in June of the same year (Guyana Chronicle 2018). These episodes are all part of the potent, liv­ ing legacy of a figure who is a leading modern example of the global creation of a ruler personality cult. While it is commonplace to acknowledge that Queen Victoria was the overarching symbol that sought to meld together the disparate parts of the British Empire, my essay seeks to demonstrate the specific discourses and practices through which affection and loyalty to her were promoted by the colonial elite, and the consequent way it was remediated, and challenged, by indigenous and settler communities. More particularly, it argues that the myth­making around Victoria stemmed from the extensive and unprece­ dented circulation of her global image through newspapers, biographies, photographs, statues, prints and film, and that this helped to promote the myth of a personal relationship between Victoria and her subjects in both Britain and its various colonies. The age­old reverence accorded to mon­ archs intermingled with, and was augmented by, the charisma and celebrity created by the modern media industry that developed in the period. As Eva

80  John Plunkett Giloi and Edward Berenson have noted, ‘The nineteenth century saw an explosion in the number of charismatic figures, largely because the audience for them grew so significantly’ (Giloi and Berenson 2010, 16). Queen Victoria has too often been regarded as exceptional in the histo­ riography of nineteenth­century Europe. The longevity of her reign at over sixty­three years; the prospering of the British monarchy at a time when so many other European monarchies were deposed through democratic reform; her femininity; her position as head of the leading industrial and imperial nation; all these factors have been used to characterise her as ex­ ceptional. Yet Victoria herself had extensive and close­knit personal links with many other European royal families. Moreover, while the political for­ tunes of European monarchies differed, the expressions of popular loyalty Victoria inspired was not an isolated example in that it has similarities with the personality cults attached to Nicholas II, Louis Napoleon, Franz Joseph I, Garibaldi, Kaiser Wilhelm II and Emperor Meiji (Giloi 2011; Giloi and Berenson 2011; Riall 2008). What is distinct about Victoria’s charismatic figure is that it was most evident in the versions exported across the British Empire. In his work on Queen Victoria and India, Miles Taylor describes the second half of the century as ‘the heyday of viceregal rule; that is to say, a system of govern­ ment in which the apparatus of European monarchy was applied to remote colonies and dependencies’ (Taylor 2018, 7). Whereas, domestically, Victo­ ria was lauded for being part of the transition to a constitutional monar­ chy, across the empire, she was much more of a charismatic, untrammelled, focal point of British rule. India, for example, was transferred to Crown rule from the East India Company in 1858, accompanied by a famous proc­ lamation from the Queen to preserve religious tolerance and act benevo­ lently. The colonial representation of Victoria was – to a large degree – an intensification of the existing familial discourse around her. From Kolkata to Cape Town, her motherly concern for all of her subjects was used to em­ phasize the existence of an imperial family and to soften the imposition of British rule. Victoria Smith has argued that ‘the image of a maternal Vic­ toria allowed for the representation of the empire not as a project of domi­ nation or conquest but of familial love and domestic duty’ (Smith 1998, 7). While Victoria herself never left Europe, from the early years of her reign she took a keen personal and diplomatic interest in her overseas subjects and in non­European royals.1 She certainly encouraged and facilitated the global loyalty she inspired, albeit much of her colonial fashioning was inev­ itably done in her name. An analysis of the scale and character of Victoria’s colonial presence, and the way that this was played out through countless local circumstances and political engagements, is far beyond the scope of a single chapter. As such, I focus on a single episode at the height of British imperial sway – Queen Victoria’s death and funeral in early 1901 – in order to demonstrate the way that the unprecedented global simultaneity of the event became part of the

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  81 narrative of imperial familiality, personal charisma and affective loyalty. A spotlight on this one event throws into relief the organizational structures and symbols which facilitated the cultus around Victoria. It demonstrates the innovative character of her iconic role in that global reactions were enabled by the burgeoning importance of the imperial press and telegraph network; the funeral also reveals the way local communities used the many statues of Victoria that had been already erected to become sites of mourn­ ing. Her iconography was fashioned through the complex, and sometimes conflicting, interplay of colonial ideology and the political character of lo­ cal populations. As Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent have argued in their work on indigenous communities and Queen Victoria, ‘symbolic vocabu­ laries and vernaculars of monarchy, empire, sovereignty and the Crown (among other things) were produced, or at the very least co­produced, by colonized communities and constituencies’ (Carter and Nugent 2016, 10). In this vein, tributes to Victoria could be both unstable and surprising; there was never a univocal, simple, top­down fashioning. White settler colonies in Australia, Canada and New Zealand, unsurprisingly, lauded imperial unity and citizenship through their shared connection to Victo­ ria; however, the response of Indian nationalist groups demonstrate that her matriarchy could be turned against the dominant power structures. By taking literally Victoria’s personal affection for her colonial subjects, they could exploit the contradiction with more oppressive aspects of imperial rule.

At home: Victoria as national and imperial mother In 1851, the poet laureate, Alfred Tennyson, celebrated Victoria’s reign in an ode commemorating the opening of the Great Exhibition. She was praised for her serene life, pure court and, above all, her virtues as ‘Mother, Wife and Queen’ (Tennyson 1969, 961). Tennyson’s phrase was subsequently repeated countless times, extolling as it did the maternal and familial before the re­ gal, while nonetheless recognizing that Victoria successfully combined all three roles. The stress on Victoria’s motherhood meant that she was turned into a paragon of domestic propriety; at the same time, it also functioned metonymically for the emotional and immediate relationship her subjects experienced towards her. Familiarity bred familiality. The familial relationship between Victoria and her subjects was encour­ aged by the oft­proclaimed interest she took in their welfare, through per­ sonal letters, visits or philanthropic donations. Upon Victoria’s death in 1901, the Daily Express was one of many newspapers to reiterate her matri­ archal affection, imbuing her with the common pleasures and sympathies of her subjects, for her subjects: She was essentially the mother of her People. When we sorrowed she sorrowed with us. Quick as the news of a disaster on land or sea came

82  John Plunkett always the Queen’s message of regret for the dead, of sympathy for the mourners… When we heard of this or that good deed done by the Queen we did not think of it as something official, passed through the office of the Lord Chamberlain, but as the spontaneous benevolence of a dear old lady who loved children and dogs, and quiet chats with the old wives of Highland cottages, and all innocent and wholesome pleasures, who would weep readily for the suffering of her people, and join heartily in their enthusiasm and pleasures. (A Collection of Cuttings 1901, 19) Prints and engravings, such as Figure 5.1, showing Victoria reading to a working­class family, enforced this intimate portrayal. Moreover, such con­ cern was said to exist outside official structures and stemmed from her own uninhibited character as a ‘dear old lady’. Victoria was certainly not the first British monarch to be proclaimed for their close relationship with their subjects. George III was revered for his domestic character and given the title of father of his people. Nevertheless, Victoria’s femininity, working in tandem with her constitutional position supposedly above party politics, gave added impetus to the loyalty she evoked. The human interest in her was also unprecedented because of the new ability of print and visual media to create a day­to­day involvement with the life of the royal family. The promotion of Victoria’s relationship with the British people; the assertion of a bond of intimacy between her and her subjects; her position at the heart of an imagined national community – all these were achieved, at least partially, through the extensive and novel media coverage given to her through the new media landscape of popular newspapers, prints and photographs. One political effect of this is evident in Walter Bagehot’s treatise, The English Constitution (1865–1867), wherein he famously distinguished between the dignified and efficient parts of Brit­ ish constitution. In contrast to the complexity and efficiency of parliamen­ tary government, the dignified parts were ‘those which excite and preserve the reverence of the population’ (Bagehot 2001, 7). For Bagehot, inspiring populist feeling around a single distinct, comprehensible figure was now the primary role of the Crown: Bagehot codified and elevated the emergent personality cult around Victoria into part of the constitutional role of the monarchy. With the expansion of the burgeoning British Empire in the final decades of her reign, Victoria was deployed as a unifying figure. There were many asser­ tions of the notion that it was love for Victoria as a paragon of womanhood that helped secure colonial loyalty and pave the way for a greater imperial unity. During the Diamond Jubilee celebrations, the Graphic was typical in declaring that the ‘love which she has universally inspired has given the throb of life to the loyalty which every different Colony owes the Crown. She has ruled in the hearts as well as through the Constitution’ (Graphic 1897, 782). The exporting of Victoria’s maternal role was an important part of the way

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  83

Figure 5.1 A itken, W. Francis. 1901. Victoria, the Well-Beloved, 143. London: S.W. Partridge. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter Library (Great Britain).

that the British Empire attempted to reproduce familiar, hierarchical, and often conservative, versions of the British social structure. David Cannadine has noted that, to the degree there was a coherent imperial project, ‘it was the effort to fashion and to tie together the empire abroad in the vernacular

84  John Plunkett image of the domestic, ranked social hierarchy’ (Cannadine 2001, xix). Victo­ ria’s imperial iconography was an idealized form of the familial and familiar icon that had already been successfully developed. This imperial reinvention of Victoria’s sovereignty reached its zenith at her Golden and Diamond Jubilees (1887, 1897), and her funeral in 1901. Portrayals of Victoria as an imperial matriarch were instrumental to a discourse of kinship between British colonies and the mother­country. The racial and cultural diversity of the empire was ideologically consti­ tuted as one whole; moreover, the links between the dominion countries of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were often naturalized as blood­ties. Alfred Tennyson’s poem, Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhibition by the Queen, 1886, is a typical assertion of such imperial brotherhood: Sharers of our glorious past, Brothers, must we part at last? Shall we not through good and ill Cleave to one another still? Britain’s myriad voices call, ‘Sons, be welded each and all, Into one imperial whole, One with Britain, heart and soul! One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!’ Britons, hold your own! (Tennyson 1886, 210) Gutenberg The anaphora of Tennyson’s refrain rousingly culminates with ‘one Throne’, making it the overdetermined centre of unity. Lewis Morris’s Golden Jubilee ode, ‘A Song of Empire’, similarly used Victoria’s already iconic matriarchy to cast imperialism as a familial pro­ ject. Morris’s work enjoyed considerable popularity in its day, probably sec­ ond only to that of Tennyson. His jubilee ode literalizes, naturalizes and racializes the notion of an imperial family. Victoria becomes, somewhat bi­ zarrely, the grand matriarchal progenitor of her colonial children: First Lady of our English race, In Royal dignity and grace Higher than all in old ancestral blood, But higher still in love of good, And care for ordered Freedom, grown To a wide tree where’er In either hemisphere, Its vital seeds are blown;

(Morris 1891, 475)

Victoria’s idealization as a constitutional monarch segues into a role as overseer of the expansion of liberty across the empire. Morris, moreover,

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  85 uses her ‘old ancestral blood’ to naturalize political relationships as cher­ ished biological and racial ones: See what a glorious throng they come, Turned to their ancient home, The children of our England! See What vigorous company Thou sendest, Greater England of the Southern Sea! Thy stately cities, sown with domes and spires, Chase the illumined light with festal fires In honour of their Queen, whose happy reign Began when, ’mid their central roar, The naked savage trod the pathless plain […] Yet everywhere are found The English laws, the English accents fair, ’Mid burning North or cooler Southern air. A world within themselves, and with them blent Island with continent. (Morris 1891, 476) Morris’s poem invokes a progressive vision of an empire united across conti­ nents, imbued with inherited English character and customs. Through their bloodline resemblance to the mother­country and to the imperial mother, the ‘Greater Englands’ beyond the sea become Victoria’s children. Politicians as well as poets liked to imagine Victoria at the heart of an imperial family. Her Diamond Jubilee of 1897 sought to embody this posi­ tion through large­scale royal ceremonial. The Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, had the idea of turning the Diamond Jubilee into an imperial pageant. As he noted, ‘there never has been in English territory any rep­ resentation of the Empire as a whole, and the Colonies especially have, hith­ erto, taken little part in any ceremony of the kind’ (cited in Lant 1980, 219). Troop detachments from different colonies were invited to participate in the centrepiece of the jubilee celebrations, a long procession through London with an open­air Thanksgiving Service at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Diamond Jubilee brought a microcosm of the empire to London, but it was Victoria’s death, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on 22 Jan­ uary 1901, that marked the culmination of her potent role as the mother of the British Empire. The outpouring of grief returned again and again to a charged discourse of familial intimacy in order to convey the unique position she had occupied in the lives of her subjects. The mourning that took place across the empire confirmed that the motherliness of the Queen­ Empress was the symbolic heart of a mythology of imperial unity. Responses to Victoria’s death reveal the importance of global commu­ nication technology in concretizing and making closer the affective links between Victoria and her colonial subjects. Scholars such as Amelia Bo­ nea, Chandrika Kaul, Donald Read and Simon Potter have demonstrated

86  John Plunkett that the final decades of the century saw an imperial press system emerge: communication and media networks helped to facilitate and maintain im­ perial power (see Bonea 2016; Kaul 2003; Potter 2003; Read 1999). As Potter argues, commercial and political interests ‘came to mesh press enterprises around the empire into a situation of mutual interdependence, influencing the development of the press as an institution and an industry in Britain as well as in the colonies’ (Potter 2003, 1). The creation of a global telegraph system, through a network of undersea cables, also played a key role in the formal and informal growth of the empire, encouraging perceptions of the closeness between Britain and its colonies. A telegraph cable was laid from Falmouth to Malta and Alexandria in 1871, while the first reliable line be­ tween London and India had been opened in January 1865, enabling com­ munication with Calcutta and Bombay; Australia was linked with India in 1872; Shanghai and Tokyo were reached in 1873, while New Zealand was connected to Australia, and to the rest of the international network, in 1876. As Duncan Bell has argued in his work on ‘Greater Britain’ and the promo­ tion of ideas of imperial federation, telegraphs and steamships ‘allowed what had seemed unbridgeable distances to be overcome; the very perception of the political limits prescribed by nature was transformed’ (29). Victoria’s personal concern for her multitudinous subjects could be articulated and amplified by the communicative power of the telegraph network. Before leaving Buckingham Palace for her Diamond Jubilee procession, Victoria sent a special telegraph message rippling across the empire reading ‘From my heart I thank my beloved people. God bless them!’ This simultaneity was magnified for Victoria’s final illness, death and funeral. The event was unprecedented in bringing together global communities around a single in­ dividual; it was perhaps the first such example of a global media occasion played out in almost real­time. During her last days, regular bulletins were issued giving the latest on the Queen’s health. Communities from Montreal to Manchester, Bombay to Cape Town, were aware that they were part of a global drama. As Figure 5.2 demonstrates, illustrated newspapers were fond of depicting crowds gath­ ered around the latest telegraph or press bulletins, implicitly promoting their own central role in the unfolding events. The personality cult around Victoria was heightened by the positive feedback loop of audiences, at both the centre and periphery of empire, knowing that they were connected through the drama taking place at Osborne House. It is important not to overstate the singular agency of the telegraph in that it functioned as part of a broader eco­system of communication, linked to newspaper offices, special editions, word­of­mouth, civic meetings, church services and official bodies. Nonetheless, the speed with which news of Victoria’s death was transmitted around the world was extraordinary. The official announcement of Victoria’s death was made at 6.45pm on the 22 January through a telegraph from the Prince of Wales to the Lord Mayor of London, the Lord Chancellor and the Archbishop of Canterbury. A large

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  87

Figure 5.2 “The Death of the Queen. Anxiety in London”. 1901. Illustrated London News, January 26, 1901. Courtesy of Special Collections, University of Exeter Library (Great Britain).

crowd of journalists, who had been waiting at the gates of Osborne House, also rushed en masse to transmit the news from East Cowes telegraph office. By 7pm, the Lord Mayor was reading the news to large crowds gathered out­ side the Mansion House, his official London residence. It was at 6.58pm that

88  John Plunkett a private wire told the Birmingham Daily Mail and the Birmingham Daily Post of the news; special editions were on the streets within a few minutes (Bir­ mingham Weekly Post 1901, 2). This was a familiar story, with newspapers often receiving the news before the official announcements could be made. Cities across the British Empire, particularly those in the settler colonies, received the news around the same time as towns and cities in the United King­ dom. In Canada, the news was received just after 1pm by the Ottowa Journal (1901, 2). It was the Ottowa Journal that telephoned the news to all of the schools and other institutions in the city. In Toronto, Victoria’s death was announced by the Great North Western Telegraph at 1.32pm; even given the inexactitude of international times zones in 1901, it seems to have taken only a few minutes to transmit the news from Osborne (Toronto Mail 1901, 2). In Montreal, the news was first known just after 1.30pm through the bulletin boards outside the office of the Montreal Star; a special edition was on the streets minutes later (1901, 1). In New York, the news arrived just as quickly, first being received through a private cable to the sexton of Trinity Church, which arrived just be­ fore 1pm; special news editions were on the streets by 1.30pm (New York Times 1901a, 2). The official telegraph confirming Victoria’s death was not received at the British Consul in New York until 2.40pm. At least some remote villages in Britain received the news several hours later than communities thousands of miles away across the Atlantic. At one small village in Devon, Sampford Courtenay, they did not receive the news until 6.30am the following morning, long after New York and Montreal (Western Times 1901, 8). Looking east, the news arrived in Calcutta at around 2am on Wednesday morning, suggesting that it took just over two hours for the information to be transmitted, albeit Victoria’s death was not officially confirmed until a Reuters telegram was received at 5.25am (Indian Daily News 1901, 2). It then took another couple of hours to reach Australia. In Sydney, the news was received just after 9am by Admiral Beaufort, the Commander of the British Fleet in Australian waters, who communicated it to the Governor General (Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 1901, 7). The message had been sent from London at 7.45pm, so had just over three hours to reach Australia with the time dif­ ference. The Sydney Morning Herald had already started printing a special late edition at 10.15am (Brisbane Courier 1901a, 5). In Brisbane, the news was received just before 10am (Brisbane Courier 1901b, 5). Editorials in both the British and colonial press referred to the telegraph and press network as nerves that carried feelings as well as information backwards and forwards. The Age in Melbourne declared that ‘Through the agency of the newspaper press the people in this part of the world were able to realize what had happened almost as completely as if they has stood by the bedside of the dying Queen’ (The Age 1901a, 5). The Hindoo Patriot, published in Kolkata, declared, ‘the wires whimper in the winds, taking the news from the dark house of death to the children of the Queen, watching, waiting, sore hearted, at the uttermost ends of the earth’ (1901, 5). In Britain, an editorial in the Daily Express, a best­selling mass circulation newspaper,

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  89 waxed lyrical in imagining the news of Victoria’s death being transmitted around the world: The sun had sank in the Western seas when England heard the news that she had feared. But as the sun swept westward over the broad wa­ ters of the Atlantic the cables caught and passed him in the race, so that it was but early afternoon when the great Dominion knew the melan­ choly tidings. The bells jingle loudly in the streets of Ottowa as sleigh after sleigh come dashing to hear the news they feared… And so with flags at half­mast high and tolling, we leave the snow­ clad north and drop southwards to warmer climes. If the telegraph at Halifax has been swift Bermuda will know the sad news and will send it on to Turks Island, and so eastward to the Leeward and Windward Isles, to Jamaica and British Guiana. The merry, careless negroes will be mourning in their own fashion, crying bitter tears for her they loved so well… Once more we sweep on, across the Southern Seas, leaving behind the islands we own where the happy folk are splashing in the surf, ignorant of their loss since no cables pierce those waters till New Zealand bulks larger to the southward. The news may have reached them from Australia: and to Australia we pass, finding it now four in the morrow's morning. The cities still sleep, but when they rouse there will be no place where grief will be more deeply felt. Once more we track the cables westward. The news has reached Calcutta at midnight, and the crowded native quarters are awake mourning. (Daily Express 1901, 4) The Daily Express propels its British readers on a fantastical journey: they become one with the telegraph cables to experience the colonial affection towards Victoria. The global sweep of such narratives amplified Victoria’s aura through the reader’s mass participation in this imperial family. Commemorative poems published in newspapers similarly linked the unprecedented mass affect towards Victoria to the agency of the telegraph network. Even at the time, it was realized that the fervour towards her was not just due to her personal charisma but due to traditional positions of authority coming together with the new forms of technologically mediated visibility. Henry Bellyse Baildon (a Scottish poet and close friend of Robert Louis Stevenson) envisaged the message diffusing around the earth, collaps­ ing time and space into one mourning imperial body politic: Then thrilled the great globe like a sentient thing, Stung into life by sorrow, from there sped Along its swift electric nerves, that bring Together to one whole with heart and head

90  John Plunkett Members and limbs of that vast realm that are By continents and oceans sundered far, The words that said, ‘The Queen is Dead’. (Baildon 1901, 63) Baildon’s sentiments were echoed by George Gordon Mcrae in a poem pub­ lished in the Melbourne Argus on 2 February 1901. McCrae was a significant figure in Australian literary circles, and his poem, like the Daily Express edito­ rial, imagines the grief being carried around the world by the undersea cables: Swift coursers, urged by dire distress, Speed on their ‘hest, beneath the seas; All tireless, sans strain or stress, Each on his faithful mission flees, I mark them flying on their track, Deep mid the ocean’s gathering gloom, ‘Neath leagues of floating kelp and wrack, That mantle many a sailor’s tomb. They travel east, they travel west, And north and south, away from Home, Where each blind billow beats her breast And merges all her tears in foam… I see it on Old England’s shores Beneath the Polar Star, Out on the Hooghly’s Sand Heads, On the coasts of Malabar: At Madras (down Coromandel). Past Palks Straits, on Ceylon’s Isle, On proud Mascarene Mauritius, Where the sunny Seychelles smile. Where Gibraltar grimly frowning Guards to windward and to lee, And where Malta’s island fortress Sternly sentinels the sea. Where the sun smiles sore on Aden And bleaches Singapore…

(McRae 1901, 4)

It was not only British readers that were interpolated into the fantasy of an imperial family united: in the settler colonies of the Anglo­world, there was a desire to feel part of events taking place in both London and other colonial towns and cities. Victoria’s death produced an outpouring of grief across the empire. When news reached Montreal, for example, the fire bells were tolled for an hour, all flags were lowered and the theatres closed (Montreal Star 1901, 1). It was a

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  91 similar situation in India with public buildings closed and many businesses suspending trading. In Madras, a combined meeting of the Hindu and Mus­ lim members of the business community, held typically enough at the Vic­ toria Public Hall, called on all traders in Southern India to shut their doors from the following morning (Friday) to Sunday evening as a mark of respect (Madras Mail 1901, 4). Lord Ampthill, Governor General of Madras, noted that reaction to the Queen’s death was unprecedented, ‘Contrary to all cus­ tom, black is being worn by natives and put upon the door­posts and in the temple prayers are being said’ (BL IOC Ampthill to Hamilton Correspond­ ence, piece 41). On the same day as Victoria’s funeral cortege made its slow progress across London, memorial services took place across Britain and its empire. The consciousness of the day as an imperial coming together was frequently referred to during the innumerable memorial services (Figure 5.3). At the state service in St Paul’s Cathedral in Melbourne, the Dean spoke of their participation in ‘a mighty burial which is bounded by no insular limits – the tread of whose mourner’s feet is to be heard at the one time in India and Africa’ (The Age 1901b, 5) Many statues of Victoria became sites of formal and unofficial mourn­ ing. Public statuary of Victoria had proliferated in the preceding decades,

Figure 5.3 Mann, Randall. 1901. “Memorial Procession for Queen Victoria: The Imperial Guard of Honour Passing along Collins Street, Melbourne”. Illustrated London News, March 9, 1901: 349. Courtesy of Special Col­ lections, University of Exeter Library (Great Britain).

92  John Plunkett particularly in commemoration of the Golden and Diamond Jubilees. Mon­ uments could demonstrate the civic loyalty of a locale, but they were also used to proclaim Britain’s imperial presence in key urban spaces. Some sculptors received repeated commissions; statues of Victoria by Francis John Williamson, for example, were installed as far afield as Londonderry (1898), Auckland, King Williamstown, South Africa (1899), Paisley (1901), Hastings (1902), Christchurch (1903), Perth, Western Australia (1903), Wakefield (1905) and Rangoon (1908).2 Victoria’s death and funeral turned her statues into totemic sites for lo­ cal commemoration, a type of embodied presence in marble or bronze. For many audiences, this was the closest they would ever get to a life­sized pres­ ence of the Queen. The usage made of the statues demonstrates the sym­ bolism and cultural memory that could be embedded in statuary: they were not just inert abstractions. In Birmingham, the recently unveiled statue of Victoria by Thomas Brock became the site of civic commemoration; floral tributes were laid by many schools, organizations and businesses (Birming­ ham Mail 1901, 4). The day after Victoria’s death, the schoolboys from Gem Street Industrial School marched to her statue with their band playing the ‘Dead March’ in order to formally lay a wreath (‘An Impressive Scene’ 101, 4). On the day of the funeral, the pedestal of the statue was draped in purple and black and was the centrepiece of the city’s mourning: processions of individuals and groups of soldiers came to lay wreaths and pay their re­ spects. Just under 100,000 people were claimed to have visited the statue in the course of the day. The Birmingham Daily Gazette described it as ‘the shrine of the people’s loyalty’ (1901, 6). Across the British Empire, statues were put to use as sites of official and communal mourning. On the day of her funeral, Victoria’s statue in Montreal was heavily draped. A procession of troops marched through the city to Christ Church Cathedral for the memorial service. As they passed through Victoria Square, the troops saluted the statue of the dead Queen (Montreal Star 1901b, 24). Cape Town witnessed similar scenes; its statue of Victoria, also by Thomas Brock, opened in 1890 and situated in the gardens of the House of Parliament, became the fetishized centre of mourning. The pedestal was draped in black and numerous wreaths were placed around its base. At 2.30pm, a time deliberately chosen to mimic the service taking place at Windsor, there was a service around the statue, attended by troops, the mayor and local Corporation (Cape Times 1901a, 5). Throughout the day a constant stream of people filed past the statue: an attendant band played hymns and funeral marches. In addition to the official service, around 800 members of the Guild of Loyal Women held their own individual service by singing a hymn and slowly filing past the statue while also laying wreaths (Cape Times 1901b, 1901, 7). In Durban and Pietermauritzberg in Kwa­Zulu Natal, commemoration was similar. Around 5,000 members of the local Indian Muslim community gathered for their own early morning mourning service around the Durban statue

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  93 erected in honour of the Diamond Jubilee; addresses extolling Victoria were given in six languages (East England Daily News 1901, 7; Evening Standard 1901, 5). Events in Australia and India mirrored those in Canada and South Af­ rica. In Adelaide, the Queen’s statue in Victoria Square, unveiled in 1894, became the centrepiece for the mourning; crowds gathered around it day and night and many wreaths and tributes were laid at its feet, including one from the Governor (Adelaide Observer 1901, 7). It was the same in Sydney; Victoria’s statue in the appropriately named Queen’s square was the site for the laying of floral wreaths by organization like the Young Women’s Chris­ tian Association of New South Wales (Evening News (Sydney) 1901, 5). On 1 February, the National Guard marched to the statue with reversed arms so that their commanding office could lay a wreath at its base (Melbourne Argus 1901, 7). On the day of the funeral itself, troops stood with arms re­ versed around the statue and an estimated crowd of 40,000 people gathered (Sidney Daily Telegraph 1901, 6). In India, there were fewer statues but that in Bombay by Matthew Noble, the first of Victoria to be erected after the rebellion 1857, played a key role in local ceremonial. The night prior to the funeral, Indian soldiers had kept guard with arms reversed at Victoria’s statue, an eerie echo of the actions of those soldiers guarding Victoria’s coffin before its final journey from Portsmouth to Windsor (Leeds Mercury 1901, 10). The intensity of reaction to Victoria’s death seems to have taken colonial officials by surprise. Members of the British Raj certainly did not expect such a fulsome response. On 24 January, Lord Curzon, the Viceroy of In­ dia, wrote a letter to Lord George Hamilton, the London­based Secretary of State for India, which epitomizes the perceived importance of Victoria’s matriarchy to promoting imperial feeling: No one who has not been to this country can well realise the extent to which the British Government, the monarchy, and the Empire, were summed up and symbolised in the mind of the Oriental in the person­ ality of the Queen. Nowhere throughout the empire did loyalty assume a more personal, and therefore, a more passionate form… The virtues of the Queen, her domestic character, her homeliness, the old­fashioned simplicity of her sentiments and sayings, the fact that she was equally revered as Mother, Wife and Queen, have all combined to produce an overpowering effect upon the imagination of the Asiatic. (BL IOC MSS Hamilton Papers, 24 January 1901) Curzon’s self­congratulatory belief in the susceptibility of Indians to the potent charisma of Victoria is clearly part and parcel of his Orientalism. In a fashion akin to Bagehot’s conception of the Crown’s dignified role dazzling the populace, it is as if the naiveté of the Indians needs British rule to be concentrated in the charismatic figure of the Queen­Empress.

94  John Plunkett Expressions of loyalty by native and indigenous communities need to be treated with caution however. Nugent and Carter argue that affective modes of speaking and of expressing relationships to a distant queen were a medium for a hardnosed and clear­eyed political agendas, or for extending the terms of engagement between Indigenous people and settlers, or indeed among Indigenous people themselves. (Carter and Nugent 2016, 6). Taylor has likewise argued that Indian proclamations of reverence for Queen Victoria were complex and multifaceted, noting that while it en­ compassed ‘clientelism’, particularly on the part of Indian princes and mercantile elites, personal fealty towards Victoria was a means of criti­ quing British rule from a standpoint of loyalism. Taylor claims that such loyalism ‘was not just incidental to nineteenth­century Indian national­ ism, a polite addition for the sake of form – it was central to its ideology’ (Taylor 2018, 6). Across these varied motivations for the expression of personal loyalty for Victoria, what is striking is the way it became a capacious discourse for en­ gagement between Indian communities and British officialdom. In the im­ mediate aftermath of her death, Curzon was struck by the weight of native discourse reiterating maternal homage. He noted that in score after score of the communications that I am getting from Native Societies, or individuals, the word recurs. They truly loved her as a mother even more than they revered her as a Queen. Strange freaks of phraseology sometimes find their way into these telegrams. (BL IOC MSS Hamilton Papers, piece 91) Others were equally taken aback; William Mackworth Young, the Lieutenant­Governor of Punjab noted, after having seen numerous evi­ dences of native grief, noted ‘It is marvellous what a hold she acquired on the affections of the people’ (BL IOC Curzon Papers, piece 18). Hamilton, too, was equally surprised at Curzon’s letter reporting the Indian devotion to Victoria’s character, writing back that ‘I had no idea that the deference and homage given to her were of so personal a character’ (BL IOC, Private Correspondence of Lord Hamilton to Lord Curzon, piece 47). The surprise of Hamilton and Curzon suggests that, while the Raj certainly made the most of Victoria’s iconic position, the British ruling elite did not fully com­ prehend, and was certainly not fully controlling of, the symbolism invested in the Mother­Empress. Curzon’s own memorial address at the Supreme Legislative Council is just one example of the institutional deployment of the cultus of the maternal Queen­Empress. Reiterating Tennyson once again, British rule was legiti­ mated and humanized through Victoria’s feminine and familial qualities.

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  95 India in its long cycles has had no such Empress, tender­hearted, large­ minded, just, humane, the loving parent of her subjects of every race and clime. All the Princes of India have been proud to own their fealty to so noble an example of sovereignty, and the hearts of all the Indian peoples have been drawn together by this singular and beautiful com­ bination of mother, woman, and queen. (Indian Daily News 1901b, 13) Addresses from Indian societies and newspaper editorials in the wake of Victoria’s death do reiterate, or at least reflect back to the British Raj, the pervasive matriarchal discourse. The Oudh Times declared that the people knew it was the Maharani who was the mistress of their destinies. Who has fed the famished—the Maharani. Who protects their life and property—the Maharani. Who protects their religion—the Maharani. They have never cast their eyes upon that Maharani, but all the same they sang her praise. (Madras Mail 1901b, 1901, 8) The extent of Indian mourning suggests that she was more than the distant Great White Queen. Moreover, the tributes suggest that her interest in the religious and constitutional freedom of her Indian people could be appro­ priated to highlight failures in the British Raj. A long article in the Bengalee exemplifies how Victoria could be claimed for India and turned against the masculine and martial values of British imperialism. The Bengalee, pub­ lished in Calcutta between 1863 and 1931, was the highest­circulating Indian weekly in the late nineteenth­century. It was also an important voice of the Indian nationalist movement, and this is reflected in its final complex verdict upon Victoria: To our people she was not a mere abstraction, but an incarnation in the very flesh and blood of the lofty womanhood which they have adored through the ages in a Sita or a Savitri… And the personality of the Queen was the property of every Indian home. She was not to us the Queen who rides in the thick of the battle with blood on her sword­blade and blood on her spur and her bridle­rein, not the Queen described in Kipling’s verse, not the Queen of the hard­hearted, iron­heeled, pitiless Neo­Imperialism which at present is the master passion of England, but the Queen who was the emblem of an exalted widowhood, of a sacred and all­embracing maternity… And at the same time we knew that al­ though she could not do much to influence our destinies, her mother’s heart yearned with an equal affection for all her subjects, irrespective of colour and of creed… They had never seen her in their midst, it is true. But her gentle virtues and the riches of her love had made her a holy presence among them. And the Hindoo knew her as the Bhagavati of his Pantheon, the sacred well of infinite Power and of infinite Beneficence,

96  John Plunkett the incarnation in the Kali Yuga of the Universal Mother in whom all Being is and from whom all Being draws it life. (Homeward Mail from India, China and the East 1901, 7) The Bengalee fashions an Indianized Victoria, a figure akin to a revered Hindu deity; such comparisons were not uncommon in that Taylor has noted that other Indian writers saw her as the incarnation of Lakshmi or a Chakravarti, while she was also ‘likened to Muslim women rulers – Bilqis and Qaidafa, and to Persian kings such as Nausherwan, renowned for their justice’ (Taylor 2018, 184). The Bengalee is deeply aware of both Victoria’s personal interest in India and the limitations on her ability to directly im­ pact their lives. This clear­eyed refashioning of Victoria and the limits of her matriarchal agency is the antithesis to Curzon’s Orientalism. The more Victoria’s role as beneficent mother was stressed, the more its contradiction with the ultimately forcible maintenance of British rule could be exploited. In the English­language Hindoo Patriot, a newspaper generally supportive of the British administration, a poem by Satish Chandra Mukherjee simi­ larly fashioned an Indian Victoria. Mukherjee was a well­known nationalist writer and educationalist who founded the Dawn Society in 1902. His poem declares that India is most attuned of all nations to Victoria’s character and benignant rule. Her feminine virtues allow Mukherjee to claim her as Hindu, ‘For thou was Hindu/In Spirit, self­forgetful, forgiving’. The final lines go even further in desiring an Indianized Victoria: But India keeps remembrance of days When to her the Sovereign was divine, And glad should she be, if Victoria, The same, but enrobed in homelier garb, Under Indian skies, should reappear, With benignant grace, Goddess­like, herald Of morning peace and brotherhood of nations! (Babu Satish Chandra Mukerji 1901, 4) It is impossible to gauge the degree to which such pronouncements were expressions of popular feeling or complex remediations that ventriloquize imperial discourse. Nonetheless, it is telling that the British Raj’s promotion of Victoria’s concern for her Indian subjects could spill over into those sub­ jects quite literally making Victoria one of their own. The very strength of personality cult around the Queen­Empress was not its totalizing dominion but its mutability. It was not only Indian tributes that turned Victoria into a quasi­deified figure; for others, it also marked the apotheosis of her familial role. Poets reaching for suitably redolent symbolism employed tropes more often asso­ ciated with the Virgin Mary. One epic tribute, published in Trinidad, even referred to her as ‘England’s Madonna’ (Charles Eryl Secundyne Assee 1902,

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  97 71). Many elegies, including those by poet laureate Alfred Austin, Theodore Martin and Alfred Munby, imagined Victoria continuing her maternal pro­ tection after death.3 Lewis Morris imagined Victoria as a star shining above the lives of her countless subjects, who continue to yearn for her comforting presence. Morris’s elegy is the most prominent tribute to use Marian im­ agery in that it was first published in the high­circulation Graphic in its issue of 26 January 1901 (Morris 1901, 114). In Morris’s poem, Victoria’s role as protector and guardian carries on from above: Thou showest a single star Shining serene above the gathering strife, The clouds, the troubles of thy people’s life; For thee to­day thy countless millions yearn With heart and lips that burn. (Morris 1901, 114) Victoria is transfigured into the abstract yet universal figure of ‘The Mother’, taking up the cares of her subjects regardless of creed. The final stanza goes further in that Victoria is again figured as a star, whose stead­ fast will and pure heart continue to guide Britain and the colonies. Morris’s call for maternal protection was given impetus by imperial anxieties of the day because ‘The curse of war still vexes, and our race/Seems sinking to disgrace’, a reference to both the reverses of the Boer war and the fear of racial degeneration. Morris desires Victoria to plead with God on their behalf: Think of us still, if God so wills, and plead! As dearly thou wert wont indeed, For this thy people which must toil and bleed. Plead thou for Peace for all the suffering Earth Till comes at last Man’s New Millennial birth: Plead, tender, aged voice, till all is well! Friend! Sovereign! Mother! Oh, Farewell! Farewell! (Morris 1901, 114) Victoria, the universal pure mother who is also a star, is to act as intercessor with God on behalf of her people, who are not only the British but also her race. Morris’s poem is the culmination, in its most extreme form, of the ma­ triarchal icon of Victoria: her sanctified figure takes on the qualities of the holiest mother of all. Public statuary and the imperial press network were not the only way for re­ mote audiences to participate in the death and mourning for Queen Victoria: the new medium of film was able to replay the funeral events again and again in the subsequent months. Since its inception, Victoria and Albert had been enthusiasts for the new medium of photography. Compared to prints and drawings, the realism of the camera seemed to offer a more authentic and

98  John Plunkett intimate link with the sitters it depicted. Between 1860 and 1862, three to four million copies of Victoria’s carte-de-visite were said to have been sold (Wyn­ ter 1869, 126). The moving images of early film extended this phenomenon. Queen Victoria was first filmed at Balmoral in early October 1896 during a visit by Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra. Her journal describes being captured ‘by the new cinematograph process, which makes moving pictures by winding off a reel of films. We were walking up & down & the children jumping about’ (Queen Victoria’s Journal 1896). The scenes were delightfully intimate and domestic – a family at leisure showing off for the latest novelty. Film, though, was equally successful at capturing the grand ceremonial occasions that were intended to bring nations together. Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was one of the first major public events to be filmed, and provided a significant boost for the early British film industry. Films of every part of Victoria’s funeral procession subsequently received showings as far apart as New York, Bombay, Cape Town, Paris, Singapore, Auckland and Singapore.4 Just like the telegraphed news of her death, there was an impe­ tus to get the pictures developed and distributed as quickly as possible. In Melbourne, funeral scenes were first shown at the Athenaeum on 18 March 1901; they were also in Sydney at the Centenary Hall by 23 March 1901, and in Brisbane in early April.5 When Diamond Jubilee films were shown in Adelaide, crowds gave sus­ tained applause for the appearance of the Queen and the South Australian Premier and troops (South Australian Register 1897, 6). This frisson of inti­ macy, recognition and participation also pervaded responses to the funeral pictures. The Daily Telegraph in Sydney noted that the audience clapped when the royal personages first appeared in the procession: The audience was quick to recognize the royal presences, and ap­ plauded, inappropriately, perhaps, but spontaneously… It was a cold day in London and Windsor, and the hot breath of the horses as it comes into contact with the sharp air can be distinctly seen. In fact one can easily imagine standing on a point of vantage and viewing the procession for himself. (Daily Telegraph (Sydney) 1901, 5) In New Zealand, the first appearance of the funeral pictures was on 3 April at Auckland Theatre Royal and ‘gave all present a splendid Idea of what the sol­ emn pageant must have been like’ (Auckland Star 1901, 2). The whole evening performance was devoted to Victoria; it included films of her visit to Ireland in 1900 and lantern slides of royal residences. Funeral pictures continued to tour relentlessly, spreading out from cities to smaller towns. Nearly six months after the funeral, at the Theatre Royal in the small New Zealand town of Palmerston, Cooper and McDermott’s Cinematograph Company was still touring with its Victoria films (Wairarapa Daily Times 1901, 4).

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  99 Victoria’s funeral led to a proliferation of commemorative schemes, en­ suring a lasting manifestation of her charismatic global presence. Long after death, many of her former subjects had statues of the Queen­Empress look­ ing imposingly down upon them. Often located in key public spaces, the stat­ ues continued to be used as sites for civic ceremonial. In Toronto, Victoria’s statue in Queen’s Park, unveiled in 1903, was repeatedly used as the focal point for celebrations of Empire Day in the years running up to 1914. In 1913, for example, a review of cadets in the park included them marching past the statue, which was then covered in floral tributes by groups of schoolchildren (Toronto Star 1913, 7). Empire Day in Australia and New Zealand, which was celebrated on 24 May, Victoria’s birthday, similarly made local statues the centrepiece of annual celebrations in the 1900s and 1910s. The monumental legacy of the personality cult around Queen Victoria, however, had the consequence of aligning her firmly with colonialism and its discontents. Statues became targets for a range of nationalist groups and causes. In the aftermath of the Second World War, post­colonial regimes in Africa and Asia removed many signs and symbols of imperial rule; and more recently, the Black Lives Matter and #RhodesMustFall movements have protested against the continued presence of imperial monuments. The Black Lives Matter protests in June 2020 saw ‘racist’, ‘coloniser’, ‘murderer’ and ‘slave owner’ graffitied onto the pedestal of Victoria’s statue in Leeds, erected in 1905 as one of many memorial statues. With Queen Victoria, however, such attacks have a much longer history than is often realized. Even before the end of her reign, in 1895 Victoria’s statue in Bombay was attacked and covered with a large bucket of tar, and also had a pair of old sandals draped around her neck (South Wales Daily News 1896, 5). In Au­ gust 1901 in Malta, a statue of Victoria was similarly defaced with corrosive liquid during a dispute over whether the official language on Malta should be English or Italian (West Australian 1901, 5). Again, during the rise of the Indian nationalist movement, the crown of Victoria’s statue was struck off during riots in Delhi in 1907; in late 1908, Queen Victoria’s statue in Maha­ raj Bagh, one of public gardens in Nagpur, was vandalized, as was another a Benares. (East Anglian Daily Times 1907, 10). No longer the Great White Queen, the Nagpur statuehad had been covered with tar, the nose was pulled off and sceptre broken. For this crime, a student at the Agricultural College at Nagpur was sentenced to two year’s imprisonment, and an Overseer at a government farm, to one year’s imprisonment (Staffordshire Sentinel 1909, 5). The tar proved difficult to erase and the statue was ultimately removed from its pedestal; it was forgotten about until 1951, when it was rediscovered at the bottom of a city water reservoir (The Times of India 1951, 7).6 The paradox at the heart of Queen Victoria’s position is that, unlike some other examples of ruler personality cults, the potency of her idealized status operated in an almost inverse proportion to perceptions of her direct politi­ cal power (albeit in her personal interactions with governments and officials she was more than capable of making her strong views known). Her death,

100  John Plunkett funeral and commemoration is just one intensive example of the plurality of agents and formats through which – thanks to their cumulative and iterative effect – she became a monumental yet everyday colonial presence; moreover, the many statues of Victoria continued to be significant sites for civic and imperial ceremony in subsequent decades. The unprecedented global nature of Victoria’s imperial figure was a distinct chapter in the making of mod­ ern ruler iconographies. As the spectrum of responses to her death demon­ strates, there still remains a need for more focused studies of her fashioning by different countries and communities. While, the period around the end of Victoria’s reign was the high point of British imperial sway, the chequered afterlives of her statues show how quickly her benevolent iconography was challenged, disrupted or simply forgotten.

Notes

References Adelaide Observer. 1901. “At the Queen’s Statue.” February 9, 1901, 7. The Age. 1901a. “Mourning in Melbourne.” January 25, 1901, 5. The Age. 1901b. “St Paul’s Cathedral.” February 4, 1901, 5. “Ampthill to Hamilton Correspondence.” BL IOC, MSS EUR F 123/96. Assee, Charles Eryl Secundyne. 1902. Laus Reginae (A Memorial Tribute). Trini­ dad: Franklin’s Electric Printery. Atwal, Priya. 2017. “Domesticity and Contested Sovereignty in Anglo­Sikh Impe­ rial Relations: the “Family Saga” of Maharani Jind Kaur, Maharajah Duleep Singh and Queen Victoria, 1843–1893”. PhD, University of Oxford. Auckland Star. 1901. “Cinematograph Entertainment.” April 4, 1901, 2. Austin, Alfred. 1901. “Victoria.” The Times, January 24, 1901, 6. Australian Star. 1901. “Queen Victoria’s Funeral.” March 23, 1901, 4. Bagehot, Walter. 2001. The English Constitution, ed. Miles Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baildon, Bellyse. 1901. “The Queen is Dead.” In Poetical Tributes to Queen Victoria, edited by Charles Forshaw, 63. London: Swan Sonnenshein. Bell, Duncan. 2007. The Idea of a Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  101 Birmingham Daily Gazette. 1901. “Birmingham in Mourning.” February 4, 1901, 6. Birmingham Mail. 1901a. “An Impressive Scene.” January 24, 1901, 4. Birmingham Mail. 1901b. “The Adornment of the Birmingham Statue.” January 31, 1901, 4. Birmingham Weekly Post. 1901. “The News in Birmingham.” January 26, 1901, 2. Brisbane Courier. 1901a. “The Southern States.” January 24, 1901, 5. Bonea, Amelia. 2016. The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c.1830-1890. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Brisbane Courier. 1901b. “Reception of the News in Queensland.” January 24, 1901, 5. Brisbane Courier. 1901c. “The Cinematograph Pictures.” April 5, 1901, 6. Cannadine, David. 2001. Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. Ox­ ford: Oxford University Press. Cape Times. 1901a. “Funeral Ceremony.” February 1, 1901, 5. Cape Times. 1901b. “In Cape Town.” February 4, 1901, 7. Cape Times. 1901c. “Royal Biograph.” April 6, 1901, 6. Carter, Sarah, and Maria Nugent. 2016. “Introduction.” In Mistress of Everything: Queen Victoria in Indigenous Worlds, edited by Sarah Carter and Maria Nugent, 1–21. Manchester: Manchester University Press. “A Collection of Cuttings from English and Foreign Newspapers on the death and funeral of Queen Victoria.” 1901. British Library, 19. British Library 1899. r.17. “Curzon, Lord, to Lord Hamilton, Letters.” BL IOC, MSS (Hamilton Papers) EUR F D 510/7. “Curzon Papers.” BL IOC, MSS EUR F 111/203. Daily Express. 1901. “An Empire in Tears.” January 23, 1901, 4. Daily Telegraph. 1901. “The Queen’s Funeral.” March 25, 1901, 5. Daily Telegraph (Sydney). 1901. “How the News Arrived.” January 24, 1901, 7. East Anglian Daily Times. 1901. “Memorial Service Abroad.” February 4, 1901, 7. East Anglian Daily Times. 1907. “Reported outrage on the statue of Queen Victo­ ria.” May 15, 1907, 10. Evening News (Sydney). 1901. “The Queen’s Statue.” January 25, 1901, 5. Evening Standard. 1901. “Durban.” February 4, 1901, 5. Giloi, Eva. 2011. Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Giloi, Eva, and Edward Berenson, eds. 2010. Constructing Charisma: Celebrity, Fame, and Power in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Oxford: Berghahn Books. Graphic. 1897. “For Queen and Empire.” June 26, 1897, 782. Graphic. 1901. “Place Aux Dames.” February 6, 1901, 16. Guyana Chronicle. 2018. “Queen Victoria Statue Defaced.” June 5, 2018. http:// guyanachronicle.com/2018/06/05/queen­victoria­statue­defaced Hindoo Patriot. 1901. “Death of our Beloved Queen.” January 24, 1901, 5. Homeward Mail from India, China and the East. 1901. “The Native Papers.” Febru­ ary 18, 1901, 7. Indian Daily News. 1901a. “Receipt of the News in Calcutta.” January 24, 1901, 2. Indian Daily News. 1901b. “The Viceroy’s Tribute to the Late Queen.” February 7, 1901, 13. It’s Going Down. 2019. “Montreal: Macdonald Monument & Queen Victo­ ria Statue Vandalized Again.” May 24, 2019. https://itsgoingdown.org/ montreal­macdonald­monument­queen­victoria­statue­vandalized­again/ Kaul, Chandrika. 2003. Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, 1880–1922. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

102  John Plunkett Kaul, Chandrika, ed. 2006. Media and the British Empire. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Lant, Jeffrey. 1980. Insubstantial Pageant: Ceremony and Confusion at Queen Victoria’s Court. New York: Taplinger. Leeds Mercury. 1901. “Vigil by the Queen’s Statue.” February 4, 1901, 10. Madras Mail. 1901a. “[Editorial].” January 24, 1901, 4. Madras Mail. 1901b. “The Oudh Times.” January 30, 1901, 8. Martin, Theodore. 2001. “Victoria the Good.” Nineteenth Century and After 99: 335. McRae, Gordon. 1901. “Victoria Regina Et Imperatrix.” Melbourne Argus, Febru­ ary 2, 1901, 4. Melbourne Argus. 1901a. “In Other States.” February 2, 1901, 7. Melbourne Argus. 1901b. “Athenaeum Hall.” March 16, 1901, 16. Melbourne Argus. 1901c. “Athenaeum Hall.” March 18, 1901, 3. Montreal Gazette. 2019. “Montreal’s John A. Macdonald and Queen Victoria statues vandalized again.” May 17, 2019. https://montrealgazette.com/news/local­news/ montreals­john­a­macdonald­and­queen­victoria­statues­vandalized­again Montreal Star. 1901a. “Announcing the News.” January 22, 1901, 1. Montreal Star. 1901b. “The Brigade Parade.” February 2, 1901, 24. Montreal Star. 2019. “Anti­colonial group claims responsibility for Queen Victo­ ria vandalism.” March 24, 2019. https://montrealgazette.com/news/local­news/ anti­colonial­group­claims­responsibility­for­queen­victoria­vandalism Morris, Lewis. 1891. The Works of Lewis Morris. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner and Co. Morris, Lewis. 1901. “In Loving Memory.” Graphic, January 26, 1901, 114. Mukerji, Babu Satish Chandra. 1901. “A National Memorial.” Hindoo Patriot, Feb­ ruary 5, 19014. Munby, Alfred. 1901. “The Queen’s Best Monument”, and other Articles, Poems, and Letters on the Queen. London: The Spectator. New York Times. 1901a. “New York’s Mourning for Queen Victoria.” January 23, 1901, 2. New York Times. 1901b. “Huber’s Museum.” March 16, 1901, 19. Ottawa Journal. 1901. “When the News Came.” January 23, 1901, 2. Potter, Simon. 2003. News and the British World: The Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922. Oxford: Oxford University Press. “Private Correspondence of Lord Hamilton to Lord Curzon.” BL IOC, MSS EUR C 126/3. Proquest and Royal Archives. [1896] 2012. Queen Victoria’s Journals. http://www. queenvictoriasjournals.org/home.do Read, Donald. 1999. The Power of News: The History of Reuters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Riall, Lucy. 2008. Garibaldi: Invention of a Hero. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Singapore Free Press and Mercantile Advertiser. 1901. “The New Biograph.” July 10, 1901, 2. Smith Victoria. 1998. “Constructing Victoria: The Representation of Queen Victo­ ria in England, India and Canada, 1897–1914.” PhD thesis, University of Rutgers. South Australian Register. 1897. “Royal Jubilee Cinematograph.” September 2, 1897, 6. South Wales Daily News. 1896. “Insult to Queen Victoria.” October 19, 1896, 5. Staffordshire Sentinel. 1909. “Desecration of Queen Victoria’s Statue.” January 29, 1909, 5.

Queen Victoria and cult of colonial loyalty  103 Stocker, Mark. 2016. “‘A Token of Their Love’: Queen Victoria Memorials in New Zealand.” 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, 22: n.p. http://doi.org/10.16995/ntn.724 Sydney Daily Telegraph. 1901. “At the Queen’s Statue.” February 4, 1901, 6. Sydney Morning Herald. 1901a. “Cinematograph Show.” April 6, 1901, 9. Sydney Morning Herald. 1901b. “Cinematographs of Queen Victoria’s Funeral.” March 25, 1901, 5. Taylor, Miles. 2018. Empress: Queen Victoria and India. New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ versity Press. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. [1873] 1969. “To The Queen.” In The Poems of Tennyson, edited by Christopher Ricks, 1755–1756. London: Longman. Tennyson, Lord Alfred. [1886] 1908. “Opening of the Indian and Colonial Exhi­ bition by the Queen.” In The Works of Alfred Lord Tennyson 4, 395. ed. Hallam, Lord Tennyson. London: Macmillan. Times of India. 1901. “The Cinematograph.” August 5, 1901, 3. The Times of India. 1951. “Queen Victoria’s Statue.” July 5, 1951, 7. Toronto Mail. 1901. “Toronto Mourns.” January 23, 1901, 2. Toronto Star. 1913. “Great Day for the Toronto Children.” May 23, 1913, 7. Wairarapa Daily Times. 1901. “Palmerston News.” July 30, 1901, 3. West Australian. 1901. “Malta.” August 16, 1901, 5. Western Times. 1901. “Sampford Courtenay.” January 25, 1901, 8. Wyatt, F. B. 1901. “Victoria.” Western Times, January 25, 1901, 8. Wynter, Andrew. 1869. “Contemporary News. Cartes de Visite.” British Journal of Photography, March 12, 1869, 126.

6

The magic mirror Supplicant letters and the role of false equivalences in shaping ruler dominance Eva Giloi

As a young emperor in the 1890s, Wilhelm II chose the poses of absolutism for his state portraits. Modeled on the works of Hyacinthe Rigaud, Louis XIV’s court painter, one of the portraits intended for the German embassy in Paris was a classic example of Wilhelm’s tactlessness: although he filtered the reference to Louis XIV through the lens of Rigaud’s portrait of August III, the reference was clear to contemporaries and caused an international scandal for its ill­timed allusions to Versailles (Schoch 1975, 198–201). But the iconography also reveals a deeper intention in Wilhelm’s domestic pol­ icy. From the outset of his reign, the emperor intended to be the incarnation of the state and to reestablish, as much as possible, the absolute authority of hereditary monarchy. Rejecting a century of royal iconography that had depicted the hereditary monarch as the “first servant of the state” – a style exemplified in the portraiture of his predecessor Wilhelm I (1861–1888) – Wilhelm II adopted the style of the Sun King at the center of the political universe as the basis for his right to rule. The Kaiser’s iconography appro­ priated the phrase l’état, c’est moi to mean that an exalted emperor would lead Germany to glory. Setting himself apart at the political and social center, Wilhelm II used the magnificence of his person – his version of a cult of personality – to legitimate his rule. Filmmakers played along: by the turn of the century, Wilhelm II was the most filmed person in the world and a regular feature in the cinema of at­ tractions (Kohlrausch 2010, 55). The Kaiser’s striking appearance played to the technical requirements of early film: the highly choreographed nature of royal events allowed cameramen to set up their equipment in advance with the best chances for visual success; the settings in which the emperor was filmed provided ready­made, visually exotic backdrops; his uniforms and eagle helmet were so distinctive and unique that he could be identified even when the quality of the film was poor; the repetition of his image in other settings – photographs, magazines – reduced his person to a kind of “visual shorthand” that did not require elaborate explanation or sound to convey a message (Kohlrausch 2010, 55–56). The prevalence of his autocratic ico­ nography made him a readily legible character in the “sociology of urban types.” In this “theater of characterology,” the monarch in his royal robes

False equivalences in ruler dominance  105 and glittering parades became metonymic for the grandeur of the state and nation (Apter 2010, 87–88). Not all of his subjects were convinced by the spectacle, however. Max We­ ber considered Wilhelm “the very opposite” of the “genuinely charismatic ruler” because he relied on “the convenient pretensions of the present ‘di­ vine right of kings’” rather than proving himself, through his actions, to be “the master willed by God” (Weber 1968, 1114, 1157). Walther Rathenau, the industrialist and future foreign minister, ridiculed Wilhelm II’s reign as a form of “electro­journalistic Caesaropapism,” which promoted traditional Byzantine visions of rule through the abuse of modern media (Rathenau 1919, 30).1 Friedrich Naumann, one of Germany’s most prominent liberal politicians, ignored Wilhelm’s claims to the absolutist authority of Louis XIV and instead focused on Wilhelm’s potential as a populist Volkskaiser and “Integrator” (Kohlrausch 2010, 53–54). The public, too, seemed to have mixed feelings about Wilhelm II’s pretentions. Large crowds attended the Kaiser’s royalist ceremonial and collected royal postcards, photographs, and other loyalist memorabilia (Giloi 2011, 2012, 407–451). On the other hand, the satirical weekly Simplicissimus made a tidy profit from mock­ ing the emperor’s pomposity, and when Ludwig Quidde published a thinly veiled comparison of Wilhelm II to the Roman emperor Caligula, twinned in their maniacal grab for power and presumed mental illness, Caligula be­ came the best­selling pamphlet in the history of the Empire, with 200,000 copies in print (Kohlrausch 2005, 124). Given this incongruity, Wilhelm II’s cult of personality has to be called a failure since it did not have the persua­ sive force to promote the allegiance that persona cults aim to create. But why did it fail? This essay argues that Wilhelm II’s autocratic cult of personality was fatally hampered by deep­seated changes in social life that could not easily be papered over by the monarchy’s iconographic strategies. These changes in cultural mentality challenged the traditional hierarchical mindset by foregrounding individual and subjective experience, and in the process created false equivalences that led to feelings of discontent when they were not acknowledged by the monarchy. As a result, Wilhelm II’s at­ tempts to establish a new­found pseudo­charisma based on the return to absolutist iconography was doomed to fail, despite its photogenic nature. What kinds of sources can one draw upon, though, to determine such changes in mentality? Or from the perspective of reception history: what kinds of sources represent a reliable supply of subjects’ voices? Supplicant letters, written to the Hohenzollern monarchy over the years, are one such source, and a tempting one at that. Asking the king for support is a Euro­ pean tradition that reaches back into the Middle Ages with the laying on of hands. In the German states, from the early modern period onwards, municipalities routinely petitioned their princes as they passed through their lands, often using lavish entrance ceremonies to press their economic claims. On an individual level, needy subjects had long turned to the mon­ archy as a last resort when they could not find support elsewhere, while

106  Eva Giloi requests for patronage of artistic and scientific endeavors reached the mon­ archy in growing numbers in the inventive nineteenth century. Together, supplicant letters form a substantial source base that goes beyond the anec­ dotal and takes on a critical mass of analysis. Moreover, while petitions to the monarch are a long­standing form of engagement between subjects and ruler, used by communities to establish ties and clarify relations between the state and local notables, when written by individuals supplicant letters illuminate how subjects saw their relationship to the monarchy and can thus reveal subterranean shifts in popular mentalities toward authority. And while petitions are formalized tools of social interaction, with clear admin­ istrative rules and rituals, supplicant letters introduce a level of subjectivity that lends them the valence of a “magic mirror,” reflecting the individual’s horizon of expectations as much as the status and power of the ruler. Still, letters must be treated with care. First, letters were disproportion­ ately written by supporters of monarchy – or to be more precise, the letters were only preserved by court officials if they are supportive – which can limit and distort the range of opinions represented in the letters. Writers also self­censored their letters because they were performative: letters were intended to activate a desired outcome, either the concrete objective of fi­ nancial gain or the reassurance of meaning in one’s social existence through the act of connecting to the social center. To activate this desired outcome, or even more fundamentally to reach the monarch in the first place, letter writers were conscious that they had to use stylistic rules that followed an established genre. The role of genre must not be underestimated: as will be shown below, supplicant letters followed a pattern that reached far into the twentieth century – Hitler still received the same types of letters as did Wilhelm II or, even earlier, Friedrich Wilhelm IV. Because of the role that genre played in how the letters were formulated, one needs to be careful not to read them merely on their surface level and assume that expressions of admiration or abject supplication were really meant or felt that way: these formulaic expressions were as likely to have been copied from letter­writing and etiquette books, or based on the services of scribes or local notables who advised the writers on how to write. That same caveat also provides an opportunity, however, because the for­ mal structure of genre offers a view, through its fissures, into changes in mentality. It is not the continuous surface narratives of the letters, but the subtle changes in expressions of motivation – why the writers were writing, or even who felt he or she was allowed to write – that can mirror new social and cultural assumptions that arose and pervaded society, even if they were not expressed openly or consciously. This essay will look at such letters to see how expectations of the monar­ chy’s connection to the people changed. It will divide the letters into three types of requests: for financial capital, social capital, and cultural capital. The letters requesting financial capital remained relatively consistent over time, and relied on a process of humanization. The humanization of the

False equivalences in ruler dominance  107 Landesvater arose first in the eighteenth century: by acknowledging the hu­ man nature of the king, rather than his semi­divine status, humanization gave the state a personal embodiment, linking king and state to the fate of their subjects. Letters seeking social capital arose with the increasing sense of social power among the middle class, and were based on a cultural shift of personalization: personalization developed rapidly in the nineteenth cen­ tury and facilitated what John B. Thompson calls “non­reciprocal intimacy at a distance,” in particular through the tropes of family and familiarity (Thompson 1995). But this social capital had to be embedded in an actual object – not a financial gift, but an object that created the social equivalence, and this took its concrete form in the autograph, especially as performed on the carte­de­visite photograph at mid­century. The request for cultural cap­ ital, or patronage of art works, was embedded within a longer tradition, but took on a new form at the fin­de­siècle as a highly subjective identification with the monarch through the conduit of the authentic soul. Identification arose from the conditions of late nineteenth­century modernity, at a time when “all that is solid melts into air” (to quote Marshall Berman quoting Karl Marx) and individuals sought to confirm their sense of identity among a multiplicity of identity choices. In each case, the magic mirror of subjective exchange, arising beneath the surface genre narrative, created a growing sense of equivalence that broke down the barriers between subject and monarch – at least in the minds of the subjects. Royal iconography was thus not the property of the monarchy alone, as the personality of the ruler had a limited impact on the content of the letters. Far more important was the ruler’s “recognizability factor”: the ability to become a conduit of vision that allowed followers to see a reflec­ tion of primal facets of their own experience. Recognizability did not reflect the true nature of the ruler, but the selfhood of a particular (and changing) audience, one eager to create equivalences between ruler and ruled, even if they be false ones – a factor that helps to explain the divided reactions to Wilhelm II’s absolutist iconography.

Financial capital: humanization – the human face of the state Just like public petitions, supplicant letters requesting financial support comprised a genre that followed certain structural outlines. Typically, these letters offered services to the king and asked for patronage; requested di­ rect financial support; or offered birthday wishes with the view to gaining a monetary counter­gift. The latter practice was so common that court offi­ cials derided these celebrants as “begging well­wishers” (Bettelgratulanten), their contemptuousness reflecting that the letters emphasized clichéd nar­ ratives that made them seem more rote than real (M. M. 1893–1894, 51; Büschel 2006, 313–324). Those narratives tended to include four elements. They assured the monarch that the letter writers were respectable subjects

108  Eva Giloi who had, through no fault of their own, fallen on hard times. When those misfortunes were the result of physical ailments, the supplicants listed the physical problems in detail to explain how they impaired the writers’ ability to support themselves. After making references to the writers’ families, who also required support (or alternately lack of a family that could be called upon for support), many also gave an example of how the writers had over­ come obstacles to make contact with the monarch, suggesting a reverence for the dynasty that overcame bounds. Just how much these letters drew upon an established genre is evident in a letter sent by August Dick to Adolf Hitler in 1932, which continued to fol­ low generic lines dating back a century. Dick established his credentials as a trained tinsmith and plumber. He explained his need for a loan based on a series of physical calamities: an inflamed left knee that required six opera­ tions, leaving his leg permanently stiff; an operation for an inflamed appen­ dix; and an accident during the potato harvest that shattered his right leg. In a postscript, he explained that he had overcome these difficulties, riding 120 km on a bike, in order to see Hitler personally, and that the postscript itself was handwritten because he had had to pawn the typewriter with which he had typed the rest of the letter (Eberle 2012, 57–58). With no royal house to act as a source of succor in 1932, Dick was still employing tropes used a century earlier but to a very different type of recipient, suggesting that it was not the person or personality of the recipient but his recognizability as a pillar of sympathy that mattered. Going back to the 1880s, the structures are the same. In 1883, Bianca Strehz also enumerated the “many, hard blows of fate” that had plagued her life: widowed at age 76, with an ailing daughter, Strehz had fallen and bro­ ken her arm, which made writing the letter difficult and painful, while her meager financial means made it impossible to travel to see the emperor and greet him personally. A year earlier, Elise Schmidt had assured the emperor of her social credentials (granddaughter of a general consul); her innocence (betrayed and divorced by a cheating husband); and her inability to support either herself or her two underage children because of her ailments (rheu­ matism, constant illness, advanced age). Nor was this a gendered genre: in 1886, Carl Eduard Kühn attested his good social standing as a business­ man and pillar of the community, but also that his advanced age and severe ailments explained both his penury and the fact that he had dictated the letter to his wife. Reaching back another generation, Moritz Merrtz equally described himself as a deserving young man who had faced unfortunate circumstances: he was an orphan, had studied economics and fulfilled his military duties, and had done well enough financially to purchase a house, until – “through no fault of my own” – the troubles of the post­1848 economy had plunged him into hard times as a father of five children.2 Woven into these letters was an expectation of sympathy on the part of the sovereign or Landesvater. The long proliferation of ailments, coupled with the assurances of worthiness, diverged from older tropes that sought succor

False equivalences in ruler dominance  109 from the king as a semi­divine being who could heal with the laying on of hands. Instead of confessing unworthiness as a sinner in need of redemption – as was the case in earlier times – these letter writers sought to elicit human sympathy through an understanding of common human frailty, correspond­ ing to the humanization of the monarchy. The humanization of the monar­ chy took form variously in the ideal of the Landesvater (father of the people), the “first servant of the state,” and the physically embattled human being beginning in the eighteenth century. Louis XIV may already have expanded his iconographic repertoire beyond semi­divinity to a more realistic depic­ tion of concrete achievements, but this propaganda was supplemental to his continuing power to command (Burke 1992, 129–132). The perceived need to justify rule by tying the fate of a humanized king to that of his subjects arose only with the development of newspapers and the republic of letters that fa­ cilitated the discussion of public expectations of monarchy. Once it became possible for competing power sources (financial and political) to imagine, as a group, systems of socio­political organization other than the rightful suc­ cession of royal inheritance, monarchs began to see the advisability of being loved by the people. The figure of the good, beloved king became part of the tools of governance (Wienfort 1993). Rather than divine or even semi­divine, the good king was a human mon­ arch representing the best qualities of mankind, and was ordained to guide the ship of state. In becoming human like his subjects, the king’s physical fate was tied to the fate of the people, just as his role as human head of state equated his personal success with that of the state and its population. But this humanization was not a full equality: in the letters, (adult) givers styled themselves as children, with the king as father, thus drawing on the Landesvater image (Büschel 2006, 320–321). When Henriette Kulau wrote to Friedrich Wilhelm IV in 1852, she followed the standard narrative lines – her father, a consul, died when she was a young girl; her mother had lived in penury thereafter, leaving her no inheritance; and she was herself now wid­ owed and alone – but she also explained her motivation for approaching the monarch in patriarchal terms: she approached the king like “an innocent child brings her affectionate father a fragrant wildflower.”3 As Landesvater, or father of the people, the king held a paternalistic role that emphasized his power as patriarch: the king took on the role of the caring but strict parent, while subjects were styled as immature and in need of guidance by the royal father. As enlightenment expectations of rationality gained ground, however, the image of Landesvater gained an added layer as the king was transformed into the “first servant of the state,” as Frederick the Great famously dubbed himself. This image of the king as hard­working head of state persisted into the nineteenth century, with monarchs increasingly depicting themselves not in the royal robes of Louis XIV, wielding the accouterments of rule, but in uniform, standing at a desk, with the paraphernalia of bureaucracy at hand (until Wilhelm II sought to revive the older absolutist iconography). Still,

110  Eva Giloi even the “first servant of the state” kept the same social parameters in place: it made the king recognizable as a (superior) human engaged in good gov­ ernance, but also retained his authority to rule over the people. By retain­ ing an unbreachable social barrier of hierarchy between king and subject, humanization was not yet personalization, in which the monarch would be regarded as a person like everyone else. In humanization, common humanity was recognized, but in a stylized form that left an essential difference intact. Still, this recognizability of the king as fellow human, rather than semi­ divine, eventually softened social barriers by giving subjects more latitude in defining their relationship to the king. Literacy, the developing press, and an expanded publishing industry enabled a discussion of whether the king was living up to his Landesvater role and the expectations of good govern­ ance. When it came to policies of state, the ability to judge was largely lim­ ited to commentators involved in the republic of letters, often members of the civil service. The development of engravings and broadsides, however, widened the audience for the king’s humanization by making his physical vulnerability visible. When a king suffered from illness, engravings of his frailty functioned for many subjects as a talisman or relic through which to participate in the king’s fate. Subjects increasingly expressed concern about the king’s physical well­being, especially if his fate was tied to the survival of the state. Images of Fredrick the Great being saved from shots fired at his person became metonymic not only for the heroism of a great king, but for the vulnerability of the state and its narrow salvation from demise. In this way, wishes for the king’s recovery from frailty could strengthen public loyalism through the enactment of sympathy. The acknowledgment of royal frailty could also undermine a monarchy as it came into conflict with the expectations of good governance. One sees both elements surrounding George III’s mental illness in the late eighteenth century, which garnered great public sympathy, but also concern about his ability to rule. In Prussia, Friedrich Wilhelm IV held a similar position after 1848, when his growing nervous exhaustion prompted public pity despite his role in repressing the revolution of 1848, but also raised grave concerns about his accountability as head of state. The increased public interest in the fate of the king as a metaphor for the fate of the state and its subjects thus highlights the role that the audience played in both recognizing and creating that motif: the public presentation of the monarch as a human be­ ing was tied to a sense of self­reflection on the audience’s part.

Social capital: personalization – the ruler as person and personality Not all well­wishers were seeking financial gain; some were seeking to raise their social capital or profile among peers (Bourdieu and Passeron 1990). Such was the case with a wealthy landlord who sent birthday greetings to the emperor to express his sense of self­importance. When his greetings were

False equivalences in ruler dominance  111 mistakenly interpreted as a request for assistance, the appalled landlord handed out 50 Marks to the poor to show that he was an alms­giver not alms­ taker, and wrote to the emperor to tell him of his act of charity. When the emperor replied with a letter of commendation, the landlord hung it on his wall and forced his tenants to admire it when they came to pay the rent (M. M. 1893–1894, 51). The social capital conferred by the emperor’s acknowledgment increased the landlord’s standing in the local community and simultaneously redrew the lines of hierarchy. The landlord emphasized the barrier between himself and his tenants by setting himself closer to the monarch as fellow phi­ lanthropist. Here the king was no longer the sole Landesvater giving succor, but a primus inter pares as a fellow patriarch guiding his wards. As the nineteenth century wore on and the bourgeoisie grew in social and economic power, an increasing number of middle class subjects began to make these equivalences with the royal house, most prominently through the tropes of family. The earliest point at which humanization tipped over into personalization, in which the monarch became a person like “the rest of us,” came with the domestic transformation of the queen as metaphoric mother of the nation (or Landesmutter) into a real mother of actual children. In the early eighteenth century, Queen Caroline’s fecundity was interpreted as a mark of dynastic viability: the English “Landesmutter” was guarantor of the state by maintaining the dynastic lineage of government. Half a century later, Queen Charlotte’s fertility was still interpreted in the same way, but was also given a new angle: the mark of loving motherhood. This idealized, affec­ tive role to which all subjects could (presumably) relate was projected onto queens across Europe in the nineteenth century. Queen Victoria, Queen Lu­ ise of Prussia, Empress Eugenie, and Empress Elisabeth of Austria­Hungary were all depicted affectionately dandling infants on their knees, even though they often had little patience for small children in reality. The emphasis on families led to familiarity, literally. Based on the tropes of family, personalization was far more intimate than humanization be­ cause it was a projection of the public’s own mundanity. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as middle class ideals regarding the emotive family, childhood innocence, and companionate marriage began to pervade na­ tional culture in most European countries, monarchs were shrouded in a sheen of everyday sentimentality. To wit, in the 1870s–1880s Wilhelm I was widely visualized in the popular press as a kindly grandfather presiding over Christmas Eve celebrations in the same manner as other German families, in modest rooms filled with possessions reassuringly similar to the bric­a­ brac found in the average middle class home (Brendicke 1890, 223). The universality of these emotions brought the monarchy down to a man­ ageable scale, and not surprisingly was largely initiated by the public and enacted in various forms of mass media, starting with copper engravings and lithographs in the 1790s, then lithography as of the 1830s, and mass cir­ culation newspapers, illustrated journals, and photography after the 1850s. There were instances in which royal houses sought to promote this type

112  Eva Giloi of intimate imagery, for instance Queen Victoria’s autobiography, Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, which opened her marriage up to public view, and the sale of her family photographs in the Royal Album (Plunkett 2003). But Victoria’s self­styled domesticity was off­set by an equal attention to pomp and circumstance, in an attempt to keep royal authority intact through distance. Despite their efforts to strike a balance between sentimentality and regal splendor, most monarchs were not in a position to control the process of personalization, as public demand for self­reflection drove the production of wished­for images. Already at the beginning of the nineteenth century, private authors published unwanted saccharine anec­ dotes about Friedrich Wilhelm III and Queen Luise, even if subjects still addressed the king formally as Landesvater in their letters. Wilhelm II was equally impotent a century later: even though he discouraged familiarity through his haughty absolutist iconography, the popular press continued to publish sentimental stories about the royal family. When Wilhelm II refused to have himself photographed with his young children or grandchildren, private entrepreneurs produced extensive series of photomontaged post­ cards to supply the desired intimacy, often adding intimate captions like “Grandpa’s Darling” (Großväterchens Liebling) to emphasize the monarch’s relatability (Giloi 2012). These postcards and their predecessors – the carte­de­visite photographs produced in mass quantities from the 1860s onwards – provided letter writ­ ers an object with which to approach the monarchy to create a personal equivalence. As a result, from the 1860s onwards, a new genre of letters emerged that, in the act of requesting an autographed photograph from the emperor, styled the relationship between monarch and subject into that of emotive peers, if not social and political equals. One might expect individuals who supported the traditional pillars of kingship to request autographs, and indeed there were plenty of pastors and patriotic young men who expressed their undying loyalty to the monarch as they did so. Just as commonly, however, subjects sought to gain social capital by finding an emotive link between themselves and the emperor that was to be validated by the signed autograph. Not only did subjects seek au­ tographs for having reached the same advanced age as Wilhelm I, but some discerned a much closer connection: a sailor who was a great­grandfather just like Wilhelm I; Karl Friedrich Gok who was born the day Wilhelm I’s father had died; the pastor Braunstein and his wife, whose birthdays fell on the same dates as the two assassination attempts against the emperor in 1878; and school children who wanted a souvenir of their encounter with the emperor on a school trip. Others requested autographs with no particular connection in mind, but simply to possess the emperor as part of their au­ tograph collections.4 These patterns continued into Wilhelm II’s reign, much to the emperor’s chagrin. Instead of responding to the new emperor’s bid for absolutist iconog­ raphy, subjects used ever more intimate language as they sought autographs

False equivalences in ruler dominance  113 for increasingly personal reasons: as mementos or inspiration to help them through difficult times; as travel souvenirs; because they were in love with the Kaiser; because it would give them pleasure; or simply as part of their autograph collections. These treasures were also intended to give them social capital among neighbors as “the pearl of my salon” or among close friends and family as the “most beautiful and valuable adornment of my boudoir.”5 The personalization of the monarchy through the intimate tropes of fam­ ily, embodied in photographic souvenirs, led to a “non­reciprocal intimacy at a distance,” which further prompted actions that crossed former social boundaries. When subjects assumed that they knew the king intimately – as a person – they were more likely to try to interact with him directly: subjects were no longer content with letter writing, but took the further step of en­ gineering “spontaneous” meetings with the emperor to create occasions at which to ask for an autograph in person (Giloi 2010). By the end of the century, this personalization had further mutated into an assumption that the monarch was not only a person “just like us,” but also had a personality just like everyone else (Kohlrausch 2010). This was a particular problem for Wilhelm II as his reign coincided with the profes­ sionalization of psychology as a field of study and analysis. Over the course of his reign, Wilhelm II was increasingly criticized for his character flaws as his public actions – blustering speeches, jingoistic saber­rattling, and taut, martial posturing at festivities and in photographs – were analyzed by pro­ fessional and amateur psychologists alike. As early as 1895, the graphologist W. Langenbruc published an analysis of Wilhelm II’s handwriting in the popular magazine Der Bär, concluding that the emperor had an unsound temperament: the Kaiser had an “energetic, strong­willed personality” but needed more “self­control” to “avoid getting carried away by fleeting emo­ tions” (Handschrift Kaiser Wilhelms II 1895). Here, personalization had a negative tenor, as the emperor’s actions as ruler were seen as a defective version of normal adult behavior. Personalization thus created greater sympathy for royal dynasties, but also broke down traditional social barriers, raised expectations of approach­ ability, and opened new avenues for criticism and discontent in the public. As Wilhelm II suspected, personalization was a double­edged sword, as emo­ tional disappointment could undermine ceremonial grandeur if the monarch did not live up to the increasing expectations of equivalence and access.

Cultural capital: identification – authenticity amidst fragmentation A third type of letter, seeking cultural capital, emerged at the end of the nineteenth century as a further iteration of the magic mirror. These letters came from (mostly) young, male aspiring poets from lower middle class backgrounds: the white collar workers who fueled Germany’s development into a consumer and service economy and who were soliciting the emperor

114  Eva Giloi to support their art. Asking for financial sponsorship was not a new phe­ nomenon, of course, and the letter writers approached the emperor because of his traditional, and widely publicized, role as patron of the arts. What was new, however, was the letter writers’ justification in approaching the emperor: they felt entitled to his attention due to their will to be artists, which allowed them to leapfrog from their low social status to the higher position of poet­artist.6 They insisted that they deserved cultural capital because of the authenticity of their creative selves, even though they had not accomplished any actual artistic success, and in the process projected a sense of identification with the emperor as a man of will and art. Rather than bringing the monarch down to the level of the individual, this identi­ fication raised the individual up to the level of the monarch, styling him as a visionary who could see the letter writer’s authentic value. Through the magic mirror of false equivalence, the emperor, in his charismatic pose, was expected to activate the individual’s interior selfhood at a time of increasing uncertainty about fixed social roles. This form of identification was different from the older forms of address used by those seeking patronage. In traditional requests, artists had justified their supplication on two grounds: narratives of woe and proof of merit. These traditional letters hewed closely to the supplicant letters discussed above: illnesses, broken arms, underage children appeared in the traditional letters as well. Traditional patronage letters also offered proof of the poets’ quality of work, though. Although some of the traditional letter writers had found greater success than others, most had been relatively productive, but had, in old age, fallen on hard times and could no longer support them­ selves through their literary efforts. When he requested funds in the 1870s, Freiherr F. W. von Ditfurth had already published in journals and given lectures in literary societies, just as Emilie Schröder had published poems in a number of magazines, including the Unteroffizier-Zeitung, which re­ viewed her work as “in its own way a poetic masterpiece.” (Schröder sent her well­received poems about the emperor’s birthday to Wilhelm I in the hope of receiving a counter­gift.) Johanna Baltz, who hoped in the 1890s that the emperor would sponsor her works, had had 12 of her patriotic dra­ mas performed. Also in 1899, Bruno Garlepp noted that 450,000 copies of his works had been published, but that he had fallen on hard times because of a widespread decline in interest in patriotic literature.7 Because these traditional authors had had some public validation, their requests for financial support bled over into a bid for greater social capital: dedicating a work to the emperor or having him accept their publications as a gift increased their social status among peers and in literary associa­ tions, and could potentially boost sales or secure a position as a civil serv­ ant. What was never in doubt for these traditional authors was their cultural capital: they had all gained their literary skills by studying literature and the arts, usually thanks to a middle class or artistic family background. Bruno Wollf­Beckh hoped to obtain a position at the court as librarian or secretary

False equivalences in ruler dominance  115 based on his literary talents, but he did so as the son of a professor and be­ cause he had studied at university himself, just as Johanna Baltz had gained her literary talents as a pupil at an advanced school for girls.8 The new class of writers took a different tack: these petitioners sought to establish a connection to the monarchy to gain the cultural capital they were lacking because of their social status. Rather than traditional learning or merit, their connection to the emperor was based entirely on a feeling of inner creativity, and they felt that poetic inner being so strongly – de­ spite all evidence to the contrary – that they were certain their true nature would be recognized by the Kaiser. Hermann Lemmerz, whose father was a locksmith and who was himself an office clerk, had never finished any written works, but nonetheless identified himself as “a poet” to the Kaiser. Hermann Bartel, an actor by profession who by age 37 had also produced no written works to speak of, nonetheless avowed that poetry was his “life’s mission” and his “only hope.” Wilhelm Mieschel, an office clerk whose four dramas had been rejected by various theaters, insisted to the emperor that “I rightfully call myself ‘poet’.” The impoverished Emil Gienau, whose dra­ mas were also rejected by various theaters, was convinced that he was des­ tined for “greater heights than where I am now,” based on the authenticity of his feelings: “what I feel inside myself is truly not a blind inclination, but true conviction.”9 In approaching the emperor, these young men mimicked Wilhelm’s bid for charisma through a will to power: they, too, had a vision of greatness for themselves. As Richard Moritz explained: although the theater world “stubbornly closes its gates to me and steals my poetic life­breath,” he would make it anyway, on his own terms (auf eigene Faust). It was just a matter of will; as he assured the emperor (and himself): “I can do it.” Moritz and the other writers’ attachment to the dynamic, willful emperor was not based on the goals to which Wilhelm actually aspired – revitalizing the absolutist authority and auratic distance of the monarchy – but on the belief that he was a kindred soul who could see their true inner selves and elevate them into the sphere of the sublime.10 In reality, though, the emperor had no sympathy for their projected sense of equivalence. None of their requests were funded; the emperor did not reply to any of the letters; and even his proxies responded with the most minimal of dismissals. Why, then, did these young men misrecognized the situation so severely? Three reasons suggest themselves, and in each case, it was the inability to establish external value that made the young men look to the emperor to confirm their inner worth. On a first level, they perceived the emperor as the ideal arbiter of value because other sources of validation had proliferated to the point that there was no clear consensus on literary merit. With the widespread expansion of the culture industry, there were too many expert opinions to give a center or grounding to individual assessments of worth. With 4,200 daily newspapers in the empire alone, the number of critical voices multiplied to the point of

116  Eva Giloi unmanageability, as Annemarie von Nathusius found out from reviews of her book, Die Herrin auf Bronkow: one prominent critic praised its “great originality and depth” and “forceful psychological analysis;” another de­ rided it as being “without any originality…without even the beginning of psychological depth.”11 The situation was further complicated by the fact that definitions of ge­ nius had been colored by the modern sciences and their criteria of novelty and ingenuity. In the sciences and technology, true genius was found in original discoveries or inventions that other people hadn’t thought of, and probably didn’t understand, at least not initially. The metrics of originality cast a shadow on the assessment of art and literature as well. In contem­ porary debates on genius, Franz Liszt was deemed a virtuosi but Richard Wagner a true genius because of the rule­breaking nature of his compo­ sitions. Likewise, Anton von Werner counted as very talented but Arnold Böcklin as truly groundbreaking. But unlike the sciences, the arts did not have a practical gauge for value. Technologies either worked or did not, and scientific experiments could be replicated, proving their value. Arts and lit­ erature could not be rated on the basis of objective efficacy. Their efficacy was always subjective, rooted in their effect on the audience, which made the long­term value of esoteric, groundbreaking works of “artistic genius” far more tenuous. For lower middle class young men in particular, the amorphous nature of value was exacerbated by their daily experiences: many were engaged in economic and social roles that were not anchored to professional train­ ing or formal education, but were open, relatively free­form, and required a certain amount of “hustle and flow.” Writers such as the ones cited above often moved through a variety of unregulated jobs in the new service sector  – gastronomy, tourism, insurance agencies, the theater, traveling salesmanship – and somewhere along the way ended up in journalism or other forms of writing. These occupations were increasingly sought after by newcomers who sought to accelerate their social ascent outside of the established routes of apprenticeships, training institutes, and patient years spent kowtowing to superiors. What they lost along the way was a clear set of credentials to establish their worth. The ability to move laterally and without much training through multiple occupations increased the sense that all that was solid was melting into air, and the inability to ascribe merit through common criteria led to an emphasis on the self through inner feel­ ing. It was against this backdrop that these young men turned to the char­ ismatic Kaiser as a visionary who could see into their souls and validate the identity they felt so strongly to be there. The lack of certainty in the literary and artistic world extended to other social developments, which were equally in flux at the turn of the century. When Friedrich Naumann spoke of the need for an Integrator, he was reflect­ ing one of the overriding anxieties of the day: that urbanization was loosen­ ing social bonds and creating fragmented communities. Commentators at

False equivalences in ruler dominance  117 fin­de­siècle were obsessed with what they saw as psychological “lability,” rootlessness, and an uncertainty of how to act in the modern world with its baffling, fast­paced changes (Radkau 1998; Jeffries 2008, 179–183). Attach­ ment to the emperor as cultural object provided an anchor for individuals’ sense of self within the modern multiplicity of choices. It was for this reason that the monarchy became a prime marketing tool for brand name products. Advertisers were drawn to the royal image because it conveyed quality at a time when advanced consumerism made it difficult to determine value. But monarchy was also tempting as an advertising tool because it was flexible in its associations and vague in its commitments: it could be read as represent­ ing a variety of values and appeal to multiple constituencies simultaneously. The term Kaiser was as malleable and generic as other popular brand name descriptors like “Ideal,” “National,” “Triumph,” and “Deutsch.” These names implied broad feelings of comfort and solidity, optimism and con­ fidence, and were ultimately interchangeable as terms of reassurance to a wide audience of consumers. The increasing number of monarchy­themed consumer goods that flooded Germany from the 1890s onwards was a mixed blessing for the monarchy. In the private realm of consumption, brand recognition could lead to brand dilution as economic interests were given precedence over royal dignity. Not only the emperor, but his entire family were drawn into the consumer rev­ olution: in 1906 the Hofmarschallamt discovered to its horror that a ciga­ rette manufacturer was selling Crown Princess Cecilie Cigarettes, using not only the princess’ name, but also her portrait on delivery wagons, marketing posters, and even matchboxes. The emperor, too, became a prime advertis­ ing tool for products as diverse as soaps and perfume, ham and champagne, moustache wax and cigarettes (Giloi, 2011). Left to run its course, would this branding have had the same effect as humanization or personalization in undermining imperial grandeur (if the war had not intervened first)? The monarchy seemed to think so: it fought against the use of its image as a mar­ keting tool. And no wonder the monarchy was concerned: far from keeping royalty in its unattainable space at the center of society, the consumption of these products brought the royal brand into the mundane realm of the personal and private. Even more problematic, the use of the royal brand tapped into generic emotions that ran directly counter to the distinctive image cultivated by Wilhelm II. By trying to use the distance of royal aura – in the form of ab­ solutist iconography – as a means to extend his personal charisma, Wilhelm II put himself into an impossible bind of both maintaining the distance of aura and validating the individual through the magic mirror of equivalence. By the end of the century, despite the empire’s sclerotic political system, Wilhelm II’s absolutist leanings and cult of personality were doomed to fail as the triple developments of humanization, personalization, and identifica­ tion foregrounded the subject’s active involvement in shaping the sovereign’s public persona.

118  Eva Giloi

Notes

References Apter, Emily. 2010. “Celebrity Gifting: Mallarmé and the Poetics of Fame.” In Constructing Charisma, eds. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi. New York: Berghahn, 86–102. Bourdieu, Pierre and Jean­Claude Passeron. 1990. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. London: Sage. Brendicke, Hans. 1890. “Kuriosität.” Der Sammler 12, 223. Brude­Firnau, Gisela. 1981. “Preussische Predigt: Die Reden Wilhelms II.” In The Turn of the Century: German Literature and Art, 1890–1915, eds. Gerald Chapple and Hans H. Schulte. Bonn: Bouvier, 149–170. Burke, Peter. 1992. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

False equivalences in ruler dominance  119 Büschel, Hubertus. 2006. Untertanenliebe: der Kult um deutsche Monarchen 1770– 1830. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Eberle, Henrik, ed. 2012. Letters to Hitler. Cambridge: John Wiley. Giloi, Eva. 2010. “So Writes the Hand that Swings the Sword: Autograph Hunting and Royal Charisma in the German Empire, 1861–1888.” In Constructing Charisma, eds. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi. New York: Berghahn, 41–51. Giloi, Eva. 2011. Monarchy, Myth, and Material Culture in Germany, 1750–1950. Cambridge: Cambridge University. Giloi, Eva. 2012. “Copyrighting the Kaiser: Publicity, Piracy, and the Right to Wilhelm II’s Image.” Central European History 45(3): 407–451. “Handschrift Kaiser Wilhelms II.” 1895. Der Bär 21, 586. Jeffries, Matthew. 2008. Contesting the German Empire, 1871–1918. Oxford: Blackwell. Kohlrausch, Martin. 2005. Der Monarch im Skandal: die Logik der Massenmedien und die Transformation der wilhelminischen Monarchie. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Kohlrausch, Martin. 2010. “The Workings of Royal Celebrity: Wilhelm II as Media Emperor.” In Constructing Charisma, eds. Edward Berenson and Eva Giloi. New York: Berghahn, 52–66. M. M. 1893–1994. “Gratulant.” Der Bär 20, 51. Plunkett, John. 2003. Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch. Oxford: Oxford Uni­ versity Press. Radkau, Joachim. 1998. Das Zeitalter der Nervosität: Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler. München: Hanser. Rathenau, Walther. 1919. Der Kaiser: Eine Betrachtung. Berlin: S. Fischer. Schoch, Rainer. 1975. Das Herrscherbild in der Malerei des 19. Jahrhunderts. München: Prestel. Thompson, John B. 1995. The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Weber, Max. 1968. Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology. New York: Bedminster. Wienfort, Monika. 1993. Monarchie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht.

7

Father of the people, face of the nation The premodern and modern foundations of ruler personality cults1 Alexey Tikhomirov

Introduction A great man is great not because his personal qualities give individual features to great historical events, but because he possesses qualities which make him most capable of serving the great social needs of his time, needs which arose as a result of general and particular causes. Carlyle, in his well­known book on heroes and hero­worship, calls great men beginners. This is a very apt description. A great man is precisely a beginner because he sees further than others, and desires things more strongly than others. He solves the scientific problems brought up by the preceding process of intellectual development of society; he points to the new social needs created by the preceding development of social re­ lationships; he takes the initiative in satisfying these needs. He is a hero. But he is not a hero in the sense that he can stop, or change, the natural course of things, but in the sense that his activities are the conscious and free expression of this inevitable and unconscious course. Herein lies all his significance; herein lies his whole power. But this significance is co­ lossal, and the power is terrible. (Plekhanov [1898] 1940, 59–60)2 In conceptualizing a dialectic of the birth of the hero in his 1898 essay ‘On the Role of the Individual in History’, Georgii Plekhanov (1856–1918), the first Russian Marxist, was well aware of Marx and Engel’s antipathy to the ‘cult of personality’ and Western social democrats’ hostility to it. Nonethe­ less, he formulated the guiding principle of the birth of the hero by defin­ ing the leader as a messiah who could recognize the past’s cause­and­effect relationship with the present. More importantly, he identified the leader as someone who could also organize the masses and draw them to his side as he strove to resolve pressing social and political problems. The ideological movements of fascism in Italy, nazism in Germany, and bolshevism in Rus­ sia adopted the topos of the ‘charismatic situation’—the collective expec­ tation of a saviour who would appear in the midst of a crisis and resolve it (Lepsius 1993; Ennker 2010). Plekhanov left no room for doubt in asserting

Father of the people, face of the nation  121 that by taking the monopoly on state violence into their hands, not collec­ tives but heroes would make history. In 1919, before the rise of totalitarian states in the early part of the twen­ tieth century, German sociologist Max Weber described the charisma of the leader not as a person’s ‘divine grace and exceptional qualities’, but as a set of social relationships between the ruler and his flock which were based on identity­building, emotional engagement, and trust in the leader. In fact, around 1900, intellectuals captured the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, re­ flecting the legitimation of modern personality cults on a wave of modern state­ and nation­building. An age of masses turned into an age of leaders (Cohen 2007, 611). After decades, at the Twentieth Congress of the Commu­ nist Party in February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev stigmatized the term ‘personality cult’ (kul’t lichnosti) in his Secret Speech, which laid out Stalin’s crimes: immediately after this speech, the personality cult became a negative feature of communism which was not only used as a weapon by critics of the Soviet Union and the ‘people’s democracies’ but which has also been reproduced in popular culture and academia alike to the pres­ ent day (Jones 2006). Despite this stereotype of Eastern Europe as the only place where the personality cult of the ruler determined the shape of poli­ tics, culture, and society, the phenomenon examined here goes far beyond the framework in which authoritarian and totalitarian political orders are usually analyzed.3 In recent years research on rulers’ personality cults has gained currency as a heuristic analytical tool for explaining the legitimacy of authoritarian regimes, their ability to mobilize people, and the power they exert in various contexts around the globe. The concept of the ‘ruler’s cult’ is understood here as a way to personify power and sacralize the political by placing the figure of the leader at the centre of the social and political order. Ideology, institutions, and the rule of law have both allowed and circumscribed the potential for generating solidarity and mobilizing the population, but the image of the ruler has the power to give a human face and body to the abstract ideas of the state and the nation. This ‘human’ connection between the ruler and the ruled was crucial for generating an emotional attachment to the paternalistic order and it contributed decisively to the emergence of the cult community, with its sacred boundaries, which were defined through symbols, narratives, and rituals (Hein­Kircher 2010). Proclaiming some people the leader’s friends and others his enemies, the state and nation enhanced the sacrality of the cult community’s borders by defining modes of belonging to it or being ex­ cluded. This approach treats the ruler cult as a complex web of meanings and a symbolic space of empowering interactions within which negotiations between the state and an individual took place (Blockmans et al. 2009). By providing a fundamental source of identity and security, ruler cults played a key role in making imagined communities with a shared understand­ ing of the past, present, and future (Anderson 1983). Reconfiguring time and space in cultic rituals and everyday practices shaped collective memory

122  Alexey Tikhomirov by reducing complexity; such reconfigurations presented the charismatic leader as a repository for power, authority, and, most importantly, trust. The use of new types of mass media (photography, print media, radio, film, and television) were essential in constructing the ruler’s charisma.4 Follow­ ers of all ages were mobilized to participate in charismatic communication with the ruler, which reinforced the scale of the social engineering which set in motion the (self­)fashioning of modern subjecthoods and offered a space for participation in political projects (Mosse 1975). The rise of new media made cults into one of the cornerstones of everyday experience by putting into circulation information, images, and performances involving political figures which were designed to appeal to everyone: men, women, and even children (Loiperdinger et al. 1995; Leese 2011, 256). Understanding this al­ lows us to develop a productive analytical approach that integrates state­ and nation­building from below with well­studied mechanisms of power from above. Ruler or leader cults have been usually identified as a manifestation of modernity. Jan Plamper described five features that separate modern per­ sonality cults from their premodern forerunners (Plamper 2004b). First, for modern ruler cults, the source of ruler’s legitimacy is support from the people, rather than the divine right of kings to rule. Second, modern cults are the products of mass society. They are not the province of a small elite but instead they draw in society as a whole through educational institutions (schools) and state service (the army). Third, they arise only in closed so­ cieties as a result of such societies’ standardized information fields, which circulate narratives and images of leaders in the mass media at the expense of a more pluralistic flow of information. Fourth, violence facilitates harsh control over which images of the leader are permissible in the public sphere and which are taboo. Fifth, the modern personality cult is an ‘exclusively patricentric phenomenon’, unlike traditional, gender­mixed cults, which in­ cluded queens, tsaritsas, and princesses. Instead of drawing a line sharply dividing the premodern and modern worlds, I think a more fruitful approach is to search for continuities between the two epochs which can explain more deeply the reproduction and per­ haps the radicalization of leader cults in modern times. In fact, the modern ruler’s cult was often rooted in premodern narratives, rituals, and symbols that were reinvented, dynamized, and integrated into the process of modern state­, society­, and subjectivity­building. This article gives an overview of the premodern and modern foundations of personality cults of the ruler. Their intersections have transformed the leader cult into a powerful tool for making modern politics, managing a mass society, and creating modern subjectivities. It presents evidence that ruler cults were vital for many political and social orders, going far beyond the socialist/communist regimes and the modern dictatorships of the twen­ tieth century. The concept of the ruler personality cult has moved beyond the framework created by totalitarian theory and has gained currency in

Father of the people, face of the nation  123 research on state­, empire­, and society­building. Rather than focusing on differences, the article looks, above all, for the similarities and shared structures that united many personality cults, without neglecting their particularities.

The patriarchal and familial foundations of the ruler cult Ruler cults have been and continue to be a part of the political landscape. To understand how they emerged, it is necessary to look at the most basic structural element of such cults: the shared image of the ruler as the father of the state and nation. For centuries, emotional and moral bonds uniting the ruler and the people were conceptualized as the ties of spiritual kinship joining the members of a harmonious and happy family headed by a caring patriarch.5 In fact, these bonds were considered as binding as blood ties. Lynn Hunt’s pioneering research has shown how important metaphors and images of kinship are in explaining how political orders function: If kinship is the basis of most if not all organized social relations, then it is also an essential category for understanding political power. Tradi­ tionalists in European history had long pointed to the family as the first experience of power and consequently as a sure model of its working; just as the father was “naturally” the head of the family, so too the king was naturally the head of the body politic. (Hunt 1992, 196) The tradition of seeing the ruler as a paternal authority has its roots in ancient Rome. Roman emperors received the honorific title ‘Pater Patriae’, which represented the ruler as the father of the country. In Roman thought, however, this title was imbued with deeper meaning because it implied that the ruler was the spiritual leader of his subjects (Alföldi 1971; Gradel 2002). The paternalistic model of the state did not vanish with the fall of Rome. In the Middle Ages, the political and religious doctrine undergirding the European monarchies reinforced the patriarchal essence of the state by in­ voking the king’s divine right to rule: because the ruler’s right to govern is­ sued directly from God’s will, his power was not only claimed as legitimate, but received that approval from the highest possible authority. As God’s representative on earth, the monarch was interpreted as the most impor­ tant moral and judicial authority in his realm. The genealogy of this sacred right to govern reveals the source of later representations of secular polit­ ical leaders as the ‘Father of the Fatherland’ or the ‘Father of the Nation’. For example, Russian emperor Peter I (1672–1725); Victor Emmanuel II (1820–1878), the first king of a united Italy; and the first president of Czech­ oslovakia, Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk (1850–1937) were all called the ‘Fa­ ther of the Fatherland’. Don Stephen Senanayake (1883–1952), who was the first prime minister of Sri Lanka; Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1922–1999),

124  Alexey Tikhomirov the first president of Tanzania; and Nelson Mandela (1918–2013), the first president of post­apartheid South Africa were also honoured with the title ‘Father of the Nation’. While it is a crucial foundation for the emergence and flourishing of leader cults, a narrative about founding fathers is also at the heart of the history of the United States and the European Union (Bernstein 2009; Directorate­General for Communication [European Commission] 2013). The ruler cult was a buttress of the symbolism of the paternalistic state. On the one hand, it stipulated that the ruler as the paternal authority was morally obligated to care for his family’s dependents. On the other hand, the popula­ tion’s expectation of care gave subjects the moral right to demand protection, defence, and justice from the ruler. The discourse of the ruler loving his sub­ jects as he loved his own children set out a moral obligation to which his fol­ lowers had to respond by expressing gratitude, trust, and love for the ‘father’ in the everyday practices of letter­writing, presenting gifts, and participating in state­sponsored events (Stephanov 2018, 265). Consequently, imagining the state as a family, the ruler as the father, and his subjects as children gave everyone who was part of this symbolic system a fundamental sense of be­ longing that defined the entire grammar of inclusion and exclusion within the cult community. Attempts to challenge the legitimacy of this sacred au­ thority were equated with sin and were often criminalized: crimes against the ruler were seen as a direct threat to the symbolism of the unity, loyalty, and harmony of the family and were depicted as a bacillus that endangered the healthy body of the nation as a whole. A key element of the image of the ‘family’, one that was shared around the globe, was the powerful call for consolidation around the ruler. The paternal image of the ruler aiming to unify people of different faiths, eth­ nic, and social origins into one political body was particularly visible in the contexts of empires. The fact that religious and ethnic differences could be surmounted because subjects identified with the ruler has often been a crucial component of the viability of empires and multinational states.6 In the British Empire, King George III (1738–1820) enjoyed the title ‘father of his people’ while Queen Victoria (1819–1901) was called the ‘mother of her people’ because of royal acts of empathy—letters, visits, and philanthropic donations—directed towards their subjects.7 In the Late Ottoman Empire, the sultan, ‘who watches equally over all of his subjects and cares for all of them as a human and good­natured father’, had an integrating function (Stephanov 2018, 265). Likewise, Stalin was the ‘father of peoples’, who urged many different nationalities and ethnicities to refashion themselves into a single ‘Soviet people’ (Martin 2001). Even the visual images of him that were distributed in countries on the peripheries fit national stereotypes and had stylistic features drawn from numerous indigenous folk arts (Stites 1983). These examples point to the semantics of the idea of the family that was associated with feelings of closeness, solidarity, and unity. Such per­ ceptions are connected with the absolute power ascribed to the head of the

Father of the people, face of the nation  125 family and prescribe the entire family’s subordination to the familial pa­ triarch. ‘The family’, as Michael Herzfeld pointed out, ‘provides an easily understood model for the loyalty and collective responsibility that citizens must feel toward the state’ (1991, 12). Consequently, imagining the leader as a ‘father’ and the state as a ‘family’ was crucial in forging a politically united imagined cult community.8 The image of the state as a family was not only an ideological, political, and theological concept, it was also the lived experience of everyday life. In the course of secularization and the formation of modern states, these religion­based practices of daily life did not disappear. Instead, losing their religious connotations, they moved into the sphere of the political and put down roots in official discourses and institutions, informing civic rituals and communicative practices. I would like to mention just one example. Spiritual kinship in the form of godparenthood was a Christian tradition used by both the ruler and the folk for creating an empathic power relationship based on the concepts of reciprocity and moral obligation.9 The ruler was often asked to be a godparent for his subjects’ children. Across the Eastern bloc, the leadership in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, and Romania adapted the pre­ modern religious institution of the godparent (Grigorov 2008; Tikhomirov 2017).10 Naming children after rulers allowed people to create an emotional bond with state leaders (Tikhomirov 2017, 412). Spiritual kinship with the ruler usually implied an expectation of financial support given in exchange for political loyalty—a tradition that survived in modern times as the per­ ception of the state taking the patriarchal role of the caring father who looks after everyone who needs help (e.g., Halder 2013, 158–159; Ironside 2018). These practices show that modern states were not formed exclusively by the institutional, ideological, and normative transformation of the state and so­ ciety. In fact, the resources for legitimizing the state that drew on the elemen­ tary structures of kinship played a very significant role in creating modern political orders and forming modern subjectivities. Metaphors of family and kinship connected the population emotionally with the regime (and vice versa) since such imagined bonds conveyed fundamental ideas about the so­ cial order in ways that were accessible and understandable to a broad public. By privatizing the image of the ruler and integrating it into individual life­ styles, ordinary people became active consumers as well as producers of the cult’s languages, rituals, and artefacts.

The spatial and the ritual orders of the cult community As a stabilizing and ordering entity, the ruler cult occupied the very centre of the symbolic universe. In the way the cult community worked, the leader was the cornerstone of the spatial and ritual order, thereby involving the en­ tire society in ‘working towards the ruler’.11 Thus, the population built and renamed cities, wrote letters, and sent gifts to the leader, sought personal au­ diences with him, and participated in festivities of veneration, which became

126  Alexey Tikhomirov integral parts of building authority and even sacrality towards the leader. Constructing the capitals of nation­states on the wave of urbanization and industrialization in the modern age, along with the acceleration of the media­ technological revolution, heightened the ruler’s representations and, in stag­ ing the leader as the very centre of the state and nation, strengthened the significance of this visibility (Bernhard 2011; Bodenschatz 2011; Clark 2011). New media made it possible to reach large swathes of territory at a single point in time and in that way, to create a cultic space through the press, ra­ dio, and television. The emergence of this medial public sphere produced the impression of synchronicity and the nation’s unity. The formation of a single discursive, spatial, and ritual order preserved the cult community’s homo­ geneity. In what follows, I analyze initially the spatial and subsequently the ritual structures of the cult community. Spatialization of the ruler cult and unification of the cult community The ruler’s cult has always had semantic connotations of spatial con­ solidation, ideological standardization, and the desire for unity around the leader as the sacral centre of power. Mapping leaders through public representations—monuments, posters, and other media—was an integral part of the spatial design of the cult community as was a division of the territory into sacred precincts and profane areas. Changing city landscapes and renaming squares, streets, and parks with the rulers’ names, as well as putting the leaders’ monuments, posters, and busts in central places, were re­ inforced by the introduction of public representations, festivals, ceremonies, and rituals in which members of the cult community venerated the leader (Azaryahu 1991; Crowley and Reid 2002; Dobrenko 2003). As a result, the sacred spaces were highly politicized: they were organized, controlled, and subjected to monitoring as part of daily life in order to embed the individual in the web of ideological meanings.12 On one hand, the cult became lived experience in such spaces and these places were ‘training grounds’ where people learned how to belong to the nation and the state. On the other hand, these politically saturated spaces had a significant potential for conflict: the population used iconoclastic practices to contest and renegotiate them.13 The ruler’s travels through his/her realm were an important ritual of knit­ ting disparate territories into a state or an empire. Elizabeth I (1533–1603) resided in London but, by travelling throughout England, she increased her personal charisma among the inhabitants of many parts of the country, in­ cluding the members of different denominations (Geertz 1985, esp. 16–20). The high visibility of Russian emperors in St. Petersburg impacted the spa­ tial organization of the empire by representing the capital as the sacral cen­ tre of power. ‘For all of us’, a Guards officer living in the provinces wrote, ‘Petersburg was the enchanting residence of the Tsar. And everyone who travelled to Petersburg was considered one of the elect, who could expect the

Father of the people, face of the nation  127 happiness of being close to the Tsar’ (quoted in Wortman 1985, 245).14 Late Ottoman sultans toured their empire to make themselves visible in public, that is, to offer their subjects a physical space for having direct visual and emotional access to the ruler’s body (Stephanov 2018, 261). Until the middle of the eighteenth century, when monarchs of the German­speaking lands travelled through their realms, their subjects showed their closeness to the ruler with a potent symbolic act: they unharnessed his horses and drew the carriages by themselves (Büschel 2006, 310). Masses of people greeted Na­ poleon III (1808–1873), when he journeyed through the outlying parts of the empire. In doing so, he enacted the symbolic unity of the periphery and the centre as his subjects addressed their greetings to his person (Truesdell 1997, 164). The monarch’s travels became a space integrating regional traditions into the ruler’s cult and provided a time when this could be done. On these oc­ casions, subjects honoured their rulers in accordance with local customs. Songs and poems of praise, in which elements of the local mythology and topography were interspersed with language and imagery shared across the realm, were written in local dialects and adopted to regional circumstances, images, and narratives (Stephanov 2018, 262; Plamper 2004a). Oral tradi­ tions passed from generation to generation and ever more rapidly spreading printed materials taught the population how to express their love for the ruler, how to honour him/her, and what was forbidden in displays of love and deference (Stephanov 2018, 264). The ruler’s meetings with delegates who travelled from the regions to the capital were another way to create representations of the unity around the cult. These usually took place in the capital—in the ruler’s residence and in direct contact with his/her body. For example, in the premodern world, the practice of giving audiences opened up direct access to the sacral centre of power and buttressed reproduction of the myth undergirding the ruler cult. Audiences not only allowed leaders to appear in the role of the car­ ing father­leader but also let subordinates affirm their personal loyalty to the leader. The functions that audiences performed for monarchs and the princes of the church show up again in Mussolini’s Italy, Stalinist Russia, Tito’s Yugoslavia, and Mao Zedong’s China (Schieder 2013; Kershaw 1998).15 The networks of railroads and air routes which made it easier to travel in the twentieth century, as well as improvements in telecommunica­ tions, increased the importance of the diplomacy leaders practiced and their trips to other countries. These visits reinforced the leader’s authority in the eyes of the population and burnished their image as major players in world affairs (Paulmann 2000; Derix 2009). The cult community’s collective memory, which took the form of muse­ ums and exhibitions dedicated to the rulers, reinforced the spatialization of the cult. Museums and exhibitions became tourist attractions and spaces for experiencing closeness to power.16 To celebrate sovereigns’ birthdays, exhibitions featuring installations about the leader’s biography and displays 

128  Alexey Tikhomirov of gifts sent to him were organized and museums were founded. Exhibits of gifts sent to Stalin in 1949 for his seventieth birthday staged the unity of the entire communist world, displaying declarations of people’s love for the So­ viet leader expressed on a global scale. For Tito’s seventieth birthday, in Bel­ grade, at that time the capital of Yugoslavia, an entire museum was opened in which gifts for the leader from every corner of the country and from for­ eign countries were exhibited (Halder 2013, 108). The many versions of the badge produced in honour of Mao Zedong were collected in the Museum of the Chinese Revolution in Beijing: every badge­producing unit was required to submit several examples as expressions of revolutionary art and the cre­ ativity of the masses, and as a symbol of Chinese unity around the leader (Leese 2017, 215). In general, places where leaders were born, lived, and died became sites of national memory and were objectified by being turned into museums or tourist attractions. Even today Mussolini’s birthplace (Predap­ pio, Italy) and Tito’s (Kumrovec, Croatia) are places of pilgrimage for their supporters, drawing the curious as well (Belaj 2008; Duggan 2013, 429–435; Halder 2013, 278–279). Cultic space was a medial space, and consequently a space of vibrant communication, steady streams of information, rumours, scandals, and emotions. Certainly, modern media—photographs, posters, radio, tele­ graphs, and television—contributed to the popularization of leaders and the creation of the medial sphere of the personality cult (Berenson and Giloi 2010). Technological and media developments put the ruler at the centre of public attention: the king, the leader, or the president became the icon, the personification of the imagined cult community, be it the nation, state, or empire. Expanded opportunities for replicating images and reaching a broad audience transformed rulers into communicative figures, which gave the public the impression that they were participating in high politics and had a front­row seat for the political and private life of leaders, becoming privy to their passions and the state of their health. In particular, the quick and cheap distribution of photographs and the public’s interest in this medium turned leaders into political icons. That al­ lowed ordinary people to privatize public figures for individual use and per­ sonal purposes in private spaces (Duggan 2013, 73–74). Citizens’ requests for autographed photographs of their rulers became a mass phenomenon in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Germany, a fad for seeking the monarch’s autograph was a sign of an increasing public interest in politics and ordinary people’s need to take part in producing the cult as well as their desire to manipulate the power structures to achieve personal goals (Giloi 2010). By staging global sorrow at the death of Queen Victoria and likewise Joseph Stalin, the press, the telegraph, and the postal services played a cen­ tral role in motivating millions of people to mourn these dead leaders (Plun­ kett 2003). The dead bodies of both the British monarch and Soviet dictators symbolized the unity of their cult communities and made the events com­ memorating their deaths a starting point from which the ruler’s posthumous

Father of the people, face of the nation  129 cult emerged. The funeral became a decisive moment when the emotional experience of cohesion around the figure of the ruler was dramatized and expressed in ritual laments.17 Posthumous cults around former leaders, in­ cluding Lenin in the Soviet Union, Kaysone Phomvihane in Laos, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, and Mao Zedong in China, were seen as a stabilizing, integrative element in establishing new governments and overcoming the crisis situation resulting from the death of the leader (Barmé 1996; Ennker 1997; Großbölting 2011; Leese 2017, 341; Tumarkin 1997). Ritual unification of the cult community The rituals of the ruler cult were an important instrument for generating the cult community. More specifically, they offered people a way to participate in power. By affirming the unity of the cult community, these rituals showed that citizens belonged to the state and were a way for them to display their loyalty to the ruler as his/her subjects before the leader. These rites helped the regime construct its political order, fill public space with its symbols, and ex­ plain to cult participants how the world was organized; of equal importance, they also indoctrinated the population and mobilized it to serve the state’s interests. In Durkheimian terms, it could be said that personality cult rituals created, reproduced, and revitalized collectively held ideas which help peo­ ple understand and interpret their surroundings (Durkheim [1912] 1994, 498). These rites translated myth into collective action: narratives were enacted— indeed, they came to life—in public space and they aroused (as was intended) positive emotions: love, pride, and gratitude. These feelings were the ‘diges­ tive enzymes’ that allowed the state’s ideology to penetrate citizens’ bodies and be assimilated into the consciousness of millions of individuals (Hein 2001, 11). Sharing the emotional experience and behavioural actions of the rituals made it possible for people to identify personally with the ruler, who was the incarnation of the nation, the state, or the empire (Dörner 1995, 54). By providing a space for both socio­political integration and the crucial experience of affective identification with the ruler, rituals allowed peo­ ple to participate in leader cults emotionally but also to encounter them as visual, acoustic, and whole­body sensory experience. In addition, they created communicative spaces, offering many channels through which the population could interact with the ruler. Entering into spiritual (indirect) or physical (direct) contact with the leader was a way to get closer to the sacral centre and enjoy its advantages. However, contact with the ruler also created moral expectations of him and became a way for the participants to make moral demands. By ascribing power, legitimacy, and authority to the leader, belonging to the cult was also a way to share the construction of the sacral centre. Since the second half of eighteenth century, celebrating the ruler’s birth­ day has been an important moment for the symbolic production of unity and for generating the emotional experience of solidarity between the leader

130  Alexey Tikhomirov and his/her followers. This tradition became especially widespread in mod­ ern states. For example, in Yugoslavia, every year, in the weeks before Tito’s birthday, ‘Tito’s baton’ was carried across the country by a relay of young people before it was presented to him on 25 May (Leese 2011, 345; Halder 2013, 193–214). The way Stalin’s seventieth birthday was celebrated across the Eastern bloc in 1949 is another example of the power of symbolic pol­ itics in securing the ruler’s cult. Creating a shared experience of solidarity with Moscow as well as evoking the feeling of the ‘we’ for the imagined cult community became a constitutive ritual that centralized and synchronized the post­war Soviet empire. Thus, the Soviet ambassador to Czechoslova­ kia reported to Moscow on the state’s internal consolidation, which was exemplified in the design for a monument to Stalin: to lay the monument’s foundation, the authorities planned to bring in stones from every locality and every region of the country (Volokitina 2002, 214–216). In Hungary, peasants from an agricultural cooperative planted four rows of walnut trees running from east to west. These were a ‘symbol of truth, proclaiming that the star of peace, rising in the Soviet Union, sheds its light on the entire world’.18 In a Bulgarian village, the task of collecting each and every vil­ lager’s signature on a congratulatory address to Stalin began with festiv­ ities, which included honouring tradition by killing an ox, a festive meal, and toasts to the Soviet leader’s health.19 Accounts from Romania noted the opening of 2,500 exhibits about the leader’s life and activities, which were intended to ‘express the love of the Romanian people for Comrade Sta­ lin’. Here, propaganda was compelled to allow for the fact of a multiethnic state, simultaneously printing materials in Romanian, Hungarian, German, Serbian, and Ukrainian (Volokitina 2002, 225–230). The entire Periphery used the leader’s birthday to carry forward two types of centralization: the promotion of social integration around local communist regimes, and the production of symbolic subjection to their patron, Stalin (Leese 2011, 223). Gift­giving is another common element of power relationships with roots in the Early Modern period.20 That is, giving gifts to rulers became an­ other ritual for establishing a direct connection between the leader and the individual. Georg Simmel argued that gifts create social relationships and strengthen or challenge these relationships by circumventing officially es­ tablished hierarchies and the lack of direct access to the ruler (Simmel 1992, 667). With increasing urbanization, greater anonymity in daily life, and the growing complexity of social reality, gifts to leaders were a key way to create emotional ties between the donor and recipient, going, figuratively speak­ ing, from hand to hand, and from person to person. Gifts given to monarchs to mark a coronation, a wedding, or the christening of their children poured in from all corners of the empire. Thus, the topography of gift­giving was defined as the territory within which subordination to the ruler took place, with possibilities for limitless symbolic colonization and expansion to new territories. This semantics of gathering together the empire by giving gifts was already evident in the Gospels of Otto III. This illuminated manuscript

Father of the people, face of the nation  131 was written around 1000 CE for Emperor Otto III. One of the illustrations shows gifts being presented to the emperor by four women, who personify the four provinces of the Holy Roman Empire: Rome, Gallia, Germania, and Sclavinia. This practice and this semantics of gift­giving can be traced through the centuries and has persisted to the present day. Thus, the Marble Hall in the Ethnographic Museum in St. Petersburg was the impressive site used to stage the public display of gifts from various peoples in the empire and from friendly countries that demonstrated Alexander III’s might and magnificence (Sosnina and Ssorin­Chaikov 2006, 13). Marcel Mauss emphasized the emotional power of gifts, arguing that they created reciprocal relationships and the expectation of an exchange (Mauss 1968, 4). Subjects not only presented gifts to the leader, they also expected something from him in return (Algazi et al. 2003). They asked for a letter with a photograph, just a few lines that would be a memento, and they promised to preserve the leader’s letter as a family heirloom that would be handed down from generation to generation. German monarchs gave presents to their subjects for their weddings and on becoming a godfather to their children (Büschel 2006, 313–324). To reinforce the giver’s moral influence, letters with speeches, poems, songs, and drawings praising the ruler frequently accom­ panied gifts. In these works, rulers were often called ‘father’ and ‘mother’, which reflected the popular perception of the state as a family and the rulers as close relatives (Büschel 2006, 321). Some donors thought that handmade gifts would make the giver’s connection with the ruler even more personal and would lend that bond a more individual character. Authors often vowed to accomplish particular goals and complete various acts which would help the ruler and the state. Thus, the practice of giving gifts to leaders indicates that there was a way to produce the leader cult from below; this opened up the possibility that broad social strata, even those far from politics, could be included in the political project (Ssorin­Chaikov and Sosnina 2004). For subjects it was a way of making sense of belonging to the sacred centre due to the (self­)staging of bonds of trust and participation in festivals, holidays, and celebrations of the ruler’s birthday. Mass celebrations and public rituals of honouring rulers became a con­ stituent element in the functioning of leader cults. From the turn of the eight­ eenth century, leaders’ birthdays became national and state holidays. This gave the population a chance to become acquainted with the biographies of leaders and to develop the sense of belonging to a nation by identifying with the leader. With the establishment of a cult’s ritual order, the cult’s artefacts and commodities were introduced into the economic system and the pre­ vailing cultures of consumption. For example, during the Cultural Revolu­ tion in China over 2.5 billion Mao badges were produced (Leese 2011, 215). The production of items bearing the leader’s image sometimes touched off a struggle, in particular, when different producers of consumer goods com­ peted for the right to use the leader’s name and image as a marketing tool.21 The expanding commercialization and politicization of European societies

132  Alexey Tikhomirov consolidated the sacralization of national leaders and its increasing visibil­ ity in both the public and private spheres.22 The upsurge of nationalism at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was intertwined with the militarization of soci­ ety and representations of leaders as military heroes, skilled tacticians who courageously led their men into battle. In early twentieth­century Poland the cult of Marshall Pilsudski, in which he was revered as the saviour who would preserve the Polish state in the face of the Soviet military threat, fed already strong nationalistic feelings (Hein 2001). ‘Fathers of the nation’— Garibaldi in Italy and Bismarck in Germany—lived on in public memory as military statesmen who led successful struggles for national unification and were guarantors of stability in times of rapid historical change (Gerwarth 2005; Gerwarth and Riall 2009). Military language and dress were significant in staging the cult of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) as the founder of the Republic of Turkey (Navaro­Yashin 2002; Hanioğlu 2017). Remember­ ing military victories became important for creating collective memory and strengthening feelings of patriotism, invincibility, and nationalism. For that reason, the cults of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible ‘flourished’ in the Soviet Union during the total mobilization of the population in the Sec­ ond World War. These historical figures were invoked not only to arouse a military spirit in the population and to inspire feelings of patriotism but also to create historical models for identification with the military feats of cen­ turies past (Perrie 1998; Schenk 2004). As leaders and heroes, they became figures around whom the nation’s historical narrative coalesced because they provided a shared sense of belonging, unity, and power.

Conclusion Ruler cults were not exclusively an invention of modernity. They have al­ ways relied on tradition and reinvented it (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).23 Thus, the Chinese practice of honouring communist leaders had its roots in the cult of emperors and kings (Leese 2011, 4–5). The Kim cult in North Ko­ rea incorporated elements of Japanese emperor worship (Armstrong 2003, 223). In Stalinist Hungary the Rákosi cult drew legitimacy from a tradition of popular veneration of the founder of the state, Saint Stephen, and the first royal family, the House of Árpád (Apor 2017, 39). Despite their revolutionary radicalism, Bolshevik leaders inherited scenarios of power that developed during the Tsarist period.24 With their logics of patron­client networks and politics of pomp based on the theological concept of the divine right of kings, the cults of European monarchs became the preconditions for the emergence of modern—secular, medial, and masculine—leader cults. The mixture of tradition and innovation, the religious and the secular, the po­ litical and the everyday, in the realization of symbolic politics had its roots in practices of worshipping monarchs and national leaders which emerged in the middle of the eighteenth century and this melange became evident in

Father of the people, face of the nation  133 what Eric Hobsbawm called ‘the age of extremes’, especially in totalitarian states and communist countries (Hobsbawm 1994). Even today, the image of the ‘great man’, the ‘strong head of state’, the ‘father of the nation’ continues to influence international politics and define nationalist projects in many parts of the world.25 Historical change from premodern to modern times has been marked by three major, interconnected shifts that impacted the emergence of modern personality cults as the sacred centre of a particular social order. First of all, the image of the ruler went from being an invisible to a visible entity. Hid­ den from the eyes of society in earlier times, concealed behind palace walls and blocked from direct view by their courtiers, rulers gradually began to appear in public more frequently, started to take part in ceremonies open to the populace, and began to arrange times when the people could have contact with them, directly and through various types of media.26 Since an­ tiquity, the common perception that what is visible constitutes authentic facts—or truths—and the idea that power is so powerful due to public rep­ resentations of it have suggested a very close connection between visuality and both realizing power and (de)legitimizing political orders.27 The ruler’s increasing visibility was further reinforced by the Enlightenment idea of popular sovereignty, which forced European monarchs and modern dicta­ tors alike to make the issue of legitimacy central to systems of public sym­ bolism created to gain their subjects’ support (Barclay 1992; Büschel 2006; Frevert 2011; Giloi 2011).28 In addition, the ruler’s image changed radically. No longer represented as cold—in other words, emotionless and remote—his image underwent a transformation and he was displayed as a warm—empathic, emotional, and, not least, human—leader. When the state was personified in the body of the ruler, the abstract idea of the state became visible, tangible, and accessible (Walzer 1967, 194). Emotions became a resource for creating emotional bonds with the state by virtue of (in­)direct communication with the ruler. The rul­ er’s former emotional coldness and passivity on ceremonial occasions, when he was often accompanied by intermediaries, was replaced by his active role, openness, and indeed high visibility at the centre of public discourses, ico­ nography, and rituals. Moreover, by showing empathy, making exceptions from the rules, and offering the possibility of a direct response to the needs, fears, and hopes of a single individual, the ruler’s warmth could compensate for the bureaucratic indifference of state apparatus. Likewise, over the long span of European history, the sovereign’s power to grant pardons fostered the perception that the ruler was an empathic institution for administering justice (Prosperi 2018, especially chap. 5, “Justice and Grace”; Zemon Davis 1987; Härter and Nubola 2011). Technical and technological progress, im­ provements in the channels of communication and the means of mobility, the expansion of literacy, the availability of an inexpensive popular press, the emergence of radio, and later television, in a rapidly changing world of in­ creasing urbanization and ever more politicized big cities all helped to create

134  Alexey Tikhomirov a vibrant public sphere full of emotions, preoccupations, contradictions, hopes, and illusions about the ruler. At the same time, this public sphere of­ fered spaces and times for participation, belonging, and making sense of life through emotional identification with the ruler. Finally, the image of the ruler made a transition from uniformity to multiplicity, moving towards a plurality of meanings and representations, produc­ ers and recipients, appropriations and opportunities for consumption. As scholarship on leader cults shows, the history of ruler cults is the history of a dichotomy between uniformity (the production of a single perception of a leader) and multiplicity (the co­existence of multiple perceptions of a leader). In reality, the ruler cult united both cultural production and social reception in everyday life by offering such integrating structures as language, ritual, time, and space to increase communal solidarity.29 Even in modern dictator­ ships, the complexity of the social actors involved and the variety of unique, individual experiences at play challenged and changed the message which the uniformity of ruler cults transmitted.30 Since the mid twentieth century, nostalgia and consumption have become two driving forces that created (and continue to create) a variety of individualizing discourses and prac­ tices which ordinary citizens used to develop a personal identity through the process of imagining the ruler.31 Improvisation, creativity, the manipulation of artefacts, symbols, and communicative strategies which built spaces of agency for diverse individuals allowed large sectors of the population to pro­ duce, to participate, to interpret, and to use these tools as part of the life of the state, the nation, the country, the city, and, last but not least, one’s self. Linking an individual ‘I’ with the leader became a way of self­fashioning that included not only buying and using goods bearing the leader’s image, for example clothing, watches, and dishes, but also creating one’s own, homemade pictures, postcards, collages, playing cards, and other things featuring portraits of leading state figures. A person’s choice to be tattooed with the image of the leader marks the point of confluence of an individual body with the leader’s political body: in this way many bodies of the ruler are multiplied on the physical bodies of individuals.32 Unpacking the regime’s standardized messages in the fates of millions of individual citizens and fill­ ing these messages with personal meanings is the driving force behind the regeneration of ruler cults in the contemporary world.

Notes

Father of the people, face of the nation  135

















136  Alexey Tikhomirov

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8

The image of Josip Broz Tito in post-Yugoslavia Between national and local memory Tamara P. Trošt

Introduction1 Since the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia almost 30 years ago, mem­ ories of the communist past and the common state have undergone vast transformations in each of the republics. Studies on the transformations of the memory of the communist past, as well as of Josip Broz Tito as the leader of the common state, have thrived in recent decades. This research is generally confined to two groups. On the one hand, there are studies of how memory of the common past is adopted at the ground level by common people in everyday life: in particular, those are the studies on communi­ ties of nostalgia, Titostalgia, and Yugonostalgia (Škrbić Alempijević and Hjemdahl 2006; Vočić 2007; Belaj 2008; Velikonja 2008; Petrović 2012; Ko­ janić 2015; Dremel and Zekić 2016; Palmberger 2016; Petrović 2016; Popović 2018; Vučković Juroš 2018; Popović and Rupnik 2019). These works focus on understanding the diversity, complexity, and the function of memories of Yugoslavia—and Tito—among individuals and communities. On the other hand, and representing the bulk of scholarly research, are cross­national comparisons of the ways in which memory of Yugoslavia and the Com­ munist past was manipulated at the national level, in accordance with the nation­building and ideological goals of the post­Yugoslav states. This re­ search demonstrates the extent to which the memory of Communism, the common Yugoslav state, and Tito as its embodiment, have all been subject to extensive political manipulation aligned with the nationalist agendas of the new political elites (e.g. Sretenović and Puto 2004; Brunnbauer 2004a; Najbar­Agičić 2006; Volčić 2007; Bing 2012; Samardžić et al. 2013; Pavasović Trošt 2014; Koren 2015; Subotić 2015; Stojanović 2017; Đureinović 2018a; Stojanović 2019). By examining Tito’s personality cult through the lens of the nation­state, however, this research assumes that Tito’s image changed in a uniform and consistent way within each of the post­Yugoslav states, frequently presuming that the process of historical memory (re)making is somehow consistent within the countries (Kuljić 2007). However, approaching the issue of Tito’s memory at just one of these levels ignores the agency and complexity of memory­making across time and space. While the representatives of the nation state have an authority (and resources)

144  Tamara P. Trošt of hegemonic power to promote the “official” historical narrative that suits their political and ideological interests, various social and political actors may have power and/or interest to engage in the process of public memory­making. The historical narratives these mnemonic agents promote may conform or add to the dominant national narrative, or may express a range of “counter­ memories” typical for sub­national and marginalized social groups (Levy 2010, 15). A group that feels completely excluded and alienated from the offi­ cial memory may become cohesive enough to assemble an “oppositional narra­ tive” (Ashplant et al. 2004, 22). “Sectional narratives” are those “memories that achieved the level of open public articulation, but still have not yet secured rec­ ognition within the existing framework of official memory” (ibid., 20). While the weaker and more marginalized groups have less resources and ability to influence the dominant narratives or promote their own in the public arena (ibid., 21), I examine them in order to show how such symbols as Tito can play different roles at national, regional, and local levels. In the case of Tito as a historical symbol, I show that contestation or ac­ ceptance takes place at three distinct levels: 1

2 3

the official politics of Communist memory revisionism, usually taking place at the national level (changes in official commemorations, history textbooks, the national anthem, official calendars of public holidays, national symbols)—on which the bulk of research has been written; local government politics (e.g. street renaming, removal or installation of Tito’s monuments) occurring at the local city or municipality level; grassroots and vernacular memory­making, typically organized by civil­society agents, which frequently challenge the official post­war strategies (e.g. opposing the appropriation of anti­fascist symbols for nationalist purposes).

This chapter examines the continuation of Tito’s personality cult as a con­ textually contingent practice, paying close attention to the ways in which different levels of society—the nation, local municipalities, and civil society—have differently appropriated, rejected, or adapted the “official” dismantling of Tito’s personality cult post­1990. By focusing on changes or opposition to changes at the local and grassroots levels, either by civil so­ ciety agents or local political bodies, and showing how these were at odds or in agreement with the politics of memory at the national level, this paper points to the plurality of memory agents operating on different planes of society with different ideological, political, and personal motivations, and demonstrates that the outcomes of memory­making activities are highly de­ pendent on the local context within which the activities are embedded. The following sections proceed as follows. Following the methodology, I first provide a brief background of Tito’s life and legacy and summarize the controversies and divergences of Tito’s understanding and remembrance across the post­Yugoslav area. Here, I also point to the three different “per­ sonas” that are of importance when examining Tito’s personality cult: Tito as

Tito between national and local memory  145 the leader of the anti­fascist partisan movement in WWII, Tito as the leader of the non­aligned movement and his defiance to Stalin, and Tito as the embod­ iment of the politics of Socialist Yugoslavia. In the second part of the paper, I proceed to the analysis of the three different levels at which his personality cult has been accepted, contested, or rejected: (1) the “top” or official­level changes in the representation of Tito across the post­Yugoslav countries; (2) local government politics, captured through debates at the local, city, or mu­ nicipality level, regarding street renaming, removal or installation of Tito’s monuments; and (3) grassroots and vernacular memory­making; including memory activities taken by individuals or unnamed groups.

Methodology For the official level of Tito memory­making, I review the ways in which Com­ munism and Socialism broadly, and Tito in particular, were revised in each of the post­Yugoslav states post­1990. As official post­Communist memory revisionism has received much attention in the literature, as well as the trans­ formation of Tito’s image across time and space, I only briefly summarize the main changes at the official level, as documented in previous research. In order to map out various patterns of how the local contexts influence local politics of memory, I examined several cases since the 1990s in which Tito’s memory was advanced or challenged: renaming local streets and squares, removing or reinstalling monuments, etc. Here I applied a trans­ national approach that goes beyond methodological nationalism (Amelina et al. 2012; De Cesari and Rigney 2014), aimed at finding trends that are common across the region of former Yugoslavia. The cases included in the analysis are provided in Table 8.1. Table 8.1 List of cases and actors analyzed in the chapter Actor

Case

Circle for the square

Renaming/replacing Tito’s name in Zagreb’s main square Replacing all Tito and Tito­related names from squares and streets with pre­WWII names in Serbia (Kula) Returning Tito’s monuments in Istria (Labin) Croatia—preserve Tito’s name for square and elsewhere; Serbia—remove Tito’s monument to Užice; Slovenia—participation in Sagadin battles Restoration of Tito sign in stones in Sagadin, Slovenia

Association of descendants of Thessaloniki Volunteers Society of Josip Broz Tito SUBNOR and its national successors Pan­Slovenian People’s Uprising Movement; Primorski puntarji; Section May 45 of ZZNOB Individual acts of resistance

Blowing up; desecrating Tito’s monuments; artist performances (e.g. Dalibor Martinis); Tito sign in olive plantation; documentary film about street name­changing (Disappearance of Heroes)

146  Tamara P. Trošt When examining individual cases of challenging or advancing a particu­ lar representation of Tito’s image, I focus on the following questions: •

•

• •

Who are the memory agents in the particular case? Are they local polit­ ical representatives (e.g. office of the mayor of a municipality), or is it a local civil society actor (e.g. an NGO, an activist group, a locally based civic association—“grupa građana”)? What kind of collective identity does the memorial activity promote? Is the narrative focused on the left vs. right or fascist vs. anti­fascist, ideo­ logical oppositions the national (Serbian vs. Croatian) vs. the local lens, or it is rather a community of nostalgia? Is the historical narrative of the local memory at odds with the official national politics of memory? Was the memory­making activity (e.g. street renaming, monument removal and reinstallation) successful or not, and which local factors played a role in its ultimate success or failure?

Background: Tito and his personality cult Tito was born in Kumrovec in the Austro­Hungarian Empire (modern Cro­ atia) in 1892, and spent his early years as a metal worker. He was drafted into the Austro­Hungarian army during World War I, where he was subse­ quently captured by the Russians. While in Russia, he joined a Bolshevik group in 1917 and returned to Yugoslavia after the war, where he became active in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia (CPY). He became known during World War II as the leader of resistance group called “partisans” and backed by the Communist Party. Tito’s role in this movement was particularly pronounced, and he soon came to be viewed as the “face” of the partisan movement. Two more groups played an important role in this period, both fighting in a civil war against the partisans: ustaša in Croa­ tia, which supported the regime of fascist Germany, and četniks in Serbia, originally a resistance group backed by the ruling monarchy and led by Draža Mihailović. After World War II, Tito’s communists triumphed, the monarchy was expelled, and Tito assumed power over Yugoslavia made up of six republics (Serbia, Montenegro, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina). The various ethnic groups returned to seemingly peaceful coexistence and high rates of intermarriage, typically attributed to Tito’s iron­fist rule under the slogan of “brotherhood and unity”, which disallowed any kind of displays of ethnic identification or mention of World War II crimes. Tito served as the prime minister (1943–1953) and later the life­long pres­ ident (1953–1980) of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). In external affairs, he was a staunch communist, although he defied Soviet hegemony by heading the non­aligned movement. His role in this movement won the support of the West, resulting in plentiful foreign aid and loans,

Tito between national and local memory  147 which allowed the country high standards of living. However, after Tito’s death in 1980, the country’s economy was in ruins, and ethnic animosities increased. By the late 1980s, Yugoslavia began unravelling along ethnic lines, and a bloody ethnic war ensued, ultimately resulting in six republics. The period between the end of World War II and the wars of the 1990s is commonly referred to as “Tito’s Yugoslavia”. Tito’s personality cult was extraordinary mostly in the sense that it combined otherwise seemingly contradictory attributes. On the one hand, he was a firm socialist, represented in textbooks as a very modest common man “just one of us”, comrade Tito. On the other hand, however, he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, including numerous villas, cars, and women; he was known for his love of international cuisine, expensive presents from foreign leaders, and otherwise enjoyed an apparently capitalist life­ style. Somehow, however, these two seemingly incompatible hypostases were neatly combined in his personality cult, probably largely due to the role of the media in the production of a compelling storyline: to an av­ erage Yugoslav, Tito offered a vision of how hard work could eventually pay off. For the general population, Tito was the son of a blue­collar family who through his own work and dedication “made it”, and thus provided aspirations that this social and economical lift was available for everyone. Narratives of Tito during the war paint a compelling picture of his heroism and dedication to Yugoslavia’s cause, offering the implicit argument that the leader’s good life was more than deserved. During Tito’s rule, there are several aspects of his biography that were glossed over or simply ignored: his questionable activities in Russia before World War  II, numerous marriages and infidelities, secret meetings with both German and četnik representatives during the war, purges of political op­ ponents after WWII, increasing reliance on foreign loans to maintain an image of prosperity in Yugoslavia (which eventually crippled Yugosla­ via’s economy), actions towards Stalinists and other regime opponents, real and perceived, throughout his rule, and ultimately the failure of his “self­management socialism”. These criticisms only began to surface in public discussions after Tito’s death and Yugoslavia’s dissolution, and typically it was bent to suit the nationalist agenda of the separate repub­ lics of the former Yugoslavia.2 While Tito still occupies a prominent place in public memory in Serbia and Croatia today, its analysis poses a methodological challenge: when peo­ ple think of Tito, there are distinct differences as to which aspect of his persona is currently serving as the object of memory. As Velikonja (2008, 14) aptly explains in his volume Titostalgia, Tito’s memory represents a set of diametrically opposite ideas that span multiple layers: […] the great statesman, the victorious leader of the Partisan resist­ ance movement, a citizen of the world, a rebel who dared say No! to Hitler and Stalin (and survived), the most welcome guest, the father

148  Tamara P. Trošt of self­management socialism, a cosmopolitan, a peacemaker and a co­creator of the “third way” in the then divided world (the architect of the Non­Aligned Movement), a charming host and a bon vivant […]3 Indeed, in public opinion, Tito occupies a peculiar place, typically remem­ bered as both the most and least favourite figure, even among youth who were born in the 1990s. For instance, in a nationwide survey of 8th and 12th graders in Serbia, when asked “in your opinion, who is the most/ least positive Serbian figure in the past?”, the participants ranked Tito as both first most positive (21%, followed by St. Sava with 13% and Aleksan­ dar Karađorđevic with 8%) and the third most negative (after Slobodan Milošević with 25% and Vuk Branković with 16%) figure (Trošt 2018). A comparable study in Croatia (Najbar­Agićić and Koren 2004) paints a similar picture, here Tito is the third most frequently mentioned positive (9%, following Stjepan Radić with 37% and Tuđman with 12%), and the second most frequently mentioned negative figure (12%, following Ante Pavelić with 45%).4 In Velikonja’s (2008, 14) words, Tito undoubtedly re­ mains an important figure: […] no matter whether times were good or bad, in the eyes of his oppo­ nents, supporters or neutral observers, Tito has invariably been an im­ portant historical figure, who marked the modern history of Yugoslav nations and the wider region in one way or another However, the reasons why he is remembered so differently, and which as­ pects of his memory continue to be advanced or challenged, vary. For the purpose of this paper, in order to analyze systematically the contested as­ pects of Tito’s memory, I schematize the aspects of his persona that are the primary objects of memory in each case study: 1

Tito as the leader of the anti­fascist partisan movement in WWII; a b

2 3

the embodiment of the partisan movement and their war­time activities; the embodiment of the crimes committed by the partisans in 1945;

Tito as the leader of the non­aligned movement and his defiance to Sta­ lin; and Tito as the embodiment of the politics of Socialist Yugoslavia: a b c

the embodiment of a “common man” who was able to with hard work succeed from a working­class background, the embodiment of brotherhood and unity and pan­Yugoslavism (being Serbian born in Croatia, etc.), the embodiment of the politics of the Communist regime (purges; repression of opponents, Comintern, Goli Otok, etc.),

Tito between national and local memory  149 d

the embodiment of the stability, grandeur, and world­wide state recognition of Tito’s Yugoslavia (Flere and Kirbis 2011).

Findings: remembering Tito between the national and the local Official-level politics, memory at the national level As mentioned previously, extensive research exists on post­1990s history revisionism of the Communist era and the revisionism of Tito’s image in particular (Sretenović and Puto 2004; Volćić 2007; Bing 2012; Roksandić 2013; see also the edited volumes by Brunnbauer 2004a and Samardžić et al. 2013). This research demonstrates the extent to which the memory of Com­ munism, the common Yugoslav state, and Tito as its extension and embod­ iment, have all been subject to extensive political manipulation to fit the nationalistic agendas of the new post­Yugoslav nation­states. In some such countries, the cloak of Socialism was shred as soon as the republics gained independence in the early 1990s, and the very identity of the new nation re­ lied on complete detachment from the Yugoslav idea and Tito as its symbol). In Slovenia and Croatia, for instance, […] the revision of communist historical scholarship served the de­ legitimization of both the socialist and the federal components of the former Yugoslavia. […] These historians, building on trends already ex­ isting before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, dissociated the histories of their own nations completely from those of the other Yugoslav repub­ lics, and presented independence as the natural outcome of national his­ tory. All ills of their nation’s recent past were attributed to communism, Yugoslavism, and Greater Serbian nationalism. (Brunnbauer 2005)5 In Serbia and Montenegro, conversely, the official “shredding” of the Socialist narrative began much later, as the Milošević regime remained in power until 2000. These two countries thus went through a decade of uneasy cohabitation of the new ethno­nationalist narrative alongside the Socialist one, gradually giving rise to the new narrative in which Ti­ to’s partisans and Draža Mihajlović’s četniks are on equal footing as two side­by­side WWII resistance movements. This parallelism kept some aspects of the Socialist narrative completely intact (such as Tito’s role in foreign affairs), while strategically replacing others (Končar 2013; Pa­ vasović Trošt 2018).6 Finally, in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedo­ nia, it was simply not possible to do away completely with the Socialist narrative, as communist Yugoslavia had given birth to the Bosnian and Macedonian nation (Brunnbauer 2005; for  Bosnia, see Promitzer 2004; for Macedonia, see Brunnbauer 2004b), and accordingly, in Bosnian and

150  Tamara P. Trošt Macedonian history textbooks we still find the most positive evaluations of the Socialist system and Tito in particular (Mihajlović Trbovc and Pavasović Trošt 2013). Along with the manipulations of the narrative on Socialism and Tito that occurred at the official level, the same process took place in official com­ memorations, history textbooks, the national anthem, official calendars of public holidays, and the procedure of removing Tito’s monuments from main republic squares (on historical revisionism through name changes, see Radović 2013 and Dragosavac 2013). Local governments/municipalities/cities; grassroots and vernacular memory-making In the following sections, I review cases of memory­making at the sub­ national and local levels in the countries of the former Yugoslavia after the 1990s. Naturally, these cases include activities meant to openly challenge and contest Tito’s memory, as well as activities of those who actively work on preserving it. One of the best­known examples of challenging Tito’s memory at the grassroots level is the organization Circle for the Square (Krug za trg) (Krug Za Trg 2013). This organization, founded in 2008, defines itself as an “informal civil initiative for Croatia without totalitarian symbolism in public places” (građanska inicijativa za Hrvatsku bez totalitarističke simbolike u javnim prostorima), and particularly for changing the name of the Zagreb square labelled after Tito for which they instead propose names like “Theatre square” or “University square”, “or any other name in ac­ cordance with cultural and moral values”. Their website provides exam­ ples of real Croatian citizens of Zagreb speaking about the feelings every time the Marshall Tito Square stop is announced on a tram: these testi­ monies feature, for instance, an 84­year old woman who lived through her parents’ death when she was 17, and then lived to see her 19­ and 20­year old brothers killed by Tito’s partisans; and a man who spent four years in the Stara Gradiška camp and endured long periods of isolation and exhausting work because he disseminated anti­communist and anti­Yu­ goslav leaflets as a high school student. The organization notes that there are records of 40,000 such dissidents in the Zagreb archives, though the “total number is of course significantly higher because the regime perse­ cuted opponents throughout Yugoslavia, and many arrests and murders were not documented”. The organization’s website further argues that totalitarian commemoration is offensive to all citizens, not just the vic­ tims, because the Yugoslav regime, similar to other communist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe, violated human rights. According to this group, this kind of symbolism acts as an obstacle to the development of democracy, and while the latter had mostly done away with names like

Tito between national and local memory  151 “Lenin square”, or “The Street of the Socialist Revolution”, there is still much work left to be done. In addition to the groups of activists working to challenge Tito’s memory on ideological grounds (such as the aforementioned Krug za trg), another group of activists has been working on removing Tito’s street names in Ser­ bia. The Association of Descendants of Thessaloniki Volunteers (Udruženje potomaka solunskih dobrovoljaca—WWI volunteers), in the Serbian munic­ ipality of Kula, in addition to installing the bust of the King Peter I, has been petitioning to change the street name back to “Petar the First” street from the current Marshall Tito Street, along with returning pre­Socialist Serbian names to all streets named after partisan heroes (Rajić 2012). This organization’s mission is to pressure the state to return the war volunteer rights of 1928, and to preserve the tradition of war volunteering altogether. Among other things, their activities include creating and installing monu­ ments, celebrating war volunteer anniversaries, cooperating with scientific institutions and researchers in the collection, processing, archiving, and researching historical material about the volunteer movement, organizing conferences, roundtables, and publishing of edited collections, cooperating with the Serbian Orthodox Church and patriotic organizations in Serbia and abroad, making historical­touristic trips, “preserving patriotism”, etc. (Udruženje potomaka solunskih dobrovoljaca 2019). Simultaneously, several civil society organizations are working towards the opposite goal—to preserve Tito’s names on streets and town squares, and/or reinstall Tito’s monuments to the places they occupied before the war. One such organization is the Society of Josip Broz Tito (“Društvo Josip Broz Tito”), which has offices in several cities across Yugoslavia (Rijeka, Za­ greb, Sarajevo). The Rijeka chapter, which is said to have up to 1,000 mem­ bers, defines itself as an “organization that protects the memory of Tito’s image and work, connects his followers in the region, and works on preserv­ ing his legacy identified as ‘pacifism, brotherhood and unity’, anti­fascism, and non­alignment” (Društvo “Josip Broz Tito” Rijeka 2012). Among other things, this organization worked on refurbishing Tito’s monument and re­ turning it to Labin, which boasted three monuments of Tito prior to the war. The Society began petitioning for the return of the monument in 1998 and its efforts were almost successful in 2003; however, the actual reinstal­ lation did not occur until 2005 (Grad Labin 2010). Interestingly, while the formal mission of the organization is captured in the above mission state­ ment, interviews with the leadership and members of the society much more frequently emphasize their activity as motivated by Tito the person rather than his ideology or politics. For instance, in a 2013 interview, the secretary of the society said the goal was to preserve the image and work of Marshall Tito, “because he was straightforward, approachable, he solved every prob­ lem, so I have the most beautiful memories of my life” (RTL 2013). Other members of the Society similarly highlighted their own personal memories

152  Tamara P. Trošt of Tito, mentioning, for instance, the way he received guests, attesting to the interweaving of ideological and nostalgic activism. Last year, the Society organized a series of protests jointly with the Cro­ atian successor of SUBNOR (Association of National War Liberation Veterans, see details below) to counter the activities of the Krug za trg and preserve the name of Tito’s square and all other similar designations across the country (Glas Slavonije 2016). Protestors carried signs and T­shirts with Tito’s image and slogans such as “Zagreb for Tito”, “Tito is ours, we are Tito’s” (Tito je naš, mi smo Titovi), and “We won’t give our Tito to anyone” (Ne damo našega Tita nikome). In his speech at the demonstrations, the ac­ tor Vilim Matula criticized the statement of the then­Minister of Culture Zlatko Hasanbegović that the only true victory was the Homeland War of 1991–1995: Matula emphasized the contribution of anti­fascists to the “true and magnificent victory, above all because it was the common victory of the Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, Slovenian, and Jewish people” (Glas Slavonije 2016). The President of the Society said in his speech: “We came here to resist, relying on facts, on the historical and societal role of Josip Broz Tito, on everything he did during his life for the well­being of Yugoslavia and Croatia” (Glas Slavonije 2016). Indeed, the battle to preserve or reinstall Tito’s monuments, which were previously either destroyed or removed to safety during the war, is mostly led by the Communist successors of veteran organizations such as SUBNOR. In (Titovo) Užice, for instance, Tito’s statue was removed from the main square by the decision of the city council in 1991, and spent the next two decades in the garden of the National Museum (Lojanica 2015). The Ser­ bian Association of the National Liberation War Veterans Savez udruženja boraca Narodnooslobodilačkog rata Jugoslavije (SUBNOR) has been work­ ing on getting Tito’s statue moved to the main square since 2006. In Užice, SUBNOR had first appealed to have Tito’s statue reinstalled, and the ap­ peal was later taken over by the Museum of Užice, supposedly supported by the majority of Užice residents (Nikolić 2015). Since 2013, there have been yearly announcements that the statue would be reinstalled in its original place in the city square, with media reporting that the city council supports this move as a potential driver of tourist revenue; however, it is uncertain whether the move will ever take place, given the widespread opposition. This case highlights the importance of the local context, with the potential suc­ cess of Tito’s reinstallation depending on both the changing opinions in the city council (e.g., arguments regarding potential tourist revenue) and local coalitions (SUBNOR independently, or in alliance with the city Museum). SUBNOR, whose Serbian successor (SUBNOR Serbia) has worked on having Tito’s monument reinstalled in Užice, is an umbrella association for SUBNOR chapters throughout Yugoslavia. After Yugoslavia’s dissolution, each republic founded its own organization, many of which are active in pre­ serving the memory of Tito and the Communist regime. In Bosnia, there are two successor organizations, one for the Federation (called Savez antifašista

Tito between national and local memory  153 i boraca narodnooslobodilačkog rata u Bosni i Hercegovini or SABNOR BiH), and one for Republika Srpska (Savez udruženja boraca narodnooslobodilačkog rata Republike Srpske or SUBNOR RS), which works in close collaboration with the Serbian chapter of SUBNOR. Macedonia also has a related organization (Сојуз на борците од Народноослободителната и антифашистичка војна на Македонија, SBNOAM), as does Slovenia (Zveza združenj borcev za vrednote NOB Slovenije—ZZB, see ZZB Nob 2016). The Montenegrin organization, after its parting with Serbia in 2006, reorganized as the Savez udruženja boraca narodnooslobodilačkog rata i antifašista Crne Gore (SUBNOR CG). Across the countries of the former Yugoslavia, these organizations have similar goals: the preservation of anti­fascist traditions and development of anti­fascist consciousness, the protection of humanistic values based on tolerance and understanding, etc. Some of the goals, how­ ever, are explicitly related to Tito: “with the truth and arguments, to oppose hiding of facts and untruths about the role of Josip Broz Tito, the anti­fascist resistance, and the heroic battle of Tito’s partisans in the anti­Hitler Allied coalition”. In Slovenia, the public debate between the two narratives of Tito is well­il­ lustrated by the battles over the sign Naš Tito [Our Tito] in Sagadin near Nova Gorica. The inscription, composed of letters 25 × 100 m, was set in 1978. After years of neglect and becoming overgrown by weeds, an unnamed group of activists refurbished the sign, which was then changed to “SLO” prior to Slovenia’s entrance into the European Union in 2004, beginning a decade of battles over the signage. In 2005, it was renamed back to “Our Tito”, and then over the next few years into “Naš Fido”, and “Naš Tigr”. In 2014, a group of activists of the movement/protest Panslovenian People’s Uprising Movement (Gibanje—Vseslovenska ljudska vstaja) changed it into “Vstaja” (Uprising), and coated it with plaster. This inscription remained in place until April 2015, when a group of activists comprised of members of the Section May ‘45 of the Zveza združenj borcev za vrednote NOB Slovenije (The Union of the Associations for the Values of the National Liberation Movement of Slovenia) and members of the activist group Primorski puntarji (loosely translatable as “seaside rebels”)—again refurbished the old sign “Naš Tito” (Jerina 2014). The same year, the two organizations co­ hosted an event on May 8 (a day before May 9, the “day of victory against fascism and domestic traitors”), undertaking minor repairs and lighting up the Tito sign with torches (Primorski puntarji 2015). Interestingly, these battles include several actors, as listed above: Gibanje— VLV, Sekcija maj ’45 of ZZB NOB, and Primorski puntarji—three organiza­ tions with vastly different missions. Gibanje—VLV, for instance, organizes protests around broad topics such as the “tyranny of neoliberalism”, fights clientelism and corruption, demands transparency in government transac­ tions (including hiring processes and uses of public money), insists on sack­ ing of all politicians convicted of corruption, clientelism or abuse of power; favours the establishment of an ethical codex for government politicians,

154  Tamara P. Trošt judges, and prosecutors, direct democracy, responsible organizational leadership instead of quick privatization, and advocates “changes in the destructive politics of austerity measures dictated by Europe, which are pushing people into poverty and degrading the public health, educational, and cultural system” (Modic 2013). On the other hand, Primorski puntarji is a group of activists in the Primorska region of Slovenia, whose purpose is to “return Slovenia to Slovenians”, bringing together “all progressive forces on the basis of consensus and cooperation. Our goal is to return socialism to society, to establish direct democracy, and to build a better and fairer world” (Primorski puntarji 2019). In its self­description, the group writes: We do not accept a future that awaits us with the further deterioration of the environment, privatization of natural resources, globalization of production capacities and culture, the destruction of public services such as health, education, social benefits, security. We will not allow the further selling of Slovenian companies, banks, institutions and infrastructure, which all of us, citizens of Slovenia, built. […] We will strive for active citizenship, participation of all inhabitants of district and village communities, municipalities, regions and country. We will strive for the promotion of cooperatives and the introduction of worker co­management. (Primorski puntarji 2019) Clearly, the mission of two of the groups involved are largely divorced from the mission of the third group, Section ’45, which is specifically dedicated to preserving the memory of the National Liberation Movement, and as an extension, Tito as its leader (ZZB NOB). The president of the section Darko Žnidarčič commented that he didn’t understand why anyone would be both­ ered by the Tito sign: “Tito should be credited for the National Liberation Movement, for the annexation of the Primorska region, for the Paris Peace Treaty, for the London Memorandum. Slovenia would be a third smaller!” (A. Č. 2014). The case of the struggle over the Sagadin Tito sign in Slovenia demonstrates the multiplicity of local actors and the plurality of political and ideological underpinnings underlying the activities to oppose or resist the “Naš Tito” sign. Individual/non-recognized agent Finally, it is worth noting that many of the activities aimed at challeng­ ing or reviving the memory of Tito were undertaken not by formal organ­ izations, but by single individuals or anonymous groups. For instance, the most well­known act of defiance of Tito’s memory happened in 2004, when Tito’s monument in Kumrovec (his native town) was “decapitated”: a bomb was detonated that blew up Tito’s monument and damaged his house

Tito between national and local memory  155 and surrounding area (Reuters 2004). This event received massive media coverage across the ex­Yugoslav region, with roughly half of the residents condemning and half condoning the act; the identity of the perpetrator has never been established. This event later served as the inspiration for an artistic performance by Slovenian artist Dalibor Martinis, in which he re­ enacted the scene, climbing onto the pedestal and taking Tito’s place; an act that was interpreted to “warn about the dangers of erasing the anti­fascist past and our active participation in the collective amnesia that has engulfed the entire region” (Hrgović 2016). Film producer Ivan Mandić similarly made a documentary called Disappearances of Heroes [Nestanak heroja] about the consequences of massive street renaming in Serbia in the 1990s: between 1991 and 1996, 70 streets were renamed, while 110 streets received new names; Tito’s name was removed from all streets and squares in down­ town Belgrade, with the only streets bearing his name left at the periphery of the city. In the documentary, Mandić interviews the people affected by these changes, which many perceived as “vandalism over what they consider most holy”, while the Committee for monuments, square and street names (Komisija za spomenike, nazive trgova i ulica) maintains that the time for changing street names is over (Jovanović 2004). In a similar vein, in March 2017, the aerial photos of an olive plantation in Croatia’s Istria region, in which the letters T, I, T, and O were made of olive trees, was posted on Facebook by a European parliament member Ivan Jak­ ovčić in a response to the recently founded Commission for Facing the Past. The Facebook photo caption read: “Let the Commission for Facing the Past decide also about planting olive trees in Istria—the no. 1 region in the world by olive oil quality” [Neka Povjerenstvo za suočavanje s prošlošću odluči i o sadnji maslina u Istri—regiji br. 1. u svijetu po kvaliteti ulja]. This event was also picked up by media across the former Yugoslavia, which praised or condemned the political earthwork depending on the ideological leaning of the newspaper (Končar 2013; Kurir 2017; M. P. 2017). Local opposition to the moves of the national government can also be discerned in small acts of protest. For instance, in 2015, within a week of coming to power, Croatian President Grabar­Kitarović packed up Tito’s bust and 100 other artefacts from his time and sent them to the museum in Kumrovec. This was met with local resistance, for instance, at the 70th anniversary of the victory over fascism in Istria. Prior to her speech, the organizers—anti­fascists—set up Tito’s bust on the podium where Grabar­Kitarović was to speak, and a choir sang the Italian song “O bella ciao” (Hina 2015).

Conclusion This paper has aimed at making three contributions. The first relates to the plurality of actors involved in memory­making at sub­national, local, and regional levels. Besides institutional NGOs, there are less formal activist

156  Tamara P. Trošt or engaged groups who are dedicated to memory work as their primary or auxiliary activity. Some of these groups fit the definition of “memory ac­ tivism” given by Yifat Gutman (2016) to the Israeli peace activists who en­ gaged memory with the aim of conflict transformation and peace­building, while other memory crusaders indulge in nationalistic, historically revision­ ist memory­work which does not fit the classical normative framework of peace­building. These actors have different motivations for pursuing “la­ bours of memory” (Jelin 2003), which could include memory work as contin­ uation of anti­war or anti­nationalist activism, memory work as extension to human rights advocacy, memory work as civic engagement, or memory work as the expression of a perceived “right to memory”. As is visible from the case studies analyzed above, even groups of activists working together on particular activities could have completely different agendas and visions, which could involve one or more aspects of Tito’s image, or only touch upon Tito tangentially. Second, the chapter has pointed to the importance of local contexts: the success or failure of an activity, such as a square renaming, depends largely on the current political configuration and resources on a local level, and not merely on the ideological or political will at the national level. Some of the factors that influence the outcomes of a particular memory activity at the local level include the specific dynamics of local party politics, the local historical experience, and the demographic profile of a local commu­ nity. Thus, I argue that memory activity cannot only be explained through the framework of nation­building and nationalism (or lack thereof). For a thorough understanding of a particular memory activity, we need to take into account factors such as the current local political context, history and demography of specific localities, and the ideological background of certain memory agents and their motivations, which need not be ideological nor political in nature. Most importantly, I have attempted to move away from the trend of methodological nationalism, portraying the post­Yugoslav countries as each having a singular “Tito narrative”. Instead of analyzing the accept­ ance and contestation of Tito’s personality cult at an official level—official commemorations, official holidays, etc.—where we can speak about “Ser­ bian” vs. “Croatian” strategies, I argue—as Jovana Mihajlović Trbovc has done previously (2017)—that without taking into account grassroots, civil­ society or local­level memory initiatives, we are not presenting a fair pic­ ture of the post­Yugoslav memoryscapes. By focusing on ethno­national political elites when analyzing politics and culture of memory, we are rei­ fying their performed dominance, ignoring at the same time the reception of the official politics of memory by citizens and the multiplicity of actors at regional, sub­national and local levels. By paying attention to local and grassroots level of memory­making, I demonstrate that memoryscapes are much more heterogeneous and complex than is usually portrayed by research.

Tito between national and local memory  157

Notes

References A. Č. 2014. “Vsa življenja sabotinskih kamnov [All of the Lives of the Sabotin stones].” Radio Television Slovenia, May 8, 2014. https://www.rtvslo.si/lokalne­novice/ vsa­zivljenja­sabotinskih­kamnov­jj­ze­ni­vec­spet­tito/336402. Agičić, Damir and Najbar­Agičić. 2007. “The Use and Mis­Use of History Teach­ ing”. In Democratic Transition in Croatia: Value Transformation, Education, and Media, edited by Sabrina Ramet, and Davorka Matić, 193–223. College Station: Texas A&M University Press. Amelina, Anna, Devrimsel D. Nergiz, Thomas Faist, and Nina Glick Schiller, eds. 2012. Beyond Methodological Nationalism: Research Methodologies for Cross-Border Studies. New York: Routledge. Ashplant, Timothy G., Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper. 2004. “The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration: Contexts, Structures and Dynamics.” In Commemorating War: The Politics of Memory, edited by Timothy G. Ash­ plant, Graham Dawson, and Michael Roper, 3–32. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers. Belaj, Marijana. 2008. “‘I’m not religious, but Tito is a God’: Tito, Kumrovec, and the New Pilgrims.” In Shrines and Pilgrimage in the Modern World: New Itineraries into the Sacred, edited by Peter Jan Margry, 71–94. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

158  Tamara P. Trošt Budak, Neven. 2004. “Post­socialist Historiography in Croatia since 1990.” In (Re) Writing History. Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, edited by Ulf Brunnbauer, 128–164. Münster: Lit­Verlag. Bing, Albert. 2012. “The Past in the Present: Post­communist Croatia: ‘After Tito … Tito.’” In Confronting the Past: European Experiences, edited by Davor Pauković, Vjeran Pavlaković, and Višeslav Raos, 129–162. Zagreb: Political Science Re­ search Centre. Brkljačić, Maja. 2003. “Tito’s Bodies in Word and Image.” Narodna umjetnost—Hrvatski časopis za etnologiju i folkloristiku 40, no. 1: 99–128. Brunnbauer, Ulf. 2005. “‘Pro­Serbians‘ vs. ‘Pro­Bulgarians’: Revisionism in Post­Socialist Macedonian Historiography.” History Compass 3, no. 1: 1–17. Brunnbauer, Ulf, ed. 2004a. (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism. Münster: Lit­Verlag. Brunnbauer, Ulf. 2004b. “Historiography, Myths and the Nation in the Republic of Macedonia.” In (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, edited by Ulf Brunnbauer, 165–200. Münster: Lit­Verlag. De Cesari, Chiara & Ann Rigney, eds. 2014. Transnational Memory: Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin: De Gruyter. Dragosavac, Nebojša. 2013. “Prepakivanje istorije masovnim preimenovanjem beogradskih ulica [Repackaging History through the Massive Renaming of Belgrade Streets].” In Politička upotreba prošlosti: o istorijskom revizionizmu na postjugoslovenskom prostoru, edited by Momir Samardžić, Milivoj Bešlin, and Srđan Milošević, 333–351. Novi Sad: Alternativna kulturna organizacija. Dremel, Anita, and Andrea Zekić 2019. “Bringing the Past Back to the Future: The Politics of Memory on the Example of Yugonostalgia.” In: Exploring Nostalgia: Sad, Bad, Mad and Sweet, edited by Anita Dremel und Daniel Juckes, 23–38. Leiden: Brill. Društvo “Josip Broz Tito” Rijeka. 2012. Facebook, 2012. https://www.facebook. com/pg/Tito.Rijeka/about/?ref=page_internal Đureinović, Jelena. 2018a. “Law as an Instrument and as a Mirror of Official Mem­ ory Politics: The Mechanism for Rehabilitating Victims of Communism in Ser­ bia.” Review of Central and East European Law 43, no. 2: 232–251. Đureinović, Jelena. 2018b. “To Each Their Own: Politics of Memory, Narratives about Victims of Communism and Perspectives of Bleiburg in Contemporary Serbia.” Politička Misao 55, no. 2: 89–110. F.Ć. 2017. “Ivan Jakovčić provocira vladu “Titom”, poslao im zanimljivu poruku [Ivan Jakovcic Provokes the Government, Sending them an Interesting Tito Mes­ sage].” Index, March 7, 2017. https://www.index.hr/vijesti/clanak/ivan­jakovcic­ provocira­vladu­titom­poslao­im­zanimljivu­poruku/955038.aspx Flere, Sergej and Andrej Kirbis. 2011. “Attitudes toward Former Yugoslavia among Post­Yugoslav Youth: A Cross­National Comparison.” Südosteuropa 59, no. 3: 330–348. Flere, Sergej and Rudi Klanjšek. 2019. The Rise and Fall of Socialist Yugoslavia: Elite Nationalism and the Collapse of a Federation. Lanham: Lexington Books. Glas Slavonije. 2016. “Savez društava “J.B.Tito”: Ne mijenjajte nazive ulica i trgova koji nose Titovo ime [“J.B.Tito” Association: Do Not Change the Names of Streets and Squares Bearing Tito’s Name].” May 28, 2016. http://www.glas­slavonije.hr/302978/1/ Savez­drustava­JBTito­Ne­mijenjajte­nazive­ulica­i­trgova­koji­nose­Titovo­ime

Tito between national and local memory  159 Grad Labin. 2010. “Labinski Spomenici: Josip Broz Tito [Labin Monuments: Joseph Broz Tito].” March 12, 2010. http://www.labin.hr/labinski­spomenici­josip­broz­tito Gutman, Yifat. 2016. Memory Activism: Reimagining the Past for the Future in Israel-Palestine. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Hina. 2016. “Predsjednicu je u Pazinu dočekala Titova bista i partizanska pjesma [The President was Welcomed in Pazin by the Tito Bust and Parti­ san Song.” Telegram, May 8, 2015. https://www.telegram.hr/politika­kriminal/ predsjednica­se­u­pazinu­susrela­s­milanovicem­a­zatim­i­s­titovom­bistom/ Hrgović, Maja. 2016. “Dalibor Martinis—umjetnik koji je zamijenio Tita [Dal­ ibor Martinis—the Artist Who Replaced Tito]. Novilist, April 10, 2016. http:// novilist.hr/Kultura/Izlozbe/Dalibor­Martinis­umjetnik­koji­je­zamijenio­Tita Kojanić, Ognjen. 2015. “Nostalgia as a Practice of the Self in Post­socialist Serbia.” Canadian Slavonic Papers 57, no. 3–4: 195–212. Jelin, Elizabeth. 2003. State Repression and the Labors of Memory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Jerina, Jan. 2014. “Napis JJ na Sabotinu spet zamenjale črke TITO [The Inscription JJ on Sabotin was again Replaced by the Letters TITO].” Siol, May 8, 2014. https:// siol.net/novice/slovenija/napis­jj­na­sabotinu­spet­zamenjale­crke­tito­41409 Jovanović, Tanja. 2014. “Kako su se Peko i Koča vratili u Beograd.” Vreme 1238. http://www.vreme.com/cms/view.php?id=1230566 Koncar, Ranko. 2013. “Nekoliko zapažanja o pojavama revizionizma u srpskoj Is­ toriografiji [Some Observations on the Phenomenon of Revisionism in Serbian Historiography].” In Politička upotreba prošlosti: o istorijskom revizionizmu na postjugoslovenskom prostoru, edited by Momir Samardžić, Milivoj Bešlin, and Srđan Milošević, 35–40. Novi Sad: Alternativna kulturna organizacija. Krug Za Trg. 2013. Krug za trg. https://twitter.com/hashtag/KrugZaTrg?src=hash Kuljić, Todor. 2007. “Was Tito the Last Habsburg? Reflections on Tito’s Role in the History of the Balkans.” Balkanistica, 20: 85–100. Kurir. 2017. “MARŠAL IMA ŽIVI SPOMENIK U ISTRI: Vidljiv je samo iz vazduha [Marshal has a Living Monument in Istria: It Is Only Visible from the Air.” March 9, 2017. http://www.kurir.rs/region/hrvatska/marsal­ima­zivi­spomenik­ u­istri­vidljiv­je­samo­iz­vazduha­clanak­2722163 Levy, Daniel. 2010. “Changing Temporalities and the Internationalization of Memory Cultures.” In Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society, edited by Yifat Gutman, Adam D. Brown, and Amy Sodaro, 15–30. Houndmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Lojanica, Vladimir. 2015. “ITOVO UŽICE U PUNOM SJAJU. Maršalov bron­ zani kip vraćaju na Trg u Užicu [Titovo Užice in Full Shine: Marshal’s Bronze Statue Returns to the Square in Užice].” Blic, October 16, 2015. http://www. blic.rs/vesti/srbija/titovo­uzice­u­punom­sjaju­marsalov­bronzani­kip­vracaju­ na­trg­u­uzicu/343x90k Luthar, Oto. 2004., “Between Reinterpretation and Revisionism. Rethinking Slo­ venian Historiography of the 1990s.” In (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, edited by Ulf Brunnbauer, 333–350. Münster: Lit­Verlag. M. P. 2017. “V Istri imajo svoj Sabotin: Oljke v obliki napisa TITO—jih bodo lahko posekali? [They have their Sabotin in Istria: Olives in TITO Inscription— Will They be Able to Cut Them?].” Nova 24TV, March 9, 2017. https://nova24tv.

160  Tamara P. Trošt si/sprosceno/v­istri­imajo­svoj­sabotin­oljke­v­obliki­napisa­tito­jih­bodo­ lahko­posekali/ Marković, Predrag, Miloš Ković, and Nataša Milićević. 2004. “Developments in Serbian Historiography since 1989.” In (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, edited by Ulf Brunnbauer, 277–317. Münster: Lit­Verlag. Mihajlović Trbovc, Jovana and Tamara Pavasović Trošt. 2013. “Who Were the Anti­Fascists? Multiple Interpretations of WWII in Post­Yugoslav Textbooks.” In The Use and Abuse of Memory: Interpreting World War Two in Contemporary European Politics, edited by Christian Karner, and Bram Mertens, 173–192. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers. Mihajlović Trbovc, Jovana. 2017. “Post­war Memory Making between the National and the Local: Challenges to Official Nationhood Narratives Post­1990s in the former Yugoslavia.” Paper presented at “Victory or Defeat: Societies between Warfare and Post­War Turmoil”, Pula, Croatia, May 25–27, 2017. Pula: Juraj Do­ brila University. Modic, Max. 2013. “5. Vseslovenska ljudska vstaja—dan upora proti tiraniji ne­ oliberalizma [All­Slovenian People’s Uprising—A Day of Resistance to the Tyranny of Neoliberalism]. Mladina, April 27, 2013. http://www.mladina. si/143541/5­vseslovenska­ljudska­vstaja­dan­upora­proti­tiraniji­neoliberalizma/ Najbar­Agićić, Magdalena. 2006. “Od kulta ličnosti do detitoizacije: prikazi Josipa Broza Tita u hrvatskim i srpskim udžbenicima povijesti [From Personality Cult to De­Titoization: The Portrayal of Josip Broz Tito in Croatian and Serbian his­ tory textbooks].” In O Titu kao mitu: proslava Dana mladosti u Kumrovcu, edited by Nevena Škrbić Alempijević and Kirsti M. Hjemdahl, 377–399. Zagreb: Filozof­ ski Fakultet. Najbar­Agičić, Magdalena and Snježana Koren. 2004. Results of the Historical Consciousness Survey among 8th, 11th and 12th-Grade Croatian Youth. Unpublished manuscript. Nikolic, Ivana. 2015. “Serbian Town Wants to Put Tito Back in Place.” Balkan Insight, October 20, 2015. https://balkaninsight.com/2015/10/20/yugoslavia­s­tito­ to­return­to­his­favourite­town­10­19­2015/ Palmberger, Monica. 2016. How Generations Remember: Conflicting Histories and Shared Memories in Post-War Bosnia and Herzegovina. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Pavasović Trošt, Tamara. 2014. “A Personality Cult Transformed: The Evolution of Tito’s Image in the Former Yugoslavia 1974–2010.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 14, no. 1: 146–170. Pavasović Trošt, Tamara. 2018. “Ruptures and Continuities in Nationhood Narra­ tives: Reconstructing the Nation through History Textbooks in Serbia and Croa­ tia.” Nations and Nationalism 24, no. 3: 716–740. Petrović, Tanja. 2012. Yuropa: Jugoslovensko nasleđe i politike budućnosti u postjugoslovenskim društvima [Yuropa: Yugoslav Legacy and the Politics of Future in the Post-Yugoslav Societies]. Belgrade: Fabrika knjiga. Petrović, Tanja. 2016. “Towards an Affective History of Yugoslavia.” Filozofija i društvo 27, no. 3: 504–520. Popović, Milica and Jacques Rupnik. 2018. “Yugo­Nostalgia and the Return of the Borders.” In Europa: Un’utopia in Costruzione [Europe: A Utopia Under Construction], edited by Giuliano Amato, Enzo Moavero Milanesi, Lucrezia Reichlin, and Gianfranco Pasquino, 93–100. Roma: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana.

Tito between national and local memory  161 Popović, Milica. 2018. “Yugonostalgia—The Meta­National Memory Narratives of the Last Pioneers.” Nostalgia on the Move, edited by Mirjana Slavković, and Marija Đorgović, 42–50. Belgrade: Museum of Yugoslavia. Primorski puntarji. 2015. “Delovna akcija na Sabotinu za obnovo napisa Tito [Ac­ tion on Sabotin for the Restoration of the Tito Inscription].” Facebook, April 11, 2015. Primorski puntarji. 2019. “ZA SOCIALIZEM IN NEPOSREDNO DEMOKRACIJO [For Socialism and Direct Democracy].” Facebook, 2019. Promitzer, Christian. 2004. “Whose Bosnia? Post­communist Historiographies in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” In (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, edited by Ulf Brunnbauer, 201–235. Münster: Lit­Verlag. Radović, Srđan. 2013. “Istorijski revizionizam i imenovanje javnih prostora u savremenim balkanskim društvima.” In Politička upotreba prošlosti: o istorijskom revizionizmu na postjugoslovenskom prostoru, edited by Momir Samardžić, Milivoj Bešlin, and Srđan Milošević, 313–332. Novi Sad: Alternativna kulturna organizacija. Rajić, Z. 2012. “Nazivi ulica: Tito još živi u Kuli [Street Names: Tito Still Lives in Kula].” Novosti, December 20, 2012. https://www.novosti.rs/vesti/srbija.73. html:411490­Nazivi­ulica­Tito­jos­zivi­u­Kuli Rastoder, Šerbo. 2004. “The Development of Historiography in Montenegro, 1989– 2001.” In (Re)Writing History: Historiography in Southeast Europe after Socialism, edited by Ulf Brunnbauer. Münster: Lit­Verlag. Reuters. 2004. “Bomb Topples Tito Statue.” New York Times, December 28, 2004. https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/28/world/world­briefing­europe­ croatia­ bomb­topples­tito­statue.html Roksandić, Drago. 2013. “Historijski revizionizam i/ili južnoslavenska historio­ grafija poslije raspada Jugoslavije.”In Politička upotreba prošlosti: o istorijskom revizionizmu na postjugoslovenskom prostoru. [Political Uses of the Past: His­ torical Revisionism in the Post­Yugoslav Area], edited by Samardžić, Momir, Milivoj Bešlin, and Srđan Milošević, 27–34. Novi Sad: Alternativna kulturna organizacija. RTL. 2013. “Oni se još uvijek kunu drugu Titu! [They Still Swear by Com­ rade Tito].” November 27, 2013. https://www.rtl.hr/tabloid/zabava/986309/ oni­se­jos­uvijek­kunu­drugu­titu/ Samardžić, Momir, Milivoj Bešlin, and Srđan Milošević, eds. 2013. Politička upotreba prošlosti: o istorijskom revizionizmu na postjugoslovenskom prostoru.[Politi­ cal Uses of the Past: Historical Revisionism in the Post­Yugoslav areA]. Novi Sad: Alternativna kulturna organizacija. Sretenovic, Stanislav and Artan Puto. 2004. “Leader Cults in the Western Balkans (1945–90): Josip Broz Tito and Enver Hoxha.” In The Leader Cult in Communist Dictatorships: Stalin and the Eastern Bloc, edited by Balasz Apor, Jan C. Behrends, Polly Jones, and E. Arfon Rees, 208–223. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Stojanović, Dubravka. 2017. “The Crossed Swords of Memory: The Image of Com­ munist Yugoslavia in the Textbooks of Its Successor States.” European Politics and Society 18, no. 1: 10–22. Stojanović, Dubravka. 2019. “Yugoslavia as the ‘Ghost­Other.’” Revue d’études comparatives Est-Ouest 1, no. 5: 147–175. Subotić, Jelena. 2015. “The Mythologizing Communist Violence.” In Post- Communist Transitional Justice: Lessons from Twenty-Five Years of Experience, edited by Lav­ inia Stan and Nadya Nedelsky, 188–210. Cambridge University Press.

162  Tamara P. Trošt Škrbić Alempijević, Nevena and Kirsti M. Hjemdahl, eds. 2006. O Titu kao mitu: proslava Dana mladosti u Kumrovcu [Tito as a Myth: The Celebration of Youth Day in Kumrovac]. Zagreb: Filozofski Fakultet. Trošt, Tamara. 2018. “Beyond Ethnic Identity: History, Pride, and Nationhood across Socioeconomic Lines in Serbian and Croatian Youth.” In Changing Youth Values in Southeastern Europe: Beyond Ethnicity, edited by Tamara Trošt and Danilo Mandić, 177–203. New York: Routledge. Udruženje potomaka solunskih dobrovoljaca. 2019. Udruženje potomaka solunskih dobrovoljaca. http://srpskiratnidobrovoljci.org/ Velikonja, Mitja. 2008. Titostalgia: A Study of Nostalgia for Josip Broz. Ljubljana: Peace Institute. Volčič, Zala. 2007. “Yugo­Nostalgia: Cultural Memory and Media in the Former Yugoslavia”. Critical Studies in Media Communication 24, no. 1: 21–38. Vučković, Juroš. 2018. “‘Things were Good During Tito’s Times, My Parents Say’: How Young Croatian Generations Negotiated the Socially Mediated Frames of the Recent Yugoslav Past.” Memory Studies: 1–20, https://journals.sagepub.com/ doi/abs/10.1177/1750698018790122. ZZB Nob. 2016. “The Union of the Associations for the Values of the National Lib­ eration Movement of Slovenia (ZZB NOB): About Us.” 2016. https://www.zzb­ nob.si/

9

Deification, canonization and random signaling Upholding and sustaining personality cults1 Kirill Postoutenko

Deification, canonization and random signaling as communicative practices The article seeks to investigate a communicative strategy that appears to play a significant role in the formation and maintenance of personality cults in politics, religion and arts. Depending on the viewpoint, this strategy could be grasped best either by looking at messengers (deification) and their outputs (canonization), or by observing this messaging activity in actual in­ teractional environments (random signaling). While each of these practices is relatively independent from the others and each of these terms is actively used in many other fields from religious studies to evolutionary biology, the combination of the three is perhaps unique for personality cults. Deification can be defined as an ascription of transcendent properties to the agencies that are immanently present (i.e. sensually perceptible) in the social world.2 Under this definition, there are no obstacles to deifying the sun, snakes, stones or any class of objects conceivable as more or less in­ dependent beings [Weissenborn 1904, 34; Nakamura 1992, 27–28; van der Toorn 1997]. However, for the purposes of this study, deification is limited to the single individuals whose historical existence is incontrovertible and whose ability to communicate with (other) humans is beyond doubt. Canonization, in its turn, could be described as social selection and pro­ motion of messages invariant to the current state of the system they come from, including its internal (other senders and recipients, habitual codes, preexisting messages, preferred channels, etc.) and external (time and space) parameters. Formally speaking, deification and canonization are mutually independent: whereas some Egyptian pharaohs and Mesopota­ nian kings were deified without much association with canonic texts (As­ smann 2001, 57, 137; Shupak 2001, 545), proverbs survived and flourished across cultural traditions, languages and political systems without ever relying on any deified agencies (Mieder 2004, XII). Still, under t ypical circumstances, neither practice is strong enough to secure the endurance of peoples and texts in a changing, diverse world (Goody 1998, 15). Small children, sensually impaired adults and personages of nonsense poems

164  Kirill Postoutenko do produce out­of­touch messages from time to time, but their remarks are explained away, excused or condescendingly ignored. In contrast, the irrelevant statements associated with gods, religious prophets, revered classical poets, pop­philosophers, media celebrities and cult politicians can well be sought after, eagerly interpreted and even duly obeyed. Such utterances – and their canonic properties – are usually linked to some humanlike agencies, albeit the specific relation between a person and a text can vary: deified individuals could form the content of the respective messages (Jesus in the Bible), be their authors (Homer with Odyssey and Iliad) or work somewhere in between, turning non­encoded – “Divine”­ en­ ergy flows into signs (Prophet Muhammad in the Quran).3 Although the ar­ gument made below seems to hold true for various contexts, the case study underlying this chapter is devoted to history or politics. More specifically, it is focused on three political regimes of the first half of the twentieth century (Soviet Bolshevism, German Nazism, “New Deal” in the U.S.): the respec­ tive couplings between the countries’ chief executives and foundational texts are Joseph Stalin / Constitution of Soviet Union (1936), Adolf Hitler / Mein Kampf (1925), and Franklin D. Roosevelt / Constitution of the United States (1788). It turns out that some across­the­board commonalities in the cultic use of the Nazi, Soviet and American political canon are unmistakable, al­ lowing for the study of personality cults outside of their immediate political contexts. At the same time, since the first two duos reveal particularly pro­ found and far­reaching similarities with each other, their affinity is hypo­ thetically linked to the prevalence of random signaling in the interaction between deified messengers and the recipients of their canonic messages. Random signaling refers to the messages unrelated to the adjacent (preceding or following) interactional activity or current environment but still duly processed by social and communicative systems.4 A general example not irrelevant for our topic could be the transformation of en­ vironmental changes (or “events”) in the eye of the beholder into coded messages (Zeitlyn 1995, 189–191). In the natural world, there are myriads of interdependent energy transfers that occur without being recognized as such, let alone interpreted, by their participants. For example, there are hardly any beings around that enjoy being bitten by mosquitoes, but since no mammal can stop emitting CO2, it is sometimes inevitable that mosquitoes would use these compulsive emissions as invitations to dig in. To satisfy their hunger, the insects do not need to know the chemical formula or density of carbon dioxide: they treat the gas outporings not as symptoms of something, but solely as cues – that is, stimuli for specific non­communicative (counter­) actions here and now. But situation changes decisively if cues are translated into symbols, i.e., messages composed from elements of a certain code external to the situa­ tion, and therefore valid outside of immediate context.5 In the simplest case, cues are meaningful only insofar as they are treated as signals, i.e. mes­ sages that both sender and recipient can differentiate from informational

Deification, canonization, random signaling  165 noise (Bateson 1972, 419 Lewis 2002, 130): since their resulting informa­ tional value is 1 bit, there is not much to interpret or encode (Stent 1972, 44–45). Yet the conversions of cues straight to symbols, often performed by seasoned intermediaries, typically involve staggering over­interpreta­ tion (Zeitlyn 2001, 228). A case in point could be the interactional triad the oracle of Delphi – the priestess Pythia – ancient Greeks: whereas the first interaction participant – actually, a vent of geological origin – emitted a mixture of ethylene and ethane, the second, having inhaled the gas, en­ gaged in rambling monologues, which the third attempted to read as the guidance for present and future events (Spiller, Hale, and De Boer 2002). However, many shamans and most priests, theologians and propagandists fulfilled the same function without being stoned (Vernant 1974, 9; Bottéro 1974, 89; Assmann and Assmann 1987, 14; Goldberg 1987, 203–204; Ass­ mann 2001, 295; Hahn 2001, 242; Kalivoda and Daxelmüller 2011, 768–769: Dović and Helgason 2016, 89).6 For instance, a Mambila diviner would take a yes­no question from his clientele, and then interpret the trajectory of a spider’s movement as either a positive or negative answer to it (Zeitlyn 1995, 198).7 If these examples appear too remote from the “modern” and “civi­ lized” settings chosen for the case study, one could take a look at Samuel Beckett’s Vladimir mistaking “wind in the reeds” for the voice of certain enigmatic being awaited eagerly and vainly, in hope and trepidation, from the beginning to the end of the play (Beckett 1965, 19). Waiting for Godot never tells us to what extent its protagonist had been invented by Vladimir and Estragon, and its bare­bones action cannot be pinned down on just re­ ligion or politics: indeed, the communicative gap exposed in the play – the glaring schism between the all­powerful, seemingly omniscient yet elusive top of the power hierarchy and its crowded, stressed bottom in the dark – is reminiscent of many varieties of personality cults. Naturally, Stalin and Hitler were neither vents nor winds; they could not only breathe and sweat but speak and write as well, and people living in the Third Reich or the Bolshevik state were not in doubt about their leaders’ ex­ istence or ability to interact. Still, the contacts between chief executives and general populations in both countries in many ways resembled the situation in the ancient Delphi: while the signals from “above”, extremely scarce and hopelessly confusing, could come (or not come) in any imaginable shape at any time, receiving, interpreting and responding to them rightly – whatever it could mean – was often a matter of life and death. The main purpose of this chapter is to find out how such an interactional environment has been different from the standard interactional mechanism, and how, despite its obvious dysfunctionalities, it could survive and sustain personality cults.

Random signaling: the authoritarian alternative to turn-taking Notwithstanding Beckett’s uncanny ability to condense complex socio­ cultural problems into lucid allegories, his gloomy view of communication

166  Kirill Postoutenko falling prey to autocracy is more persuasive than enlightening: it is hard to see why the combination of canonization and random signaling is so spe­ cial unless we know how interaction is supposed to work under “normal” circumstances. For the latter, it might be helpful to revisit Sophokles’ Oedipus the King (ca. 429 BC) – the tragedy extolling the staggering power of interactional equality in the face of most formidable power asymmetries. At the beginning of the play, the king, outraged by the reluctance of the blind prophet Tiresias to name his father’s murderer, questions the seer’s clair­ voyance (Soph. OT 380); his counterpart quietly retorts that it is Oedipus himself who is sight­impaired (Soph. OT 405). It turns out that Tiresias’s physical blindness is no more an obstacle to seeing reality than Oedipus’s “bright eyes” (Soph. OT 1483) a precondition of it; having finally learned the horrible truth, the devastated patricide disposes of his useless eyeballs, achieving belated equality with Tiresias (Soph. OT 1334). For our purposes, it is remarkable that this symmetry between the two sighted blinds at the end has been sketched out (foretold?) at the play’s outset by Tiresias: re­ fusing to treat Oedipus’ threat as the last word – a perlocutionary act on its own – Tiresias invokes the right to make a counter­statement (ἀντιλέγω) binding for all citizens, and even claims to “control” this conversational equilibration (both Soph. OT 408). Made almost 2500 years ago, Sophokles’ succinct but quite accurate de­ scription of major interactional maxims adds credibility to the claims that “interactional engines” are more durable than political systems, states, na­ tions and other seemingly unshakable forms of societal self­organization. Indeed, the striking feature of human interaction is its operation on the ba­ sis of a small number of rules resistant to historical change and relatively independent from cultural, social and political differences (Schegloff 2006, 70–71): all over the world, regardless of ranks or settings, people tend to talk more or less one at a time, routinely and regularly exchanging communica­ tive roles (speakers turn into listeners and vice versa), and strive to cooperate on sustaining conversations, sticking to chosen and jointly ratified topics/ codes as well as avoiding protracted monologues and awkward silences (Du­ bin and Spray 1964, 104; Goffman 1972, 198; Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974, 696–735; Levinson 2006, 46; Postoutenko 2010a, 22; Gibson 2012, 28; Raymond and Heritage 2013, 143–144, 148, 156).8 This does not mean, how­ ever, that interactional symmetry has always had an easy ride with political inequality: cataloguing abuse heaped by the tyrant upon his patient but firm interlocutor, Sophokles, makes a point of Oedipus’ difficulty to keep his ty­ rannic powers in check. That said, even before Sophokles, the robustness of “interactional engine” revealed itself in staving off increasingly serious chal­ lenges throughout the course of human evolution. Arguably the first serious challenge to interactional harmony was the ar­ rival of social stratification, which endowed some more visible individuals (shamans, chiefs, celebrities, teachers, doctors, judges, chairpersons) with exclusive communicative privileges such as prolonged speaking turns or

Deification, canonization, random signaling  167 the right to ignore questions (Foucault 1971, 65; Burton 1981, 62, 64; Heath 1984, 247; Newmeyer 1990, 244–245; Drew and Heritage 1992, 5–6; Linell 2001, 83; Thornborrow 2002, 43; Philips 2006, 479–480; Hanks 2006, 301 Ladegaard 2009, 649–666; Junge 2011, 29; Raymond et al. 2019, 97–114. However, the functional differentiation of society eventually took turn­ taking to a new level, transferring communicative and other rights from in­ dividuals, however special, to formal organizations such as offices, clinics or clubs. The ensuing decoupling of role and person, allowing for multiplicity of social functions within a single person and the regular rotation of post­ holders, reconfirmed turn­taking as the only permanent feature of social systems and averted the triumph of a communicative monopoly that would have eventually drained all information out of interactional channels (Pa­ reto 1900, 435–436; Linton 1936, 255; Goffman 1961, 88; Turner 1978, 1–23; Argyle, Furnham, and Graham 1981, 177; Dahrendorf 1971, 30, 33; Drew and Heritage 1992, 18; Luhmann 1975, 37–38; Postoutenko 2016a, 201–202).9 Meanwhile, communication, being a part of society, was not exempt from producing functional differences of its own, gradually eroding the conversa­ tional basis of interaction: whereas the transposition of elusive oral talk into a durable written form made instant and coordinated response optional, mass media widened the gap between a single sender and multiple receivers to the extent that speakers and writers could hardly make sure if they had any audience at all (Inose 1972, 126; Ong 1982, 134; Atkinson 1984, 11–12; Bell 1991, 70–71; Esposito 1999, 89; Giesecke 2007, 207; Poe 2011, 61). How­ ever, both problems have been eventually solved, at least to some degree. On the one hand, writing was subordinated to the politeness rules not dissimilar from face­to­face interaction, such as answering letters in a matter of days (Zakharine 2005, 581). On the other, the preservation of turn­taking on the higher level of society and media prevented the breakdown of interaction: most leaders eventually lose their privileged access to print, microphone or camera, and media consumers, easily ignorable as individuals, have often crucial say in making or unmaking of political, cultural and religious celeb­ rities (Merton 1973, 39). If all this sounds like a success story, there is alongside it a failure story, too, culminating in deification, canonization and random signaling. When all kinds of conversational, medial and political asymmetries coincide, in­ termingle, harden and mutually reinforce each other, the gaps in interaction may get too wide to accommodate even the minimal conversational rules described above: the orders of parents overstaying their guidance period are no longer being listened to, and the ignored supplicants stop checking their letterboxes (Geißner 1960, 194–204; Habermas 1984, 257, 264; Postoutenko 2010a, 21). It sounds almost incredible that this state of affairs could be tol­ erated in the long term at a large scale, and that some involuntary but none­ theless creative solutions could save such a disjointed community from total breakup. Yet, this was the case of many social, cultural, political and reli­ gious systems that entertained personality cults and relied upon deification,

168  Kirill Postoutenko canonization and random signaling for their respectively top­down and bot­ tom­up interactions. It might be useful to inquire briefly how such systems could come about, which communicative properties they shared, and how they happened to interiorize the interaction strategies that are neither dom­ inant nor efficient in human populations.

Deification: subordinating roles to persons In theory, the aforementioned dissimilarity between roles and persons should have been sufficient for keeping societies and their interactions alive: whereas the alternation of messengers and recipients in interactions was supposed to assure uninterrupted influx of information into the system from all sides, the rotation of office­holders should have prevented political and communicative monopolization within states, religions and cultures (Postoutenko 2010a, 22). The platonic dominance of the transcendent, uni­ versal and timeless over immanent, local and passing is clearly discernible in the differentiation between the stainless and everlasting dignitas and its corruptible incumbent, pursued since thirteenth century with mixed success in European legal and theological discourse (Kantorowicz 1957, 386, 418, 435, 497; Jussen, 2009, 106). Put in modern terms, this is a seductively simple description of open systems: whereas their static components ensure stabil­ ity and identity preservation, dispensing algorithms for interaction with the environment, the dynamic elements ensure adaptation to changes within the prescribed limits. However, already Plato’s pupil Aristotle was reluctant to accept this hi­ erarchy (Kolingwood 1960, 68), and modern empirical sciences tends to confirm the circular causality between types and tokens, crowns and their bearers, religions and deities and so on debated in sociology for decades (Sargent and Beardsley 1960, 66–70; Turner 1978, 1–23; Kaufman and Um­ pleby 2018, 4). This circularity is particularly apparent in the nearly com­ plete conflation between personal life and absolute rule of a monarch: unlike other beneficiaries of communicative inequality (teachers, doctors, judges etc.), the typical king or queen continuously performs the assigned role until death, unable to take even a short a break, and remains the only human being performing the task in a given kingdom for the whole duration of his or her tenure.10 What is remarkable about personality cults is that their very performance goes beyond the amalgamation of life and crown, beyond con­ fused duplication of princely bodies (effigies) and titles (Le roi est mort! Vive le roi!) straight to paradox, oxymoron and, as some would say, nonsense: transcendence becomes subordinated to immanence, timelessness to time, and political roles to physical persons. How could this illogical construction survive and prosper at the helm of religions, states and cultures throughout millennia? Although the most popular political systems of the past and present – monarchy and democracy – appear to follow stable rules in choosing chief

Deification, canonization, random signaling  169 executives, this appearance is deceiving. Judged by the sketchy samples collected so far, the very significant number of personal changes on the thrones and in presidential offices have taken in defiance, or even absence, of existing guidelines, resulting in considerable public instability, wars and assasinations (Bell 1975, 49–50; Kurrild­Klitgaard 2000, 63–84, Kokkonen and Sundell 2014, 440; Marquez 2017, 126). Even swapping the procedures between these seemingly incompatible forms of political organization was sometimes in order, as elections of monarchs and hereditary successions in ostensibly democratic states seem to indicate (Brownlee 2007). Further­ more, outside of this sparsely regulated terrain, the succession rules have always been either irrelevant or absent altogether, with the rulers’ titles, however ornate, being vastly subordinate to personal ruling styles and ob­ jectives (Perlmutter 1981, 1–2). Among the three leaders chosen for detailed analysis in this chapter, only Franklin D. Roosevelt both assumed and retained his political role of the President of the United States in accordance with the preexisting, legally codified rotation rules, being elected in 1932 and re­elected in 1936, 1940, and 1944. The fact that FDR, having used his executive privilege more of­ ten than all previous U.S. Presidents combined, died in office in 1945, old and frail, may cast a shadow over the ability of the American democracy to keep personal power in check (Dawis 1987, 24–25; Howell 2003, 6; Schivel­ busch 2005, 23–24, 40; Postoutenko 2010b, 96). However, the subsequent introduction of the two­term limit for the chief executive in the Twenty­Sec­ ond Amendment to the Constitution, passed by the Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states four years later, could be seen as a reinstatement of the preferences given to rules over persons at the chief executive level in USA (Vile 2002, 475). In contrast, Adolf Hitler, controversially appointed by the German Pres­ ident Paul Hindenburg as Head of the German Government (Reichskanzler) following the moderate success of NSDAP in parliamentary elections of 1932, superimposed his party leadership (Führer) over the simultaneously abolished presidency of Germany after the death of Hindenburg in 1934. For the remaining 11 years of his life and power, Hitler was busy demolish­ ing institutional foundations of his rule, governing by haphazard personal orders, sometimes typed on a letterhead containing nothing but his name (Neumann 1944; Nyomarkay 1967, 145; Gruchmann 1973, 192; Kershaw 1975, 73, 84; Mommsen 1981, 59; Burrin 1999, 63–64; Overy 2004, 111–113; Postoutenko 2010b, 96; Postoutenko 2016b, 142). In a somewhat similar vein, Joseph Stalin ruled Russia for almost 20 years with an iron first without even holding a state post: it was only in 1941 that he supplemented his top position in the only legal political party in Soviet Union (Secretary General) with the highest governmental post (Head of the Council of People’s Com­ missars) which, since Lenin’s involuntary retirement, had been languishing in the hands of second­tier Bolsheviks for decades (Burling 1974, 211–214; Postoutenko 2019). The assumption of executive power in both situations

170  Kirill Postoutenko makes mockery of the whole idea of succession or role adherence: the post factum genealogies, invented by Hitler (who’d chosen Frederick the Great, Otto von Bismarck and Hindenburg as his predecessors) and Stalin (claim­ ing Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Lenin as his precursors), reveal demon­ strative nonchalance about both historical circumstances and legal norms of executive power in their respective countries (Gill 1980, 169; Mommsen, 43; Sartorti 1995, 196; Rees 2004, 9; Harris 2005, 75; Chonghoon Lee 2007, 506; Hille 2010, 46). Importantly, the nearly total subordination of titles and job descriptions to personal preferences of some political, religious and cultural leaders in­ evitably affected not only the circumstances of the initial power/attention grab, but first and foremost the subsequent vacation of the highest office (whatever it could be). First and foremost, if the ascent to personal power was not guided by any legal or at least traditional norms (Marquez 2017, 66), then it would have been hard to count on them – or, in fact, anything as certain as them – for building an exit strategy: in such an unruly en­ vironment, climbing down the political ladder at the end of the reign was certainly no less risky than scaling it at the beginning (Tullock 1987, 153; Thompson 1988, 106; Wintrobe 1998, 39; Rittersporn 2003, 54; Myerson 2008, 135; Svolik 2012, 198–199). Besides, in the absence of institutionalized rotation mechanisms on the top of political, cultural and religious systems, the legitimation had to be produced and validated ad hoc: anything less credible than a firm external proof of the ruler’s positive historical singular­ ity would have been promptly exposed as a fig leaf of unbridled despotism.11 This tricky situation brought about the curious paradoxical construction of legitimacy prominent, if not dominant, in personality cults: as roles had to be subordinated to persons, the transcendental foundations of political, cul­ tural, messianic power had to spring from the immanent being of individual rulers. In this topsy­turvy world, the eternal and universal dignitas was a mere attribute of the particular ruling mortal – in theory unshakable, but in practice subject to all kinds of societal divisions and volatilities: few leaders outlived their cults, and some – for instance, Gaius Verres, the avaritious Roman magistrate in Sicily impeached in 70 BC – experienced the sudden slide from worship into disgrace in the middle of their lives (Garnett and Mackintosh 1910, 206).12 The early deification routines, massively replicated throughout later his­ tory, included, aside from the preceding rise to power, some victories, mir­ acles or other proofs of superhuman abilities, followed by the establishment (or, rather, recycling) of corresponding rituals cementing this status (Weber 1919, 140). Thus Lysander, the Spartan admiral who overthrew the Athenian Empire in 404 BC, was honored for his success with altars, hymns and a festival (Boak 1916, 293–294). A few decades later, Alexander the Great at­ tempted to institutionalize the ruler’s deification, which eventually led to the routinization of the kingly “divine” charisma through its merger with the hereditary monarchy (Boak 1916, 296). Nevertheless, this transit of divinity

Deification, canonization, random signaling  171 from persons to rules was a very long and uneven process (Holz 1959, 20– 21), the details of which are of little interest for the history of personality cults. What seems certain, though, is the persistent attribution of eternity and other aspects of transcendence to the worshipped leaders, established in Rome during the reign of Augustus and quickly projected on the state governed by the chosen individual (Charlesworth 1936, 123; Instinsky 1942, 317–318; Étienne 1986, 445; Balbuza 2014, 49–66).13 Judged by the available historical evidence, this practice was an integral, if somewhat watered­down, part of the twentieth century personality cults, and could be spotted in the two of the three cases chosen for the close study. When Valery Chkalov, the famous Soviet aviator, claimed at the reception in Kremlin that “none of the present would like to outlive [Joseph] Stalin”, his words were apparently greeted with the attendees’ ovation (Stalin 1938, 154). In a rather similar vein, neither Adolf Hitler’s express wish to run Nu­ eremberg Party Rallies “unchanged”, nor his determination to keep the Nazi Regime going for 1000 years had been met with his supporters’ notice­ able disapproval (Henke 1978, 398, 400; Thamer 1988, 356; Kershaw 2001, 198; Brockmann 2006, 148; Behrends 2010, 339–340).14 Moreover, on many occasions, temporal uncertainty was eliminated from the leader­related ac­ tivities and concepts altogether: whereas Soviet engineers were grappling with the task of making the gigantic Palace of Soviets last “forever” (Pa­ pernyĭ 1996, 45), Hitler, at the opening of the Big German Art Exhibition in Munich in 1937, used the adjective “eternal” 16 times, having applied it to both German art and German state (Hitler 1943).15 A noticeable aspect of these attempts to use the chronological dimen­ sion of deification for establishing personality cults is their obvious tempo­ ral inconsistency betraying considerable difficulties with accommodating timelessness within time and transcendence within immanence. Unllike the fictional Big Brother – eternal, omnipresent, imperceptible and still more alive than any private citizen of his state – the historical person­ ality cults had to cast the elusive aeternitas of their objects in the famil­ iar, tangible molds somehow compatible with human perceptual faculties (Orwell 1949, 249). These recurring complications might have triggered the early attempts to free deified individuals from the burden of perpet­ ual self­legitimation by presenting them as messengers of eternal truths or/and elements of eternal messages (Dović and Helgason 2016, 75). Since the invention of text as a social practice based on (but not limited to) digital code enabled functional differentiation between preserving infor­ mation and putting it to use (Luhmann 1987, 223; von Neumann 1945, 1–4), the arduous task of transcending time and space while leading here and now could be outsourced to special “everlasting” storages of various information – scrolls, books, images firmly anchored in their meaningful environments, freely available for reading, viewing, and touching, and yet containing universal truths applicable to all possible current and future situations. In other words, not being initially parts, sources or targets of

172  Kirill Postoutenko canonic messages, deified individuals could still reasonably profit from firm association with them, and it is hardly surprising that the link be­ tween deification and canon was forged as soon as medial and commu­ nicative conditions were obtained.

Canonization: decoupling information from interaction and environment Without a doubt, at the time when the first documented personality cults were established, the idea that messages of oracles, prophets and other di­ vine agencies could retain their meanings more or less indefinitely was al­ ready making rounds out in the world. Almost a century before Lysander crushed the Athenians, Heraklitus, predating both the biblical chiliasm and its Nazi brazen appropriation, credited the frantic speeches of one of the Sy­ bils – Pithia’s precursors at Delphi – with a shelf life of 1000 years (DK B92). Nevertheless, turning this act of wishful thinking into stable social practice required the decoupling of information and interaction: no message could claim victory over time unless it was capable of partaking in an inestimable number of communicative events. Arguably this was achieved when writing became a channel of choice for political, cultural and religious communi­ cation, and when the ability of written texts to be understood regardless of specific conditions of their production and reception was properly recog­ nized (Luhmann 1987, 7; Hahn 2000, 241, 244, 249, 251). Beginning with the Old Testament, a number of texts (including some oral messages written down) were successively canonized much in the same way as individuals got deified before and after that16: as tyrants, revolution­ ary prophets, dictators and other objects of personality cults ascended to seemingly absolute power and semi­divine status in defiance of preexisting norms and traditions, some texts were cut out of their historical, cultural and social backgrounds, cloistered beyond reach, and ascribed greatest informativity in all kinds of situations anywhere and anytime (Assmann and Assmann 1987, 11, 21; Colpe 1987, 80; Stern 2003, 228).17 Such diverse texts as Homer’s heroic poems, the Bible and the Quran have been at var­ ious times regarded as the sources of all thinkable knowledge (Stern 2003, 237–238; Assmann and Assmann 1987, 20–21).18 The eradication of context around the texts canonized turned the interpretative gaze inwards (Crüse­ man 1987, 76; Colpe 1987, 84; Goldberg 1987, 201, 203):19 made possible by the canon’s limitless availability to multiple recipients in various interac­ tions, the practices of recitation, close reading and assisted interpretation were all intended to dig out elusive truths obfuscated by historical changes, regional disparities and social boundaries (Dović and Helgason 2019, 75).20 This familiar conflict between abstract semantics and its direct applicabil­ ity to specific situations locked the meanings of canonized texts in the same paradox as the identities of deified individuals: supposedly invariant to the differences in time and space, they were nonetheless inextricably tied to

Deification, canonization, random signaling  173 some living guarantee of universal validity, which palpable localization in the spatio­temporal world at some point was beyond doubt (Goldberg 1987, 206; Helgason 2011, 173–179; Dović and Helgason 2016, 37). This dialectics was often presented as the deliberately blurred but also indissoluble relation between the two major sources and elements of the textual semantics: while the distant principal has usually been some man­ ifestation of the Divine, the earthly animator, such as Moses, Muhammad or Jesus, exhibited some familiar human features, including the ability to express himself in verbal language (Crüseman 1987, 63, 67–68; Watson 2018, 48).21 The salience of this dichotomy could be proved by the fact that re­ flexive claims to transcendental connections seemed to be the prevailing legitimation strategy both in the Bible (where Jesus insists on his coming in his father’s name (Joh 5.43; see Postoutenko 2013, 146–147)) and in Horace’s odes (where the narrator’s unashamed self­promotion to eternity – exegi monumentum aere perennius – is said to be ordered by the Muses (Hor. Od. 3.30, 4.8)). Remarkably, this inseparability of the two hypostases within the claims to legitimacy obliterates the differences between the semiotic lay­ ers of canonic texts in the same way as it muddles the relations between transcendence and immanence in the objects of personality cults (Assmann and Assmann 1987, 12): the alleged ability of the Torah scrolls containing the name of God to spread sanctity through tactile contact with its read­ ers looks like a prefiguration of the French royal thaumaturgy in which the king’s touch translated abstract divine salvation into concrete, palpable terms – le Roi te touche, Dieu te guérit (Friedman 1993, 126; Lim 2010, 514; Taylor 2012, 294; Barton 2017, 86–87). To sum up, canonic texts, or at least a considerable number of them, ex­ hibited some common trends across genres and epochs which potentially made them convenient tools of various personality cults. Since such a text was not only excluded from spontaneous cooperative interactional practices but also insulated within the field of potential intertextual references, its informational value turned into a linear function of its creator’s authority, strengthening the mutual support between personal deification and textual canonization and thus ensuring both elements of the dyad against the loss of cultic status due to personal or textual flaws (see examples below).22 This symbiotic relation between messengers, messages and transmitted information in personality cults was complemented on semiotic level by simulta­ neous engagement of indexical, iconic and symbolic codes.23 Indeed, the trichotomy of reading, viewing and touching in the reception of canonic messages matches the general data on communication in personality cults where the followers, perceiving their leaders as persons and not postholders, had also shown considerable interest in tactile contacts (“shaking hands”) and observation (“looking in the eyes”) alongside with standard non­inter­ active encounters (“receiving a letter” – see Winkel 2001, 189; Postoutenko 2016b, 139–140).

174  Kirill Postoutenko Before one finally goes after the traces of thus described textual canon­ ization within the random signaling between Joseph Stalin, Adolf Hitler, Franklin D. Roosevelt and their followers, it is worth pondering upon the remarkable longevity of the communicative arrangement which, having both served and disserved humanity for more than twenty centuries, still shows little sign of abatement. Apparently, as with many similar cases, the key to the system’s success was the strategic fuzziness of its main concepts, coupled with the tolerance for self­contradictions. For instance, the fre­ quently declared isolation of canonic texts within respective cultures was not always accompanied by the stability of canonic meanings, functions and repertoires: throughout history, periodic rearrangements and norma­ tive reinterpretations of canonic corpus by religious authorities, cultural experts and political leaders have been the norm rather than the excep­ tion (Flesseman­van Leer 1964, 404–405, 416–417; Ritter 1987, 95; Gold­ berg 1987, 203–204; Günther 1987, 138; Stern 2003, 229; Stordalen 2007, 17, 19; Dović and Helgason 2016, 72–73; Barton 2017, 82; Brandenberger 2017). In a similar vein, the ring­fencing of potential canon could precede its assumption of referential totality (Flesseman­van Leer 1964, 406–407; Stausberg 1998, 270; Lim 2017, 9, 18–19, 24): both the Torah and the Con­ fucian Classics acquired their special status only after being subjected to the communicative practices (reproduction, assisted reading and limited hermeneutics) deemed appropriate for the canonic texts (Stern 2003, 250; Stordalen 2007, 18; Lim 2010, 12; Barton 2017, 89–90). Furthermore, both the relation between the sources of “divine” transcendence and “earthly” immanence and their joint relation to the canonic texts could remain underspecified for centuries, as had been the case with early Christian­ ity (Flesseman­van Leer 1964, 405–407). Last but not least, the relation between digital and analogue codes in the reception of canonic texts has often been variable without wrecking havoc or even causing much alarm: the perceptual immediacy of a scroll containing the words of Jeremia ar­ guably served as the better indicator of its adherence to the canon than the purportedly faithful recording of the prophet’s words (Barton 2017, 84). All in all, both canon and canonization practices have so far been elastic enough to keep switching between culture, religion and politics for millen­ nia without much substantial change, and this persistence seems to justify their study outside of conventional temporal and disciplinary boundaries.

The double face of deification in personality cults: transcendence within immanence It has been shown before that the submission of transcendence to imma­ nence, inherent in the dynamics of personality cults and serving as a prereq­ uisite for the deification of leaders as well as the canonization of texts, could come in various interconnected guises, with (1) general roles frequently sub­ ordinated to particular persons and (2) uniform, non­interactive symbolic

Deification, canonization, random signaling  175 codes (writing) often inferior to the situational, interactive indexical ones (touch). Among the three leaders in question, this challenge to the ordo creationis reveals itself in the double strategy adopted, or at least tolerated, for the most of their time in power: whereas a chief executive is interchangea­ bly portrayed either as an outstanding individual towering over the faceless crowd (Figures 9.1, 9.3, and 9.5) or as an average human being pointedly equal to every other person in size and status (Figures 9.2, 9.4, and 9.6), it is left to the iconic similarity to link two disparate scenes to the same living signified.24

Figure 9.1 Harris & Ewing. 1935. President Franklin D. Roosevelt speaking on Ar­ mistice Day in Arlington, VA (a photograph, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC, USA).

Figure 9.2 Anonymous. 1932. FDR campaigning en route to Warm Springs, Geor­ gia, shaking hands with farmer C.M. Camp (a photograph, Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum Digital Archives, Hyde Park, NY, USA. Photo ID: 48­22:3704(419)c).

176  Kirill Postoutenko

Figure 9.3 Klutsis, Gustav G. 1932. Toward the World October Revolution (a poster, IZOGIZ Publishers).

Figure 9.4 K lutsis, Gustav G. 1931. “The Reality of Our Program is the Living Peo­ ple, It Is Us and You” (Stalin) (a poster, IZOGIZ Publishers).

Figure 9.5 A nonymous. 1934. “Yes! Leader, We Follow You!” (a poster, German Historical Museum/ S. Ahlers, Berlin, Germany, Inventory Number P 62/1593).

Deification, canonization, random signaling  177

Figure 9.6 Heinrich Hoffmann. 1932. Begrüßung Hitlers auf dem Wege zu einer Kundgebung (a photograph, BPK, Berlin, Germany, Image 30003693).

In principle, this difference is often unintentionally produced by the overlapping change of perspective and interactional setting. Indeed, such built­in environments as theaters, lecture halls and assemblies prescribe spatial separation between messengers and recipients (Scheflen 1972, 139; Flusser 1996, 57–58), so zooming in on the speaker would inevitably turn any audience into a faceless “mass ornament” (Kracauer 1927, 50–63). However, the systems with regular rotation of political elites and corre­ sponding alternation of speaking roles in public typically tend to smooth out the difference between their leaders’ monological (authoritarian) and dialogical (egalitarian) behavior (Ruesch and Bateson 1951; Postoutenko 2010a, 20): in fact, the best­known interactional invention of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s presidency – the so­called “fireside chats” – disguised his ra­ dio speeches as private conversations with listeners (Lazarsfeld, Berelson and Gaudet 1975, 520–521; Ryfe 1999, 91). Inversely, in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the “transcendental” images of the leaders were blown out of realistic proportions, carved out of interactional settings and given either a messianic role or at least a prophetic posture (see Figures 9.3 and 9.5).25 As a result, both Stalin and Hitler, grotesquely oversized, had been repeatedly shown beyond communicative reach and placed in a position uniquely suitable to dispensing heavenly messages to their invisible, indis­ tinguishable, silent followers (Thamer 1988, 359; Epping­Jäger 2003, 145). (In Nazi Germany, the media montage was supplemented by the construc­ tion of grandiose amphitheaters aimed at further increasing the already great distance between the leader speaking far above and the followers lis­ tening below: the 1933 picture in which Hitler is shown addressing a vast Brown Shorts parade in Dortmund from a ski­high tribune (Figure 9.7) captures this deliberately disjoint perspective.)26 As the handful of those images, carefully selected by their prototypes, made it into the mass production of identical sculptures, posters and sten­ ciled portraits which in the mid­1930s quickly saturated the public spaces and

178  Kirill Postoutenko

Figure 9.7 Anonymous. 1933. Hitler addresses the Brown Shorts parade in Dort­ mund (a photograph, Australian War Memorial, Campbell ACT, Aus­ tralia, Accession Number 044580).

media of Soviet Union and Germany, the assumed invariance of both leaders to the contingencies of time and space took a definite, seemingly unchange­ able, shape (Golomshtok 1994, 213–217; Davies 1997, 114, 118; Kozlova 2005, 360; Maier 2006, 268; Plamper 2012, 228; Postoutenko 2010c, 33).27 Predicta­ bly, the partial ascension of leaders to the inaccessible heights only sharpened the other side of the coin: the more distant the cultic personalities became, the more they were envisioned and sought after here and now – as the ob­ jects of unredeemed love or the partners in (imaginary) private conversations (Günther 1997, 181–182; Ennker 1998, 175, 179; Devlin 2012, 96; Welch 2003, 104; Geppert 2010, 158–77; Gill 2011, 119).28 It is instructive to see how this familiar pattern, involving (1) the split of the leader’s image into the transcendent and the immanent parts, (2) the mu­ tual reinforcement of the extremes, and (3) the counter­intuitive submission of the first to the second has a strong showing in the Soviet and Nazi cases – and is barely noticeable in the American one. The case in point are the metonymies linking all the three leaders to the composite Christian deity: while both Stalin and Hitler are plainly likened to the “Gods” by their cor­ respondents29, Roosevelt is depicted a bit more equivocally as the agent of “delivery” and “salvation”, which places his prototype somewhere between

Deification, canonization, random signaling  179 the Father, the Son, and one of the Prophets (Moses).30 The last, and the least deifying, association turned out to be the most productive one as well,31 capping popular adoration of the American president at the level roughly corresponding to the “great men” of Thomas Carlyle (1840):32 occasionally Roosevelt might have been called something like “the greatest mind and the best informed personality /…/ in the world to day”,33 but there were no talk of the executive’s superhuman transcendence on conceptual or operational level. In contrast, both Soviet and Nazi discourses systematically described the respective leaders as valuable and efficient beyond the confines of time and space. Thus Stalin was routinely hailed as the greatest genius (thinker, leader etc.) “of all times and peoples” (Uchenie Lenina­Stalina 1938, 28)34; the celebrated pilot Mikhail Vodopyanov even claimed that the Bolshevik leader was “always” with Soviet people, even when they were “thousands kilometres away” (Vodop’͡i anov 1939, 164). In a like fashion, Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess equated the person of “Führer” to such a sensually impercepti­ ble, semantically inexhaustible abstraction as “Germany” (Hess 1934). This quite conspicuous difference between the not­so­deified American president and his intensively worshipped German and Soviet counterparts be­ comes even more apparent when the possibility of a direct correlation between deification and random signaling is considered. It could be further shown how random signaling creates presuppositions for canonization of some texts closely related to the deified persons, and how this possibility turns into cer­ tainty with the 1936 Constitution of Soviet Union and Mein Kampf.

FDR’s weak personality cult: restricted deification and random signaling, negligible canonization Perhaps one of the main obstacles to the proliferation of random signa­ ling in the communication between the American president and his cor­ respondents was the remaining subordination of his private person to the political role. Notwithstanding Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unparalleled use of direct presidential action, matchless media exposure and extraordinary time in office, he was generally perceived as a person temporarily fulfill­ ing the chief executive role of the state. This was confirmed, among other things, by the standard form of address: among 97 letters and telegrams sent to Roosevelt in response to his Fireside Chat On Drought Conditions delivered on September 6, 1936, almost four­fifths (77) addressed FDR as either “Mr. President”, or “the President”, 14 messages combined the insti­ tutional (“President”) and the private (“Roosevelt”) references, and only 6 refrained from mentioning Roosevelt’s office altogether (PPF). In accord­ ance with this preference, Roosevelt was overwhelmingly treated by people who wrote to him as a state function lacking personal attributes. Exception­ ally, his portraits, “framed” and placed in “conspicuous” places in private households, could become objects of veneration,35 but the overall tone of

180  Kirill Postoutenko letter­exchanges was crisp, detached and businesslike. Indeed, a few admir­ ers hinted at divine intervention as a source of Roosevelt’s power,36 but the default opinion seemed to derive his presidency from societal cooperation rather than divine ordination: simply put, Americans credited nobody but themselves with installing FDR in the White House until the next election, and they expected him to know this fact and behave accordingly.37 This understanding of political turnover as a joint egalitarian enter­ prise was ostensibly mirrored at the general communicative level. As a rule, Americans applied to their correspondence with their 32nd presi­ dent the common interactional rules, perceiving it as a shared respon­ sibility and considering the resulting informational exchange as a boon to both sides. Moreover, for all the praise heaped upon Roosevelt oral “masterpieces”,38 quite a few of his correspondents saw the President as the main beneficiary of their information exchange:39 at any rate, de­ scribing communication with the President as a “privilege”, as the Gen­ eral Allison F. Lorenzen did on September 6, 1936 (PPF), was fairly untypical. Accordingly, the Americans writing to Roosevelt displayed direct, often critical engagement with the content of his speeches, ex­ pecting, in their turn, both timely and topical responses. True, the mo­ tivation for responding to the President’s appearances in public could well be split between “duty” and “pleasure”.40 Nevertheless, many listeners not only took time and effort to provide detailed responses to the rhe­ torical questions posed in the Fireside Chats, but also asked non­rhetorical counter­questions, required the acknowledgments of receipt, and even demanded correction of alleged spelling and factual errors.41 When Hart­ ley P. Junkins in a letter to Marvyn H. McIntyre, one of Roosevelt’s private secretaries sent on September 31, 1936 (PPF), complained about the three week­delay in response to the previous message and ominously remarked that the lack of “satisfactory” answer to this and similar queries could cost the sitting President his re­election, he merely spelled out the interde­ pendence of small­scale interactional and large­scale political cooperation well­known to, and accepted by, American leaders and followers alike.42 To be sure, the specific interactions between the head of a big country and its citizens were anything but perfect due to the considerable medial, communicative and informational asymmetries embedded in any steep so­ cio­political, cultural and medial hierarchy: even in some functionally sim­ ple illiterate societies, the chiefs’ public appearances were accompanied by the sounds of their official drums while others were confined to silent listening (Mair 1964, 227–228). In the twentieth century, armed with tech­ nology, experts and bureaucracies, any President had many more chances to get his messages across unchallenged through the mass media, and his/ her capacities for both absorbing and generating information in the po­ litical system were probably unmatched in the country (Milgram 1974, 114–115). This bottleneck at the top of the communicational ladder invar­ iably resulted in a number of practices reducing informational overload

Deification, canonization, random signaling  181 – and interactional involvement – of the chief executive: apparently, only a small fraction of private letters directed at the President had reached his desk in the Oval Office, and an even tinier part of correspondence was selected for personal answers (PaP, IX). Some of Roosevelt’s correspond­ ents expressed resignation or even voiced outrage at that state of affairs, lamenting bureaucratic obstacles to their contact, and urging President to get himself on the air more often.43 Others, however, were ready to bear some extra interactional responsibility, willingly or unwillingly conceding his right to adopt authoritarian posture of a “priest”,44 delay response, skim through the letters, or even ignore some messages altogether.45 In response, the obliging chief executive simplified his messages to ease in­ formation transmission,46 and toned down his speeches to the conversa­ tional mood, which earned him the nickname “youandme”­President (Dos Passos 1934, 17; Ryfe 1999, 80; Ryfe 2001, 770). Judged by the fact that in the first quarter of 1936 on the pages of New York Times, Roosevelt was referred to as interlocutor and collaborator a bit more often than Stalin in Pravda or Hitler in Völkischer Beobachter (Postoutenko 2016a, 209), the American president was doing a decent job of both preserving interac­ tional foundations of his political legitimacy and selling his cooperative image to the public. At times the egalitarian foundations of his communi­ cation with the electorate were stretched to the limit by media superiority, aggressive political agenda and a few subservient supporters (Lim 2003), but on the whole they apparently remained intact throughout his term in the highest office of the United States of America.

Hitler’s and Stalin’s strong personality cults: comprehensive canonization, deification and random signaling To many observers in the mid­1930s, the plebiscitary dictatorship in Soviet Union and Nazi Germany did not look much different from the representa­ tive democracy in the United States: in all the three countries, the elections, held regularly and with a decent turnout, time after time failed to produce changes at the helm of the state (Schivelbusch 2005, 23–26). This superficial similarity, however, concealed the profound difference between the two sets of alternatives (Weber 1919, 862; Crespi 1997, 104–105; Patzelt 2011; Marquez 2017, 94): whereas Americans were making their choice between two equi­ pollent political forces (A vs. B), Soviets and Germans were asked at the election booth to confirm or deny the current order (A vs. non­A). It seems logical that only the first, contrary opposition enables the periodic change of personnel in the top executive office, which is confirmed by the presence of 12 Republicans and 9 Democracts in the White House throughout the twentieth century. Alternatively, the second, contradictory opposition does not really allow for personnel changes at the top office: besides incurring high political risks and nearly prohibitive social costs, voting against Hitler or Stalin is not by itself an efficient strategy of choosing alternative leaders,

182  Kirill Postoutenko since non­A, being a negative value, cannot be Führer or even Secretary General. In other words, unlike American elections of 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944, the German elections of 1933, 1936 and 1938 and the Soviet elections of 1937 and 1938 revealed no direct correlation between the voters’ activity and filling the highest post in the state: by and large, Hitler and Stalin were sup­ posed to retain their political leaderships regardless of political activities on the ground (Zaslavsky and Brym 1978, 363). This disconnect between power and politics not only reinforced the transcendental dimension of personality cults, but also brought about the peculiar interactional framework suita­ ble for this permanence and universality: the immense communicative and informational privileges on the top had been seen more and more often as natural extensions of personal authority of the deified leaders (Hein­Kirch­ ner 2010, 12). Expectedly, this situation was a fertile ground for the random signaling to flourish. Stripped of its political relevance, the standard interactional co­ operation was out of place in the environment discouraging role changes and turn­taking at nearly all social and communicative levels of public life. If Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats mimicking friendly banter at the dinner ta­ ble were a fitting, if idealized, allegory of standard conversational routines, then a street loudspeaker, unstoppably and uncontestedly preaching from above to all listeners alike, was both a vehicle and a symbol of random sig­ naling in Soviet Union and Nazi Germany (Crespi 1997, 106; Epping­Jäger 2003, 154–155; Urban 2007, 204).47 At a first glance, the suppression of elite turnover in the Soviet and Nazi states had not necessarily made the interaction between leaders and fol­ lowers markedly different from either classical conversational routines or their common manageable pathologies. Actually, the mills of bureaucracy grinding down hundreds of thousands of messages to the leaders worked rather similarly in all the three countries: the estimated number of letters personally read by the Bolschevik leader – just over 2.5% – would not be out of place in Berlin or Washington, DC.48 Despite this abysmal figure, compounded by the political climate not conducive to deliberation, a hand­ ful of Stalin’s and Hitler’s correspondents expected their letters to be read by the leaders in person, lamented delays, and even threatened to quit the epistolary exchange altogether.49 Regardless of the highly questionable po­ tency of such warnings, the chancelleries in Kremlin and at Wilhelmstrasse did invest considerable resources in maintaining at least the appearance of functioning interactional routine, typically furnishing senders with pre­ fabricated impersonal typescripts signed or even stamped by mid­rank bu­ reaucrats (BaH, 365–368, 374). To be sure, most letters were not answered, and the topical relevance of answers, usually drafted beforehand, was lim­ ited, to say the least. Still, the moderately authoritarian non­political dis­ course such as the aforementioned doctor­patient exchange could live with suspended turn­taking reasonably well (Heath 1984, 247, 249, 253), and off­ topic remarks might under some circumstances be a socially acceptable way

Deification, canonization, random signaling  183 of bringing urgently relevant information to awareness (Gibson 2012, 29). Therefore it is worth discussing in more detail how the similar arrangement in personality cults could lead to the regular and relatively stable substitu­ tion of standard interactional cooperation by random signaling.

The interactional development of personality cults: from random signaling to canonization As discussed before, one of the biggest jeopardies created by the subor­ dination of social, political and religious roles to the personalities of the leaders is the uncertainty surrounding ascension to and departure from the top position in the respective society. Albeit to various degrees, elections in democracies and succession rules in monarchies effectively reduce the incumbent’s insecurity in two important ways: not only do they provide le­ gitimate grounds and timeline for withdrawal, but the equivalency between multiple ruling persons in relation to the single role legitimizes all past, present and future postholders as elements of the orderly, predictable, safe and meaningful elite rotation. Within this seemingly interminable alterna­ tion, past and future are not necessarily opposed to each other: whereas monarchs typically stay on the throne for life, nothing prevents presidents, prime ministers and chancellors from being reelected or even elected again after spending some time in opposition. This combination of regularity, open­endedness and equivalence informing elite rotation in democracy ex­ plains the tranquility with which Winston Churchill effectively endorsed turn­taking in politics on a large scale, inviting Labour – the party of his political adversaries – to “have their turn” (1941, 6403–6404). Churchill’s own in­and­out executive career attests to the relative unimportance of one­ time loss of political and communicative privileges at the end of political term: as long as the potential head of government and his/her party perform well in one of the upcoming general elections, they will be duly allocated the very same political, medial and communicative superiority that their defeated predecessors possessed. Since the informational value of binary choices between being in and out of power, stepping down and holding on, giving victory to party X, Y or Z is nearly always minimal (Shannon and Weaver 1949, 18; Pierce 1980, 289), the uncertainty generated by democratic elections and even monarchic successions is usually too small to shatter ei­ ther turn­taking in politics or top­bottom social interaction. The situation could not be more different for prophets, totalitarian lead­ ers and other cultic personalities. Inextricably tied to the positions of pres­ tige which, in their turn, depend on both high messaging capacity and the content of specific messages (from reflexive legitimacy claims to prophe­ cies and masterpieces), such individuals have few incentives to engage in turn­taking on any level. As the pause at the end of the utterance leaves the current messenger with the alternative of going on and switching to the recipient’s role (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974, 704; Holler et al. 2015),

184  Kirill Postoutenko putting deified leadership to an electoral test effectively constitutes a choice between strengthening power for some limited period of time and losing it altogether. In both instances, the second option is only attractive if informa­ tion exchange, role turnover and cooperation in general outweigh the risks of losing privileged status quo in society, culture and communication. All things considered, this does not look like a reasonable bargain for deified in­ dividuals (particularly those relying on canonized texts), since neither their own legitimacy, couched in transcendental terms, nor the pragmatics of as­ sociated foundational texts claiming universality has much to do with social cooperation and interactional production of meaning. Of course, it does not hurt any incumbent ruler to get elected, nor is it detrimental for any canonic text to be transparently clear. However, the history of successful personality cults in literature, politics and religion is full of revolutionary figures and obscure texts (Bloom 1994, 30; Sluiter 2016, 35–40): for that reason alone, it would have made little sense for any cultic figure to risk everything by sub­ mitting to the rotation procedures or reaching out to recipients (Svolik 2012, 40). Seen in this light, the interactional phenomenon of random signaling, far from being an unexplained deviation from interactional standards, does have some rational foundations. Without going into even more theoretical details, it might be worthwhile to explore what particular shape random signaling took in the Soviet Union (under Stalin) and Nazi Germany, and how this interactional arrangement created favorable conditions for canon­ ization of Constitution of Soviet Union and Mein Kampf. Arguably the most drastic change made to the interactional standards by random signaling was the suspension of mutual responsibility for successful interaction at various levels—from turn adjacency and topical coordination to the joint clarification of meanings and information exchange.50 Simply put, while timely and relevant responses to previous turns, cooperation on shared meanings and a quest for interactional cohesion remained a pos­ sibility, it ceased to be a requirement. In practical terms, this resulted in a number of novel interactional conventions defying the notions of time­ liness, relevance and cooperation. To begin with, the normative adjacency pair message-response became just one option of many: for Hitler or Stalin, it was quite customary to react to a succession of (increasingly desperate) letters with a single response, most typically delayed and relegated to one of the secretaries. Alone, this decoupling of interactional turns increased the uncertainty of interactional situation manifold: the Soviet and German citi­ zens addressing their leaders could neither be sure of the very receipt of their messages nor predict when, if at all, they would receive the response and which elements of the original message could be selected for reaction. As a result, some fairly marginal, energetically wasteful, informationally empty and socially questionable practices such as frenzied pursuit of response in series of letters, or self­communication with the leaders’ texts and images became the norm (Bell 1975, 33–34; Pomerantz 1984, 161–163). Instead of waiting for and reacting to actual messages, some correspondents of deified

Deification, canonization, random signaling  185 leaders endlessly reformulated their own queries in pursuit of an answerable version:51 alone Nikolai Bukharin, one of the most reputable Old Bolshe­ viks, had addressed Stalin in 1936–1937 dozens of times apparently without success, only to be executed the year after (Medvedev 1990, 325).52 In their turn, Hitler’s dispirited correspondents engaged in reflexive pseudo­ interactional practices such as mock “conversations” with him,53 “prayers” in front of his “adorned” portraits54 and even the delusionary hopes of reply through mass media:55 in fact, a couple of Führer’s correspondents thanked him in all earnesty for “answering” their private messages in radio speeches.56 The evident consequence of this disjunction between interactional turns, societal poles and communicative agencies attached to them was not lim­ ited to the massive entropy injected into social, political, cultural and com­ municative systems. In addition, the evaporation of interactional solidarity created at the top of socio­political hierarchy the class of messages closely reflecting their leaders’ deified status: they could come at any point, in any code or channel, and with any content – or no discernible content at all aside from their authorship and the fact of messaging – and still be seen as the only valuable information in the system.57 This boundless arbitrariness was particularly noticeable in Stalinism: it was sufficient for the Secretary Gen­ eral just to place a call to the disgraced poet Boris Pasternak in June 1934 to rapidly change the latter’s fortunes: while hardly anybody but the caller and the called was familiar with the details of the phone conversation, the mere news of the talk was sufficient for immediately offering the poet VIP treat­ ment and free meals in the restaurant of the Writer’s Union (Maslennikova 1990, 207; Gromov 1998, 280). Accordingly, the very fact of a leader’s response was celebrated as a huge interactional success, particularly if Stalin’s or Hitler’s personal in­ volvement could be ascertained: the “handwriting” of the chief executive, crowning a highly critical letter or utterly meaningless on the back of a press photograph, was equally “valuable” for the Soviet dramatist Alexander Af­ inogenov and the German car pioneer Bertha Benz.58 Inversely, the mere leader’s inavailability on the phone or in person for such seemingly loyal public figures as the Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov or the French Commu­ nist sympathizer Andre Gid could provoke feelings ranging from surprise to despair.59 The precious paucity of the leaders’ interventions is manifest in the acute, intense longing for each and every private response, or even significant public appearance:60 quite a few letter writers saw Stalin’s and Hitler’s answers, speeches and mere physical presence in their vicinity as the cure from “depression”, “joyous” events, “miracles”, pronouncements of “justice”, or even as “the reason to live”.61 The informational value of such verdicts eclipsed any first­hand knowledge of a subject in question: when Maxim Gorky’s widow Maria Andreeva decided to write her late husband’s biography, the first thing she did was asking Stalin for “guidance”.62 In contrast, the voluminous worthlessness of the followers’ epistolary output was the subject of endless self­deprecatory remarks, disclaimers and

186  Kirill Postoutenko “apologies”:63 taking full responsibility for setting up communication with the leaders, the authors of letters to Stalin and Hitler refrained from claiming even slightest credit for it. In the absence of any sensible connection with the previous epistolary turn, the letters directed to the top of executive hierarchy were accordingly arranged in order to deal with the biggest interactional uncertainty: stuffed with all kinds of potentially relevant data and cast in all thinkable genres from panegyric and complaint to petition and denun­ ciation (Surovt͡ seva 2017, 57), they often sounded acquiescent to the whole range of pragmatic consequences from repression to promotion (Glebkin 1998, 118; Livshin, Оrlov & Khlevniuk 2002, 9; Surovt͡ seva 2008, 31). This brief survey of random signaling between Soviet and German lead­ ers and their national audiences seems to confirm the interactional prereq­ uisites for textual canonization in both countries: indeed, both Hitler and Stalin dispense their rather standard orders, pronouncements and evalua­ tions at the moments of their choosing, paying minimal attention to their correspondents’ pleas, questions and compliments, and expecting their calls, letters and speeches to be eminently informative and repeatedly effi­ cacious regardless of content and context. Importantly, this development was not just the spontaneous byproduct of gradual interactional discon­ nection but, at least in part, a sustained policy directed at producing a spe­ cial class of messages and messengers above and away from constituencies, audiences and environment. Thus already at the early Nazi public events even the loyal questions to the only speaker and leader – Hitler h imself – were actively discouraged, and any substantial discussion, let alone dissent, was met with physical violence (Kracauer 1939, 86–87; Bosmajian 1966, 14; Klemperer 1996, 10). This consciously created and laboriously nurtured interactional, spatial (see above) and political gap between Führer, audi­ ences and environments effectively left the recipients of his messages with no other choice but to absorb, study and reiterate. Hence even before the Nazi takeover of political power, any text immediately associated with Hit­ ler and endowed with transcendental semantics, prophetic or otherwise, stood a fair chance of performing canonic function associated with the deified leader. When Adolf Ortmann in his late­1936 letter to Hitler some­ what incongruously described the latter’s current and future “miracles” as “the unique, eternal, unforgettable document” (RGVA, 1355­1­32, l. 139), he merely articulated the existing connection between the deified leader and his canonized texts, already discernible in the ubiquitous quotations from various writings and speeches of Führer in German press (QMK, 627). Alternatively, Stalin’s emancipation from ideologically proscribed egal­ itarian interactional practices was a gradual process. In 1924, being not more than primus inter pares on the Bolshevik Olympus, the Secretary General still felt himself bound by common interactional conventions. So when Stepan Zenushkin, a Bolshevik sailor of the Baltic fleet, asked Stalin to explain the discrepancies between his combative speech “Trotzkyism or Leninism” (Stalin 1924) and the semi­official journalistic account of the

Deification, canonization, random signaling  187 revolutionary events (Reed 1919) endorsed by Lenin (Lenin 1920), the ad­ dressee showed some patience and imagination in sweeping the potentially explosive topic under the carpet: in Stalin’s words, both the American journalist and the first Bolshevik leader simply lacked time and informa­ tion to properly “debunk” Trotsky (RGASPI, 558­11­735, l. 35–38). But 5–6 years later, around the time of his first cultic veneration – the lavish cele­ bration of Stalin’s 50th birthday (Golomshtok 1994, 212; Ennker 1996, 94; Livshin 2010, 87–89; Dahlke 2010, 82–83; Behrends 2010, 331) – the Soviet leader’s patience with the interpreters of his writings was already running thin: occasionally responding to their queries in a relatively polite and matter­of­factly manner, Stalin could was not above branding his inquisi­ tive correspondents as “Trotskyites”, “analphabets” and “fools”, as well as unceremoniously bidding “farewell” to them.64 In fact, already two years earlier he openly claimed canonic status for his own texts, declaring on September 9, 1927 in response to L. Mikhelson’s ambiguity charge that “Stalin’s formulations do not need clarification” (Stalin 1927, 152.)65 This illeistic reference to his other “body” as a monumental device manufactur­ ing undisputable texts abundantly clear under any circumstances, paved the way for the special status of Stalin’s discourse as the reference point for all kinds of events, branches of science, culture and politics: as soon as the Bolshevik leader’s portraits filled the pages of Pravda in the late 1930s, the newspaper columns became effectively the bundles of multiple references to Stalin’s texts aimed at explaining, directed and forecasting past, present and future (Alekseev 1982, 8; Brooks 2000, 65; Gill 2011, 118; Plamper 2012, 227–232). All in all, before certain texts were canonized in conjunction with deified leaders in Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the interactional postures adopted by the Bolshevik and Nazi leaders made the elevation of certain texts to the canonic status at least possible, if not inevitable.

Mein Kampf and The Constitution of Soviet Union: canonization in the service of personality cults Given Hitler’s much­professed preference for speaking over writing and Sta­ lin’s limited enthusiasm for public oratory (Tucker 1963, 22; Klemperer 1996, 35; Broszat 1981, 25; Pankau 2003, 59; Plöckinger 2003, 121; Schmid 2013, 43; Khlevniuk 2015b, 97), it comes perhaps as little surprise that Mein Kampf was the solitary contender for the top position in the Nazi textual canon (Diephouse 1983, 60), whereas in Stalin’s discursive surrounding there had been at least several candidates for the status (Davies and Harris 2014, 11; Brandenberger and Zelenov 2019). Indeed, the canonic book of the Nazi movement owes its existence not so much to its author’s literary ambitions as to Hitler’s inability to use spoken word – his medium of choice – due to imprisonment and the subsequent ban on public speaking.66 The need to pay legal bills provided an additional impetus for writing a would­be best­ seller (Hammer 1956, 162–163; KdB, 209). Under such circumstances, it was

188  Kirill Postoutenko quite rational for the head of the NSDAP to opt for the party owned­pub­ lishing house Eher which was not in the position to refuse the publication, or at least reject the extortionate royalty demands, of its high­ranking au­ thor (Phelps 1955, 31–33; KdB, 195, 212–214). The debut of a avaricious, in­ experienced, semiliterate politician with limited popularity and fringe ideas clearly did not look in 1925 destined for breaking sales’ records, and 12.4 million copies sold in less than 20 years after that require at least some ex­ planation (Waltå 1992, 37; KdB, 206–207, 227, 229). The same could be said about the Constitution (General Law) of the Soviet Union – a dry, techni­ cal text which achieved twice the circulation of Mein Kampf in just over a year (Keller 1937, 58). The staggering figures owe much to the administrative pressure, particularly in the Soviet Union where planned economy allowed for decoupling of supply from demand (Gregory 2004, 48–49; KDB, 200, 240). However, the rise of the two mediocre texts to the positions of singular canonicity in the respective countries was a much more complex process: be­ sides random signaling firmly in place, it hinged on the careful intertwining between leaders and texts, accompanied by the whole range of supplemen­ tary canonization practices discussed above. As both the protagonist and the narrator of his semi­autobiographical pamphlet, Hitler had little difficulty in associating himself with the poten­ tial canonic text. The lack of literary professionalism was an obvious obsta­ cle for producing a classical text, but the close circle of loyal and experienced literary critics, editors, writers and scholars helped the novice out of this trouble by checking the proofs of Mein Kampf and even formulating some passages (Hammer 1956, 162–163). However, despite the best efforts of dev­ otees, the book sales kept lagging far behind the publishers’ expectations long after Hitler moved to the center of German politics: just a year before NSDAP’s electoral triumph in 1933, the book was possessed by less than 2% of the party members (KdB, 140–143, 161, 196–199). However, the unpopu­ larity of Mein Kampf did not deter some enthusiasts from paving the way for its future canonization: throughout late 1920s – early 1930s, the book was strongly suggested to “every” German (QMK, 190, 289), frequently as­ sociated with the Bible by admirers and critics alike (GeB, 405–406; Lange 1968, 121; Klemperer 1996, 35; KdB, 152, 153, 230–231; QMK, 227, 230–231, 366),67 and even preordained to “eternal” fame (QMK, 295–296). Evidently, as has often been the case with personality cults, the adoration of the leader was supposed to be the driving force of the book cult and not the other way around. But even before Hitler’s political deification, the utmost significance of his personality for the potential cultic status of Mein Kampf was gener­ ally acknowledged and widely exploited: Henrich Hoffmann’s photograph of Hitler dominated not only the dust cover of both volumes since their first edition (Figure 9.8) but also its advertisement campaigns, beginning with the imitative “book billboards” erected in Munich in 1925. Long time be­ fore Hitler’s full­blown personality cult and the concurrent extolment of his most popular writing, the preconditions for both seemed to be in place long in advance of their potential deployment.

Deification, canonization, random signaling  189 In his turn, Stalin’s connection with the Soviet text selected for promotion to the cultic status was much more intricate, resembling more the relation Prophet Muhammad / Quran than the more straightforward Homer / Iliad (see the beginning of the chapter). To begin with, since 1924 the Bolshevik state had already been in possession of a valid Constitution conceived, pro­ ͡ ͡ duced and disseminated without much Stalin’s involvement (Кonstitutsiia ͡ 1924; Chistiakov 2004, 84). What’s more, the patchy legal framework sur­ rounding the first Soviet general law was clearly inadequate for bringing about any substantial constitutional changes, and the provision of dropping the “old” Constitution in favor of the “new” one was lacking altogether (Shershneva 2007, 74–75). Last but not least, as the Bolshevik party leader without formal state executive powers, Joseph Stalin in the mid­30s had de jure little leverage for even proposing any changes to the 1924 version. Yet the combination of patience, trickstery and strong­arming trans­ formed the Secretary General from a prominent bystander to the “creator” of the future canonic text (Shershneva 2007, 73). For almost a year, the grad­ ual breakup with the preexisting legal foundations of the Soviet state was labeled in the party and state documents as its “change” carried out largely ͡ without Stalin’s involvement (Tretiakov 1953, 97–98; Ronin 1957, 35, 38; Кabanov 1976, 117). It was only in February 1935 that the grand but largely powerless Central Executive Committee of the USSR entrusted Stalin with ͡ chairing its Constitutional Commission (Bogatyrenko 1957, 131–132; Тiurin 2007, 40; Lomb 2018, 17–18). This appointment simultaneously put an end to all gradualist rhetoric and collective action: in the course of just over a year, the Head of the Commission not only managed to rebrand the con­ stitutional process as the work on the “text of the new Constitution”, but also gradually disposed of the esteemed legal experts within the party in favor of loyal bureaucrats with no party standing or even formal affiliation with the Commission (Maksimova 2014, 48; Ennker 2014, 2–3). Right after Stalin delivered his talk On the project of the Constitution of USSR at the Plenum of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party in the early June of 1936, the astounding 15 410 000 copies of the speech hit the shelves of Soviet bookstores, newsstands and libraries (Кeller 1937, 58). In a matter of days and weeks, the lavish celebrations of the speech (which content was fully attributed to Stalin despite his largely editorial, if self­willed, contri­ bution), its collective listening, film screenings and tutorials, festive sports competitions and meetings were organized countrywide, effectively setting in motion the canonization of the new Soviet Constitution before its official approval and enactment at the 8th Extraordinary Congress of Soviets four months later (Plan teoreticheskikh seminarov 1936; Аzovo­Cher[nomor­ ͡ skiĭ] Кraevoĭ komitet 1936; Аksiutin 2006, 163; Panchenko 2016, 24–25, 33– 34, 46–47; Lomb 2018, 67–72). Unsurprisingly, both the leader’s messaging activity in relation to the projected canon and its public reception strayed away from interactional turn­taking toward the vicinity of random signa­ ling: in sharp contrast to a typical public consultation based on regulated information exchange and subsequent mutual adjustment of the popular

190  Kirill Postoutenko and the governmental positions (Sayer 2015, 125), the Soviet “all­people discussion” of 1936 largely consisted of repetitive, unspecific and mostly off­topic mass glorification of the single messenger in direct conjunction with the adoration of his “world­historical” message (Ronin 1957, 44; Bo­ gatyrenko 1957, 142; Panchenko 2016, 8, 16, 20, 47; Khaustov 1992, 274, 279; ͡ Rittersporn 2003, 56; Аksiutin 2006, 164; Ennker 2014, 8; Kolpakova 2014, 40–43; Medushevskiĭ 2016, 90, 99–100, 104; Isaev 2018a, 20; Lomb 2018, 72, 74–75; Isaev 2018b, 97, 99), whereas the critical (i.e. informative) feedback to the speech was either ignored or explained away as ideological deviance.68 As in the case of Mein Kampf (see below), this pointed inattention to the content of the leader’s message led to the conservation of its canonic un­ touchability avant la lettre: in fact, it took both energy and authority of the most esteemed Russian language specialist – the academician Dmitry Ush­ akov – to purge a serious grammatical error from the text of Stalin’s talk, reprinted verbatim in millions of copies following the “original” publica­ tion in Pravda.69 All in all, the curious projection of Stalin’s cultic adoration upon “his” invitation to the constitutional debate gave a foretaste of future canonization of the full­fledged Constitution, making it almost inevitable. In his turn, Hitler’s swift transformation from a popular tribune and ac­ tive participant in democratic politics to the dictator unbound by legal or institutional constraints in the course of 1933 gave a decisive support both to his social status and the publishing fortunes of his magnum opus (KdB, 230–231). However, in many ways the canonization of Mein Kampf kept to the beaten tracks, relying, for instance, on the same portrait of Führer that had been at the center of the book design and advertisement campaigns from the mid­20s. At the same time, a number of traditional practices, enabled by Hitler’s greatly expanded organizational resources and sustained by his per­ sonal popularity, were simultaneously boosting the leader’s deification and his book’s canonic status. Thus the universal significance and applicability of Mein Kampf was promoted (with mixed success) through its periodical blanket distribution to schoolchildren, military, police officers and new­ lyweds, with the professed goal of reaching out to “every German” (GeB, 408–409, 432; QMK, 580–583, 614, 617, 640, 643–644, 649, 653–654; KdB, 202–203, 231–235). Other common practices included indiscriminate and re­ current quotations from the book in all kinds of public and private messages (QMK, 627; GeB, 413),70 references to its “all­encompassing” significance (QMK, 584–585, 587), discouragement of its thorough analytical interpre­ tation (QMK, 415–416, 616), frequent mass celebrations of its publication anniversaries (QMK, 581–582, 589–593; KdB, 201) and metonymical re­ course to the semantics of preexisting canonic messages: while at church weddings Hitler’s pamphlet was supposed to replace the Bible (QMK, 589), at school the learning by heart and directed recitation of Mein Kampf in the Hitler­“schrines” was aimed at supplanting, or at least supplementing, the literary classics (KdB, 233, 235; GeB, 411). In relation to temporal invariance of the book aimed, among other things, at mirroring the eternity of the Third Reich (see section 3 above),

Deification, canonization, random signaling  191 the measures ranged from a curious prohibition to sell the ostensibly timeless chef d’œuvre in antiquarian book shops (QMK, 648) to its pres­ ervation in a “time capsule” buried deep in the earth together with other Nazi paraphernalia (Eleftheriou­Smith 2016).71 In its turn, the inviolabil­ ity of the canon was laid bare by Hitler’s obstinate unwillingness to deal with the obvious flaws of his oeuvre such as grammar and spelling errors: whenever such changes had been made, reluctantly and surreptitiously, they were mostly motivated by political expediency rather than by the pursuit of coherence or accessibility (Hammer 1956, 165, 171; KdB, 159, 162–163, 165, 167, 172, 178, 248, 250, 252). Last but not least, the search for the immanent authenticity of the transcendent canonic semantics (see section 2 above) had led to the cult of the “invented original”, since the actual manuscript of Mein Kampf was apparently deemed unsuitable for public veneration.72 To this end, the Eher publishing house congratulated its author with his 37th birthday by producing the new 35­kilogram “lux­ urious” parchment edition with the text written by hand. As Hitler was pictured in the party newspaper perusing the brand new fake relic of his own writing on its way to display in the “Führer­House” in Munich (Mein Kampf in Pergament 1936),73 the departure of both deified leader and his canonized text­“monument” (QMK, 585, 636–637) from the peculiarities of time, space, social environment and standard interaction rules seemed to be complete. Just a few months later, on December 5, 1936, the 8th Extraordinary Con­ gress of Soviets adopted the new Soviet Constitution in Moscow. At that point, the personality cult of the second Soviet leader was well underway for at least 7 years. Although the work on “Stalin’s constitution” had only begun in the previous year, its adulation, as has been shown before, had already been thoroughly prepared by the carpet dissemination, repetitive adulation and or­ chestrated mass recitation of the Secretary General’s talk on the Soviet con­ stitution: formally designed to begin interactional collaboration on the new Soviet general law by checking public stance and soliciting amendments, the talk effectively put an end to this process. This (non­)interactional design of constitutional deliberation was greatly reinforced at the Congress where Sta­ lin took upon himself the task of telling a few reasonable amendments from ͡ the bulk of “unacceptable” ones (Тretiakov 1953, 101; Kulikova 2009, 203): in response, a meagre 11% of the deputies’ responses referred to the content of the talk, compared to almost a half of the references devoted to the standard praises of Stalin’s person (Postoutenko 2015). Among other things, this statis­ tics reveals the familiar dependence of textual canonization on the already de­ ified leader: indeed, the flood of Soviet post­1936 posters depicting huge Stalin hovering above the miniature Constitution (see, for instance, Mark L. Ioffe’s 1946 poster Hail to the Great Stalin, the Creator of the Constitution (Figure 9.9) brings to mind the already discussed dust cover of Mein Kampf, and the direct transference of the aforecited transcendental characterization of Stalin to his text – “the greatest document of all times and peoples” – confirms this trend (Shub 1937, 5; Zakharov 1939, 23).

192  Kirill Postoutenko

Figure 9.8 Hitler, Adolf. 1925. Mein Kampf (dust cover). München: Franz­Eher­Ver­ lag, Wikimedia Commons.

Figure 9.9 Ioffe, Mark L. 1946. Hail to the Great Stalin, the Creator of Constitution (a poster, courtesy of UPRAVIS, Moscow, Russia).

Deification, canonization, random signaling  193 The repertoire of social practices intended to shield constitutional mes­ sage from all substantial response (including textual criticism, comparisons with surrounding socio­political reality and undesirable practical applica­ tions) displays the familiar combination of formulaic superficial adulation, frenetic distribution and endless reiteration in all kinds of contexts and set­ tings. Immediately after the Congress, the talk, whose cumulative print dis­ ͡ tribution reached 20 million copies in a matter of months (Аksiutin 2006, 160), became, accompanied by numerous study aids, the obligatory subject of directed school, college and evening classes, the magic solution for all kinds of popular problems, the cause for lavishly staged celebrations, and ͡ even the unique explanation of the whole universe (Кushner 1941; Тiurin 2007, 44; Petrone 2000, 181–183; Shmid 2009, 103; Postoutenko 2010b, 29):74 Dzhambul Dzhabaev – the indefatigable translator of Bolshevik slogans into the rhymed acclamations – promptly described the new constitution as “the law, according to which the sun rises” (Dzhabaev 1936, 129). Perhaps the most striking similarity to the German case was the work at the Saint­ Petersburg Laboratory of Conservation and Restauration of Documents on its own version of “time capsule” aimed at preserving General Law for “centuries”, “millennia” or even “forever”:75 here, too, the manuscript, per­ ishable and bearing too many alien traces, was substituted by the new “orig­ inal”, written (on special glass) anew and intended for unspecified posterity ͡ (Мakartsev 2006, 36).76 As for the direct metonymical recourse on the exist­ ing canon through ritual and interpretational affinities, the 1936 Constitution was no different from Mein Kampf despite much­professed atheism of the Bolshevik ideological discourse. Indeed, St. Augustine’s suggestion to inscribe the Gospel of John in “letters of gold” (aureis litteris conscribendum)77 on the prominent place in every church gave birth – possibly without the knowledge of the source – to the string of nearly identical idiomatic construc­ tions culminating in the 1939 exhibit at the All­Soviet Agricultural Exhibi­ tion in Moscow, where the text of the “Stalin Constitution”, according to the guide, was written “in the golden letters on the Central Hall’s frieze” (Кush­ ner 1938, 13–15; Кuleshov 1938, 20–22; Аbykov 1938, 77; Zverev 1939, 470; Zakharov 1939, 25).78 (Tellingly, the frequent “luxurious” editions of Mein Kampf also featured golden letters on their covers – see QMK, 651). When Nikolai Sugrobov, a peasant from the Yaroslavl region, pledged to spend “all his savings” on casting the text of Constitution “in pure gold” and embedding in the Kremlin wall with Stalin’s portrait “showered with diamonds” in the middle,79 he was apparently seeking not only to uphold the merger of deified leader and canonic text within Stalin’s personality cult, but also to ensure the inescapable centrality and timeless endurance of the cultic pair.

The Constitution of the United States: canonization against personality cults? Given the very limited scope of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s personality cult, the intactness of his interactional collaboration with the American people

194  Kirill Postoutenko on both discursive and political levels, and the absence of potentially can­ onizable text in his immediate vicinity, one should not expect to find in the case of the 32nd U.S. President the strong association between per­ sonal deification and textual canonization so typical for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Still, for all the differences between the political, communicative and me­ dia networks linking three leaders to their followers, it would be rash to dismiss this out of hand: after all, a few of his affectionate correspondents did engage in the very same practices of canonization as their Soviet or Ger­ man counterparts, quoting their leader “all the time” and even expecting his speeches to retain validity “for all times.”80 Why did this remarks, despite their nearly verbatim affinity with the messages sent to the Bolshevik and Nazi leaders, remained isolated, unrepresentative accidents? While the full answer to this question could be laboriously deduced from the previous contrast of the signaling practices in dictatorships and democracies, a quick glance at the actual relations between President and Constitution of the United States in the mid­1930s might actually do the same trick in a more concise fashion. Whereas in a full­blown personality cult, as this chapter purports to show, the canonization practices would typically follow, or at least complement, a ruler’s deification, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s succession of presidential terms suggests the opposite dynam­ ics. The American constitution had a settled canonic status long before FDR’s ascent to power, and the Oath of Office requiring each incumbent to “preserve, protect and defend” the general law (Schulman 2009, 199) had been a twofold affirmation of its unquestionable superiority over a leader in question: not only the text of the Constitution was thereby proclaimed to be universally valid for the unspecified period of time, but the oath it­ self, reiterated by every incoming president regardless of circumstances, performatively imposed on each postholder the role of recipient and pro­ moter of the cultic message: in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, those were the “ordinary” people, not leaders, who endlessly recited Mein Kampf and the Constitution (General Law) of USSR and repeatedly pledged their allegiance to the canon (see section 10 above). Small wonder Roosevelt in 1937 compared American constitution to the “Bible”, and urged his readers to read it “again and again” (Roosevelt 1937, 124). To be sure, the use of this obedient rhetoric as a smokescreen for actually amending, or at least decisively reinterpreting, the Constitution was a testament to Roosevelt’s cunning political opportunism: attempting to appoint an additional Justice to the U.S. Supreme Court, he was trying to dilute the Court’s opposition to the New Deal (Pusey 1958; Solomon 2009). The failure of this legislative initiative confirmed, in its turn, the power of legal canon over individuals playing, however skillfully, executive roles in deliberative political systems. That said, the direct assault on the Constitution by the current resident of the White House may put this fundamental hierarchy into question (Col­ lins, Jackson, and Subramanian 2019).

Deification, canonization, random signaling  195

Notes

196  Kirill Postoutenko

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21

22 23

24 25 26

coimmunicative privileges – namely, priests and some doctors – serve as a breed­ ing ground for personality cults, routinely supplying societies with messiahs and gurus (James 1955, 96; Noll 1994; Zeitlyn 1995, 204). On the link between leader’s insecurity and canonization, see Hahn (1987, 33). Inversely, many literary deifications, untainted by power and survival issues, have outlived their subjects – see Dović and Helgason (2016, 46) on Francesco Petrarca in this respect. One of the possible sources of this link is the possibility of immortality for wor­ thy Romans which Cicero steadfastly promoted around the time the future Au­ gustus was born (see Cole 2006, 533). In the last case, Hitler was appropriating for Nazis the biblical reference to the thousand­year reign of Jesus Christ and apostles (Rev. 20:4–7); on this connec­ tion see Cohn (1970, 125) and Hampel (1985, 101). For the immediate context of the original message, see Trompf (2000, 104). On the Nazi obsession with the word „eternal“, see Klemperer (1996, 150). The transition from the oral Torah to the written Mischna is a case in point (see Goldberg 1987, 206). The challenge mounted by Christian ideal of all­inclusion against Jewish rheto­ ric of identity preservation was arguably one of the bigger steps in this direction (Assmann 2000, 30). In Quran, the totality claim is placed directly in the text (Quran 16:89, see the discussion in Boisliveau (2011, 165). The difference between context­free, monological prophetic oratory and context­based, dialogical conversational oratory was already familiar to Cicero (Remer 2008, 188). The backlash against the attempts to introduce the recitation of a slogan penned by the current president of Brasil Jair Bolosnaro in Brasilian schools shows that even fragile democracies could successfully resist canonization of their leaders’ texts (Philips 2019). For the general perspective, see Gutierrez and Larson (1994, 22–36). The difference between a principal (“someone whose position is established by the words that are spoken”) and an animator (“the talking machine, a body en­ gaged in acoustic activity”) is outlined by Goffmann (1981, 144). Admittedly, this distinction, while still fully accurate for describing the Goddess speaking through a philosopher’s lips in Parmenide’s The Way of Truth (sixth century BC), is a bit simplistic for the era of text­based canonization: not only principal is conceivable beyond the confines of naïve anthropomorphous materialism, but also animator could have very different relations to the canonic text, as long as the latter can certify his existence and also confirm the uniquely capability of verbalizing the principal’s informational flow. Among other things, this risk­hedging explains canonization of mediocre texts and deification of failed prophets (Schäfer 2000, 10). “An Icon is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue of charac­ ters of his own, and which it possesses, just the same, whether any such object really exists or not. /…/ A Symbol is a sign which refers to the Object that it de­ notes by virtue of a law, usually an association of general ideas, which operates to cause the Symbol to be interpreted as referring to that Object. /…/ An Index is a sign which refers to the Object that it denotes by virtue or really affected by that object” (Peirce 1903, 102–104). On the iconographical and narrative versions of the strategy, see Hille (2010, 48), Bonnell (1997, 145) and Hennig (1995, 363). In Soviet Russia, this process was well underway even before Stalin’s ascension to power (Bonnel 1997, 142; Coquin 1989, 227–228). Perceptive observers regarded this “seemingly unbridgeable” gap as the essence of totalitarianism (Fromm 1936, 121, 130).

Deification, canonization, random signaling  197

͡

198  Kirill Postoutenko

͡

Deification, canonization, random signaling  199

62 63

64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71

72

73

74

Maksimenkov 2005, 422–423; RGASPI, 558­11­717, l. 75; RGASPI, 558­11­698, l. 30; Adibekov and Anderson 2001, 70), and the letters of Mrs. von Heyden­Plötz, Adolf Ortmann and Julie Oesterle to Hitler from March 3, 1934, January 30, 1936 and March 3, 1938 respectively (RGVA, 1355­1­32, l. 137, 33; BaH, 151). See Andreeva’s letter to Stalin from July 1, 1936 (RGASPI, 558­11­697, l. 40–41). See the letters of Rudi Grün, Marie Reichert, Ralph Felgentraeger, Ida Fiebig, Susanne Hesse, François Jullier, Oskar Keller, Johanna Gräfin Brockdorff­ Ahlefeldt, Oskar Jankowski, Elisabeth Eggenberg, Gustav Brandl, Kathie Eck­ ert, Frau Dr. W. B, and Frau A. addressed to Hitler respectively on March 3 and April 19, 1933; February 2, März 1, April 14 and July 18, 1934; March 3, and October 3, 1935; January 1, February 2 and 27, October 6 and November 10, 1938; and April 10, 1944 (RGVA, 1355k­1­8, l.67, 1355k, 1­13, l. 97, BaH, 170, 159; RGVA, 1355k­1­12, l. 226; 1355k­1­12, l. 114; 1355k­1­19, l. 156­156ob; 1355k­4­14, l. 175; BaH, 228; 1355k­2­6, l. 141; 1355k­4­14, l. 46; Ebeling et al. 2011, 123; RGVA, 1355k­2­6, l. 103; LaAH, 87), and the letter addressed to Stalin by Vera Pridvor­ ova, Nestor Lakoba, Saak Ter­Gabrielian, Mikhail Chudov and Lev Shaumian in May­July 1936 (Maksimenkov 2005, 421–422; RGASPI, 558­11­761, l. 21­27; 558­ 11­818, l. 5, 6; 558­11­831, l. 22–26). See Stalin’s increasingly testy exchanges with F. Bogatyrev and P. Tchernukha in 1928–1930 (RGASPI, 558­11­713, l. 30; RGASPI, 558­11­825, l. 5–13). Apparently, Stalin was quite pleased with his self­canonizing rhetoric: having forwarded his letter to Lenin’s sister, a well­known Bolshevik Maria Ulyanova, he also saw to its publication, with slight alterations, in his Collected Works. On the oratorical properties of Hitler’s writing style, see Lange (1968, 146). On the tradition of metonymical canonization by means of likening respective texts to the Bible, see Lim (2017, 18–19). ͡ akov (1953, 99); Тi͡ urin (2007, 41); Lomb (2018, 84), and also the mid­1936 See Treti letter of the „old man“ S. Kirillovskii to the Government (RGASPI, 17­120­232. l, 55–57). See the letter addressed by Mikhail I. Kalinin to Stalin in July 1936 (RGASPI, 78­1­666, l. 101). On the significance of this practice in divination and totalitarian rituals, see respectively Canetti (1960, 7), Zeitlyn (2001, 226–227); Wintrobe (1998, 67), and Devlin (2012, 97). On the similar practice in Nicolae Ceaușescu’ Romania, see MM. Needless to say, the general practice of addressing the future by means of time capsules was not limited to personality cults – see Reingold (2016) and Brenna (2021, forthcoming). In any case, Hitler chose to make of it a present to his longtime sponsor Helen Bechstein (Hammer 1956, 162–163). This slightly unusual favor was part of the thoroughly planned strategy of dispensing indexical signs of the leaders’ bodily presence in communication which included, among other things, autograms and personally signed copies of Mein Kampf (GMK, 406, 429–430; KdB, 140–141). Revealingly, the gift promptly took a center stage at the Great German Art Ex­ hibition and became a subject of the commemoratory movie depicting its pro­ duction (von der Wense 1993, 92). Already in 1933 the printed predecessors of the “invented original” were exhibited at book exhibition next to the most valuable German manuscripts (QMK, 418). Some overzealous admirers of the new canon even advocated the obligatory “exam in Constitution” – see, for instance, the letter of the engineer I. F. Krugov­ skoi to the Presidium of the Central Executive Committee from December 12, 1936 (GARF, 3316­38­79, l. 1–2).

200  Kirill Postoutenko ͡ ͡

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10 ‘We thank you, our beloved leader!’ The origins and evolution of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality Manuela Marin Nicolae Ceaușescu and the beginning of his cult of personality Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) was the head of Romania and RCP between March 1965 and December 1989. He was elected Secretary General of the party in March 1965, after the death of his predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu­ Dej. The first years of his leadership were marked by a promise of liber­ alization as he strove to present himself as an open­minded and reform­ ist leader. To this end, he signaled willingness to change for the better the situation in the country and replace the country’s blind subordination to the Soviet Union by openness toward the West (Deletant 1998, 146–149). His moment of glory was the public condemnation of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 22, 1968. The daring act of protest against the Soviet­backed military intervention brought him an extra pop­ ularity needed for laying the foundations for his cult. This action also sig­ naled placing nationalism at the core of Ceaușescu’s political program as he identified himself with “the Romanian way of building socialism” as op­ posed to the unified Soviet model. Furthermore, it underscored the right and duty of RCP to construct its own brand of socialism in accordance with the national interests of and internal conditions in Romania. Lastly, the party leadership decided to support clearly and openly Ceaușescu’s coura­ geous stand in order to prevent a Soviet­led military invasion and possible attempts to overthrow the national leader. An unanticipated consequence was the rising of Ceaușescu’s public profile at the expense of both RCP and its other leadership. While August 1968 made Nicolae Ceaușescu popular among Romanians and the Western world, it also signaled the end of liberalization and other political and economic reforms. With the so­called July Theses of 1971, the Romanian leader aimed to replace the economic incentives with mass mobi­ lization as well as political and ideological education. As a result, the people were to be mobilized by art and literature with a “firm political orientation” and draw their inspiration exclusively from the Romanian socialist reality.

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  219 Artistic creation was placed under the strict control of the Party (Preda 2017, 144–145). This marked the beginning of the regime’s nationalistic turn that transpired in the following years into several questionable positions. One of them argued that cultural developments in Romania anticipated or even surpassed those in the Western cultures, which rendered borrowing or import from the outside world superfluous. The exacerbated nationalism also led to reinterpretation of the national history now viewed as Roma­ nians’ ceaseless fight for unity and independence of their country (Verdery 1991, 167–301). Lastly, the new trend inscribed RCP and its supreme leader, Nicolae Ceaușescu, into the gallery of past Romanian rulers who helped forge the country’s brightest future (Drăgușanu 2002, 63–65). The end of the liberalization was also epitomized by the intensification of Ceaușescu’s cult of personality. In the years that followed August 1968, Ceaușescu managed to get rid of all his potential political rivals and staffed the main party and state decision­making bodies with his political allies and even members of his enlarged family, including his wife, youngest son, and several other relatives. Also, he increased his personal control over the party and state apparatus by assuming the top political posts, thus ending the short episode of collective leadership at the beginning of his tenure. In March 1974 he was officially invested as the first President of Romania at a ceremony that reminded a coronation ritual (Gabanyi 2000, 45). Besides, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s official titles included those of Secretary General of the RCP, President of the Council of State, Chairman of the Front of Socialist Unity and Democracy, Chairman of the Supreme Council for Economic and Social Development, Chairman of the National Defense Council, Su­ preme Commander of the Armed Forces, etc. (Shafir 1985, 80–81). This manipulated charismatization of the routine that placed Nicolae Ceaușescu in the position of the most powerful political figure in Romania found its ex­ pression in the development of the cult of personality that reached its peak during the 1980s (Shafir 1985, 80). While it reflected Ceaușescu’s unchallenged control over the party and state apparatus, the cult was also used to build a popular consensus for his leadership. Even more after August 1968, when the Romanian leader aban­ doned any attempt to reform the economic system and resorted again to the high rate of investments at the expense of consumption. This policy brought Romania to the brink of an economic collapse and threatened to increase public discontent toward his leadership. In response, the propaganda strove to transform Ceaușescu into a multi­faceted idol “to be obeyed, [into] an image which could mobilize the popular support which the regime goals and Ceaușescu’s personality could not produce” (Fisher 1981, 126–127). In fact, it manufactured several images and other representations of the leader which citizens could identify themselves with (Cioroianu 2005, 182–209, 36– 38, 182). These covered every aspect of his biography and political activity. Firstly, Ceaușescu came to be portrayed as the young revolutionary, a party veteran who joined the Communist Party and its struggle against the old

220  Manuela Marin regime at the age of 15. Accordingly, being elected the supreme leader of the party was the just reward for his lifelong dedication and hard work. The overstated results of his ambitious program for the socialist development earned him the distinction of being the architect of modern Romania. At the same time, Ceaușescu was portrayed as warden of national independence and unity, a ruler whose supreme concern was to defend the political existence of the country. Lastly, the Romanian leader proudly wore the mantle of the champion of world peace as he was presented to Romanians as their only hope for the survival in the world threatened by extinction by the arms race and an imminent nuclear war. As mentioned above, Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality experienced gradual development since August 1968. Consequently, the 1970s coincided not only with the consolidation of his personal power, but also with the establishment of the main features of his representations. Since Ceaușes­ cu’s 60th anniversary in January 1978 the adulatory materials flooded the mass media, and the official propaganda used every available opportunity to praise the Romanian leader. Another landmark in the development of Ceaușescu’s cult of personality was his 65th anniversary in 1983. By this time, besides transforming his birthday into a national holiday, the inten­ sification of his public adulation was also highlighted by several other de­ velopments. They included the extended media commemoration of certain episodes of his political biography, the reinterpretation of the RCP’s history to highlight Ceaușescu’s role, and the numerical increase and thematic di­ versification of the public activities designed to praise his personality and leadership (Marin 2016, 75–79). In what follows, I will analyze the gradual development of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s concurrent representation, focusing particularly on the role of nationalism in their formation.

Nicolae Ceaușescu as a young revolutionary Ceaușescu’s hagiography paid special attention to his youth. Born in a poor peasant family, he was forced to leave his native village for Bucharest, the Romanian capital, to earn a living. There, as the story goes, at the age of 15, he joined the ranks of the RCP and fought against social injustice and fascism that swept across Europe during the 1930s. Ceaușescu’s biography as young revolutionary was organized around several events, including his participation to the National Antifascist Committee, the lawsuit of Craiova (1934) and Brașov (1936), the detention period at Doftana prison, the mass demonstration of International Workers’ Day 1939, and the imprisonment between 1940 and 1944 (Marin 2016, 155–202). All these events were sub­ jected to a double mystification. They were supposed to raise the historical profile of the RCP. The political marginality of the party was triggered by its banning in April 1924 on the ground that it supported the demands of the Comintern for the return of Bessarabia, historically a Romanian prov­ ince, to the Soviet Union. The interdiction remained in force for the next 20

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  221 years (Deletant 1998, 9–40). The party propaganda distorted the historical reality by claiming that the Romanian authorities persecuted the RCP for its alleged patriotic activities. These aimed to protect the independence and unity of the state in front of the assault of fascist forces that gained momen­ tum with the establishment of the King Carol II’s authoritarian regime. At the same time, the events were used to embellish Ceaușescu’s revolutionary record as he was turned into one of a few party members and engaged in the patriotic struggle against the old regime (as his cult of personality in­ tensified, other RCP members were excluded from the official narrative). Since RCP lacked any popular support at that time, its alleged attempts to overcome the Romanian fascist government were nothing more than an ide­ ologically convenient fiction. The fantasy was meant to obfuscate not only the party’s insignificant role during the interwar period, but also its actual anti­nationalist stand back then. Ceaușescu’s alleged record as a young rev­ olutionary who distinguished himself in the course of the anti­fascist strug­ gle was propagandistic aimed to substantiating his leadership and boosting his nationalist credentials. The falsification of Ceaușescu’s political biography followed the same pattern. It placed the young Ceaușescu in the middle of several historically certified events, but in order to embellish his political performance certain inopportune details were omitted, some aspects of his activity were over­ rated, or he was even identified as the main organizer of the events in which he never even participated. Moreover, as the cult of personality developed, the published laudatory materials approached the main events of the inter­ war history of the RCP with the purpose of underlining the unquestionable leadership qualities of the future party and state leader. After it was outlawed, RCP created several legal organizations that gathered leftwing sympathizers, including some intellectuals. They func­ tioned as mouthpieces of its political ideas, provided help for its incarcer­ ated militants, and aimed to unite people under the anti­fascist slogans. One example was the National Antifascist Committee (NAC) created in June 1933. According to the official version, Nicolae Ceaușescu, aged 15, was invited to participate in one of the fragment: the committee’s meetings and even got elected to its leadership after making an outstanding, bold speech. After 1989, testimonies of the members of the NAC and other in­ terwar communist militants revealed that the young Ceaușescu had never taken part in any of the NCA’s meetings and thus could not be elected as one of its leaders. The episode was implanted into Ceaușescu’s political biography on the 40th anniversary of the NAC in 1973. As his cult of per­ sonality intensified, the press articles used to cover in great details the meeting, and even cited laudatory testimonies about the young Ceaușes­ cu’s speech and his subsequent election to the NAC’s leadership (Neagoe 1982, 20; Băran 1983, 12). The inclusion of this false episode in the Roma­ nian leader’s biography had two purposes. One was to place the future leader among other well­known Romanian leftwing militants and thus

222  Manuela Marin to raise his early political profile. The second was to confirm his nationalist credentials (along  with that of the RCP) as a fighter against fascist forces that endangered the independence and unity of the Romanian state. The year of 1933 was marked by numerous workers’ strikes as the global economic crises reached Romania. The Romanian authorities arrested the strike leaders in Bucharest (Grivița shop factories) and put them on public trial in Craiova (a city in the South part of the country) in 1934. As the strike leaders were also communists, the RCP decided to collect signatures in sup­ port of the liberation of its militants. According to the official narrative, Nicolae Ceaușescu, one of the few communists involved in the collection of the signatures, was sent to Craiova to present them to the judge. As a result, he and other militants were arrested and released shortly afterwards (S 19 June 1983, 2; Poenaru 1986, 6). While indeed the young Ceaușescu went to Craiova to present the lists and was subsequently arrested, he was in fact paid to do it and did not have any role in collecting the signatures (Betea 1995, 171). The articles in press omitted these details which could have shed an unfavorable light on the political activity of the future Romanian leader and extolled instead his courageous act of protesting against the injustice of the old regime. The first mentioning of the episode was in 1972 and contin­ ued during the 1970s. Accordingly, Nicolae Ceaușescu and other militants were nominated in the context of the arrests operated in Craiova in 1934. Moreover, the articles rightly identified Ceaușescu’s predecessor, Gheorghe Gheorghiu­Dej, as the strike leader at Grivița shop factories, and under­ scored his central position among those tried in Craiova. The intensifica­ tion of the Romanian leader’s cult of personality also influenced the official narrative regarding this event. As a result, the press materials omitted the names of the other militants joining Ceaușescu at the trial. By the second half of the 1980s they identified him as the only party delegate who gathered the signatures, presented them to Craiova, and was arrested for his daring feat. The names of Gheorghiu­Dej and other RCP’s leaders were also re­ moved from the official account of the events. Moreover, the significance of the trial was diminished as it was designed to push Ceaușescu’s revolu­ tionary credentials. The strikes at Grivița workshops and the lawsuit that followed were the iconic events in the RCP’s interwar history. They were to attest to its important political role in the atmosphere of cruel repressions caused by the communists’ actions against the old regime. The reinterpreta­ tion of Ceaușescu’s role in the Craiova lawsuit was meant not only to place him in the middle of one of the most important events of the interwar his­ tory of RCP, but also to certify his exceptional political potential (Marin 2016, 167–169). Another episode included in Ceaușescu’s revolutionary biography was his arrest in 1936. The trial that followed took place in Brașov between May and June 1936. The official version of the events identified Ceaușescu as the leader of the defendant communists. Moreover, his testimony was said to contain the courageous denunciation of the policies that failed to improve

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  223 the life of the workers and underlined the role of the RCP in fighting fas­ cism. But the episode that supposedly raised even more his public profile happened on the last days of the trial when Ceaușescu protested against the exclusion of a co­defendant who accused the police force of maltreat­ ment. As the result, Ceaușescu received an increased sentence allegedly on the ground of being “a very dangerous communist militant,” and sent to Doftana prison (Mușat 1986, 12; Purcaru 1986, 7; S 3 June 1986, 1). In re­ ality, Ceaușescu did not distinguish himself during the trial and his act of protest was childish and futile, as it not only failed to prevent the fulfillment of the court decision, but also brought him a supplementary punishment for the contempt of the court. Moreover, the exclusion was motivated by the fact that the accused was a Polish citizen and the court decided to send him to his native country for the trial (Roman 2008, 5). The first mentioning of the event appeared in 1974 and described briefly the events that led to Ceaușescu and the other communists’ arrest. A special attention was given to his act of protest against the unreasonable decision of the court to expel one of the defendants. During the 1980s the official version of the event underwent several significant changes meant to individualize Ceaușescu. Consequently, the press article omitted the names of other communists tried in Brașov with him and the whole narrative focused on his bold act of protest against the expulsion of an unnamed brother­in­arms. The exagger­ ation of Ceaușescu’s role in the lawsuit aimed once again to substantiate his exceptional political and leadership qualities (Marin 2016, 172–176). After the trial, Nicolae Ceaușescu was sent to Doftana prison where most of the communist militants served their sentences. There he not only met his predecessor and political protector Gheorghiu­Dej, but he also man­ aged to capitalize on the political symbolism attached to this prison. Af­ ter the RCP took power in 1948, Doftana was transformed into a museum that could testify to the supreme sacrifice made by the communists in their righteous struggle against the old (fascist) regime. Consequently, the whole mythology was created around Doftana. It became a place where the com­ munists shared and strengthened their political belief, improved their po­ litical knowledge, and openly resisted the extreme persecution in the name of their political creed (Muzeul Doftana 1960; Ardeleanu 1968; Matichescu 1979). Press articles mentioned Ceaușescu’s detention in Doftana for the first time in 1974 but they tended to focus on its significance in the RCP’s struggle against the old regime. After 1978 and in connection with the inten­ sification of the cult of personality, not only the existence of Gheorghiu­Dej and the other communists was disregarded, but Ceaușescu was proclaimed the informal leader of the communists in Doftana, taking full credit for the organization of political life in prison (Marin 2016, 178–180). In reality, the young Ceaușescu was an insignificant character who, along with other detainees, strove to gain attention and small favors from the real leader of the prison—Gheorghe Gheorghiu­Dej (Tismăneanu 2005, 81, 101, 104–105, 121–122, 164).

224  Manuela Marin After the end of his detention, Nicolae Ceaușescu supposedly distin­ guished himself again as the organizer of a huge workers’ rally on Interna­ tional Workers’ Day 1939 in Bucharest. Although the mass demonstration was organized by the Romanian authorities, the political work of the clan­ destine commission consisting of young Ceaușescu and other militants suc­ ceeded, according to the official narrative, in turning the whole event upside down. When passing by the balcony where the King stood to receive the greeting of the workers, the participants began to shout, to the dismay of the monarch, anti­fascist, patriotic slogans that also demanded release of the imprisoned communist militants (Matichescu 1974, 43–51). This actually could not have been further from the truth. The International Workers’ Day rally of 1939 was one of the biggest events of such kind organized in interwar Romania, and it was meant to demonstrate the popular support enjoyed by King Carol II and his regime. Neither RCP and nor Nicolae Ceaușescu could have organized the mass demonstration as they lacked the organiza­ tional power to gather thousands of people in the center of Bucharest and thus to contest the mobilization strategy devised by Carol II’s authoritarian regime. At the same time, the few surviving participants testified that young Ceaușescu was not even among the few communists who attended the rally, and who went there on their own initiative and not at his request (Câm­ peanu 2002, 35). The first mention came in 1974 on the 35th anniversary of the event. Besides stating the anti­fascist character of the mass rally, the published materials emphasized Ceaușescu’s important role in the activity of the RCP’s clandestine organizing commission, also naming its other com­ munist members. This situation changed during the 1980s as the cult of per­ sonality gained steam: now the official press passed over the very existence of the party commission and ascribed solely to Nicolae Ceaușescu—and sometimes to his wife—the feat of turning the International Workers’ Day rally into an anti­fascist action (Marin 2016, 182–191). To be sure, there were several reasons for including this event in the Romanian leader’s political bi­ ography. A workers’ mass demonstration on the International Workers’ Day was an ideologically convenient proof of Ceaușescu’s political and organiza­ tional skills. Since the rally on 1st of May 1939 was one of the iconic events of the RCP’s interwar history, it was practical to place young Ceaușescu in its midst to certify his leadership potential. Also, his so­called contribution to transforming the mass rally into an anti­fascist protest underlined his nationalist credentials and his early involvement in defending the national independence and unity of the Romanian state. Ceaușescu spent the war years (1940–1944) in prison, arrested for his con­ tribution to the reorganization of the party local structures, especially its youth organization. To embellish his credentials one more time, the laudatory materials published especially during the 1980s portrayed him as a natural leader of the party cells in prison successful in restructuring and otherwise improving the political education of other inmates. Again, Ceaușescu was shown to be the only party member revered by all other militants. In reality,

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  225 Gheorghe Gheorghiu­Dej was the unquestionable leader of the party prison cells and he, not Ceaușescu, commanded successfully the obedience of the other inmates (Marin 2016, 195–199). The end of World War II and the presence of the Red Army on the Roma­ nian territory since August 1944 tipped the political balance into the favor of RCP. The period between 1944 and 1965 in Ceaușescu’s biography con­ tained only brief mentions of the positions occupied in the party and state hierarchy as a part of his impeccable political career crowned by the legiti­ mizing election as the Secretary General of the RCP (S 23 January 1983, 6; S 29 January 1988, 3).

Nicolae Ceaușescu as the architect of modern Romania Nicolae Ceaușescu was also praised for his achievements as the party and state leader. His representation as architect of modern Romania essentially argued that he did not only direct the building of socialism in the country but also the process in itself was based on his ideas. At the same time, the party propaganda transformed him into a national father­like figure whose main concern was to ensure the welfare of the country and its people. In order to underline the exceptional features of his leadership, the prop­ aganda machine described the 9th RCP Congress that elected Ceaușescu the party leader as the founding moment of communist Romania. Conse­ quently, the way in which the celebration of the 9th Congress of the RCP evolved during its commemoration in 1970s–1980s testified to the grad­ ual development of his cult of personality. In 1975 the party press marked modestly the tenth anniversary of the congress by publishing several articles that ascribed socialist achievements to the party, its leadership, and only in the third instance to Ceaușescu as a person. All this dramatically changed after 1980: not only the celebrations became yearly, but also the number of articles dedicated to the event greatly increased. Besides underlining the founding significance of the 9th Congress of the RCP, the acclamations in press emphasized Nicolae Ceaușescu’s theoretical and practical contribu­ tion to the development of the socialist Romania, enthusiastically praising his achievements in industry, culture and education, the fast­paced urban­ ization, and the new course of country’s foreign policy started by the 9th Congress of the RCP and Ceaușescu election to the helm of the party. More­ over, during the 1980s, in stark contrast to the celebration of 1974, the press highlighted Ceaușescu’s invaluable contribution to the successful building of the Romanian socialism, relegating RCP to the modest role of organi­ zational and ideological framework enabling the leadership performance. Consequently, the party propaganda argued that the time of modern social­ ist Romania began in 1965, and proudly identified the elapsed period of time as “the Ceaușescu Era” or even “the Golden Age.” This superlative evalua­ tion was justified by the many accomplishments in the building of socialism that increased the industrial output, augmented the national income, and

226  Manuela Marin ensured a remarkable improvement in the life quality of the people (S 19 July 1975, 1, 5; S 14 March 1980, 1; S 9 July 1982; S 20 July 1983; S 18 July 1984, 1–3, 1, 5; S 13 July 1985, 1, 3, 3; S 22 July 1989, 2). Needless to say, the achievements were said to be made possible by Ceaușescu’s unique vision of building socialism. In fact, the recipe for success, labeled after its creator “the Ceaușescu doctrine,” argued that the general blueprint of the Marxism could only produce breakthroughs if adapted to national conditions (S 24 January 1978, 1). The duty of the Party and its leadership was to consider the national priorities and the well­being of the people above everything else. These ideas were embedded in Ceaușescu’s theoretical formula of the multi-developed socialist society. The multi­ developed society as the Romanian leader envisioned it was an intermediary phase in which the main mech­ anisms of socialism were perfected according to the national conditions, preparing Romania’s transition to the bright communist future (Programul PCR 1975). Besides identifying Ceaușescu as the creator of the Romanian brand of socialism, Romanian press praised his direct involvement and active partic­ ipation in implementing it. This narrative developed around the two main types of actions that became representative for Ceaușescu’s leadership: his presence at construction sites of the most important edifices, and the so­ called working visits. The press included pictures of the Romanian leader at the building ceremonies where he poured the first concrete “with the en­ ergetic gesture of the builder […] and with the traditional tool of the ma­ son” (S 23 June 1979, 3) at the foundation of important economic units and edifices, or signed the parchment later inserted into a stainless steel cylin­ der and buried at the base of official buildings such as the Casa Republicii1 (The House of the Republic). Both kinds of actions were meant to identify Nicolae Ceaușescu as the head of the construction works and the builder of what were to become the epitomes of the country’s socialist development (Mocănescu 2007, 67–68; Marin 2016, 85–86). His active involvement was re­ affirmed by the multiple visits to the construction sites and the joint search for technical solutions with workers and superiors alike. A common sight was Ceaușescu cutting the inaugural ribbon of the edifices which construc­ tion he had supervised (S 20 December 1979, 1; S 27 May 1984, 2). Ceaușescu’s active involvement in implementing the blueprint of the Romanian socialism was also highlighted by his so­called working visits. Identified by the official press as an “ample dialogue with the makers of the materials, spiritual goods and values” (S 17 January 1988, 1), they were in fact the pre­arranged visits to the different industrial and agricultural units. The visits involved significant efforts on behalf of the hosts: Ceaușescu and other party­state leaders were normally welcomed with ample decoration and the traditional bread and wine while cheering crowds chanted slogans, carried placards and official portraits of the guests. Consequently, the party leaders verified to what extent the economic unit hosting them fulfilled its production quota, personally tested the quality of the products, inquired

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  227 about the problems encountered in the production cycle, and offered “guide­ lines” about how they should have been solved. Before August 1968 the press articles described working visits as collective efforts, mentioning both Nico­ lae Ceaușescu and other party and state leaders. After the denunciation of the Warsaw Pact’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, the journalist commentaries on the working visits started to prioritize Ceaușescu among the other partic­ ipants of the working visits. This also reflected the changes in the organiza­ tional framework of the events that gradually began to focus on Ceaușescu’s person and his actions. Consequently, since 1970 the newspapers usually titled their articles about working visits as “The working visit of comrade Nicolae Ceaușescu” (S, 15 September 1972, 3), only briefly invoking other party and state leaders in the main body of the texts. The slogans chanted or displayed on banners, also marked a radical departure from the period prior to August 1968. The unspecified greetings to “beloved rulers of our party and state” (S 13 August 1966, 1) gave way to the personalized acclamations such as “Nicolae Ceaușescu, the ruler of our beloved party” (S 14 July 1969, 1, 3–4), or “the most beloved son of our working class” (S 12 July 1969, 1, 3). The increasing identification of the Party’s public image with the figure of its leader after August 1968 was also evident in the content of the slogans. Thus, the development of the cult of personality resulted in the replacement of the standard slogans, including “Long live the RCP,” “Long live the RCP and its Central Committee” with the ones that associated Nicolae Ceaușescu with the RCP and identified him—and not the Party—as the primary source of building the Romanian version of socialism. As a result, the most popu­ lar slogans were “Ceaușescu­RCP!”, “Ceaușescu­beloved son of the people and the party!”, “Ceaușescu heroism, Romania communism!”, “For peace and progress, Ceaușescu reelected at the 11th Congress!”. The slogans also signaled the nationalist turn of the Romanian regime as they increasingly associated Ceaușescu with the name of the country (“Ceaușescu­Romania, our esteem and pride!”, “Ceaușescu­Romania!”) and underlined his special connection with the Romanian people (“Ceaușescu—the fighter for peace and the people!”, “Ceaușescu and the people!”) (Marin 2016, 220–228). The development of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality signaled not only the symbolical appropriation of the role of the RCP as the creator of the socialist order, but also its position as the distributor of the national welfare. In the socialist­type system, the Party­state centralized the national income and allocated it “rationally” according to the priorities of the eco­ nomic plans. This meant that the Party divided the national income between the investment and the consumption estimates and thus decided on financ­ ing programs designed for improving people’s lives. As the cult of personal­ ity intensified after 1978, Ceaușescu and not the RCP was identified as the source of the people’s welfare. Consequently, he became the fatherly leader who took care of his people and their wellbeing. The official media pub­ lished statistics and electoral leaflets that described the unprecedented de­ velopment of the country and the increased quality of life since Ceaușescu’s

228  Manuela Marin election as the party leader (S 1 March 1980, 1; S 7 July 1982, 3; S 4 July 1985, 3; S 20 February 1985, 3). Another means of identifying the Romanian leader as the source of general welfare was his ambitious program of the urbanization of the entire country. The official articles included statistics, graphics, and photographs that spoke about new modern cities that flour­ ished after 1965 and changed the life of their inhabitants for the better. The change was supposedly so beneficial that Nicolae Ceaușescu decided that all Romanian citizens, including those living in the villages should enjoy the same life standards. As the result, the Romanian press described in de­ tail how the life in the villages changed due to their urban transformation and how people were grateful to the party leader for his initiative. Labeled “the systematization of the villages,” the initiative resulted, in fact, in the destruction of many Romanian rural communities. The rich historical and cultural heritage of the rural settlements was doomed to disappear. The Ro­ manian press also underlined Ceaușescu’s direct involvement in ensuring the best life conditions for the people. It covered regularly his working vis­ its to markets and food stores where he personally checked the availability and quality of the products, and controlled the local officials’ implemen­ tation of the regulations concerning the retail of consumer goods. If any problems appeared during these visits, Ceaușescu promptly intervened to alleviate them and even reprimanded on the spot the officials for failing to take the necessary measures to improve the supply of goods to the popu­ lation (Marin 2016, 241–252). Moreover, his image as fatherly leader was strengthened even more by his birth support policy: the Romanian media not only pictured Ceaușescu surrounded by or hugging happy children on different occasions, but also identified all the measures for child and fam­ ily protection as being his initiative (Marin 2016, 254–263). In reality, ban­ ning abortion and other measures of fertility control resulted in the death of many women who were forced to resort to illegal abortions, as well as in numerous abandoned children who lived in horrible conditions in orphan­ ages (Gligman 1998).

Nicolae Ceaușescu as the champion of world peace The Romanian propaganda enriched Ceaușescu’s cult of personality with the theme of his involvement in defense of the world peace. The choice was ideologically sound as the socialist states portrayed themselves as peace­lov­ ing forces that were to fight the capitalist warmongers. At the same time, the general context of the Cold War and the worsening of the relations between the two superpowers at the beginning of the 1980s created an ideal setting for Ceaușescu to style himself as the guarantor of the world peace. While this policy was supposedly aimed at external audiences, it also served a specific domestic purpose, conveying to Romanians the image of Ceaușescu as a great world leader. To that end, the party propaganda tirelessly stressed his theoretical contribution to the peace process and enumerated his initiatives

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  229 for defending the peace on every possible occasion. In reality, although the Romanian initiatives made it to the international public, they lacked the im­ pact the official media ascribed to them, and were falling short of propelling the Romanian leader to the status of a world peace champion. Ceaușescu’s writings stressed that ensuring the world peace depended on disarmament. This would put an end to the arms race and to wasting important resources for supporting it, eliminate the means to threaten the states’ security, and stimulate the peaceful resolution of the conflicts be­ tween them. As the result, disarmament would encourage the détente in the inter­states relations and lay the foundations for the new international political order where all states, regardless of their size, political, military, or economic power would enjoy equal rights and participation and have an equal say on international matters. At the same time, stopping the arm race would cancel the Cold War division of the world, erase all the economic barriers, and eventually institute a new international economic order. In this new economic order, as Ceaușescu envisaged it, the disarmament would save important resources that could be used for supporting the developing countries (Marin 2016, 283–323). In order to create Nicolae Ceaușescu’s image as champion of world peace, the Romanian press quoted and, in some cases, reproduced in full his speeches or interviews given on different national or international occasions. While they directly identified him as the source of the ideas underlying the Roma­ nian peace policy, their contribution to the cult of personality depended on how the party propaganda instrumentalized them. Ceaușescu’s ideas about defending the world peace were allegedly discussed in national and interna­ tional conferences. His texts on the subject were gathered in edited volumes of speeches that were translated into the German and Hungarian (for the main national minorities in Romania) and also in English, French, Span­ ish, Italian, etc. for an international public. Discussing Ceaușescu’s works published abroad, the press accentuated their endorsement by important political leaders and cultural personalities of the host countries, and quoted laudatory comments at length. The number of the volumes gradually in­ creased since 1970s to match the development of Ceaușescu’s cult of person­ ality (Marin 2016, 323–327). The escalation of the Cold War in Europe during the so­called Euromis­ sile crisis and other international initiatives for peace, including the In­ ternational Year of Peace (1986), were marked in Romania by huge mass campaigns meant to praise Ceaușescu’s contribution to the world peace. They were organized all over the country at Ceaușescu’s initiative and they took the form of rallies sometimes preceded by a march for peace. During the demonstrations and marches, the participants carried “the portraits of the beloved son of our socialist nation, the Secretary General of the Party, Nicolae Ceaușescu,” state and party flags, and shouted slogans that pointed out Ceaușescu’s contribution to the peace policy such as Ceaușescu-Peace!, Ceaușescu-Disarmament!, Ceaușescu-Romania/Peace and Friendship!,

230  Manuela Marin Romania-Ceaușescu-Peace!, Ceaușescu and the people, peace of the world, the future!, etc. (S 3 November–2 December 1981; S 8 June–27 July 1982; S 24 September–13 November 1983; S 12 June–7 July 1985). In order to show Romanians that their leader was an important political personality with a remarkable contribution to the international affairs, the official press during the 1980s interpreted Nicolae Ceaușescu’s official con­ tacts with foreign leaders as crucial contributions to “the cause of peace, independence and international collaboration” (S 24 April 1982, 6). Arti­ cles published abroad or testimonies of foreign political leaders who spoke highly of Ceaușescu’s peace policy were quoted at length. Awards and di­ plomas were presented to the Romanian leader during the 1970s and 1980s “for his great contribution to promoting peace” (România Literară 1979, 2), by allegedly important institutions in the field of international relations, enhanced his image as champion of world peace. Although Romanian initi­ atives for safeguarding the world peace reached an international audience, their impact was highly exaggerated by the national media. In fact, the re­ gime paid significant amounts of money for the laudatory coverage of the Romanian leader in foreign press. Moreover, the personalities who offered praise to Ceaușescu, as well as the organizations that presented him diplo­ mas and other prizes were, in most cases, virtually unknown in their own countries or internationally (Marin 2016, 327–330, 339–357, 87–105). None­ theless, such endorsements played important role in projecting Ceaușescu’s cult of personality and his image as champion of world peace upon Roma­ nian audiences.

Nicolae Ceaușescu as the warden of national unity and independence Nicolae Ceaușescu’s image as a warden of national unity and independence reflected the nationalist turn of the Romanian regime and gained substance after his public denunciation of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslova­ kia in August 1968. This resulted in the portrayal of the RCP and its leader as defenders of national unity and independence—first from the old fascist regime and later from the promoters of the uniform Soviet model who tried to block “the Romanian way of building socialism.” The portrait painted by the Romanian media in this conjunction included Ceaușescu’s activ­ ities both before and after his election as Party leader in 1965. As shown above, Ceaușescu’s cult of personality was able to capitalize on his activ­ ity as young militant during the interwar period, when his personal history was creatively inscribed into the history of RCP. As the Romanian leader became “the beloved son of the nation,” the press materials stopped men­ tioning other communist activists and elevated the young Ceaușescu to the position of an unofficial leader successfully engaged in the RCP’s struggle to defend Romania’s national independence against the old fascist regime.

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  231 Consequently, he became the major character in the Party’s narrative about its pre­war anti­fascist activities, including the 1939 International Workers’ Day rally. Ceaușescu’s contribution to securing the national independence was also duly listed as a proof of his leadership activity. The Romanian press also highlighted the remarkable successes in industrialization, urbanization, development of agriculture, and quality of life during “the Ceaușescu Era.” This successful modernization of the country was claimed to be the conse­ quence of the Party leader’s commitment to building socialism according to the specific conditions that existed in Romania. The advancement of the na­ tional economy, as the argument continued, was essential for strengthening the state’s capacity to act as an independent actor on the international scene, and for providing the leadership in making independence decisions accord­ ing to the interests of the home country (Marin 2014, 429–431). The narrative about the national unity also contributed to the remaking of history in a nationalist guise: no stone was left unturned to identify historical personalities whose political activity could be reinterpreted in the sense of the national unity paradigm. This led to the 1980 pompous celebration of 2050 years since the creation of the “first centralized and unitary Dacian state” under King Burebista. Besides Burebista, the reigns of Mihai Viteazu and Alexandru Ioan Cuza were extolled for their contribution to uniting Ro­ manians living previously in separate provinces. As they finally managed to merge into one independent state on December 1, 1918, the RCP, created in May 1921, supposedly struggled for defending the newly created Romania against the threat posed by the Fascist allies of the Old Regime. The estab­ lishment of the Communist regime in 1948 was presented as the pinnacle of the struggle for national unity as the people united around the RCP and its program for the socialist modernization of the country. This redefinition of national unity enriched Ceaușescu’s cult of personal­ ity. On the one side, it suggested the need for all Romanians to gather around their supreme leader as his (grossly overstated) achievements changed the face of the country and improved people’s lives. On the other side, the unity of action binding Ceaușescu with the Romanian people was considered an essential requirement for moving toward the communist future (Marin 2014, 431–432). At the same time, details of Ceaușescu’s biography were used to stress his predestination as the warden of national unity. The future Ro­ manian leader was born on January 26, 1918 in the village of Scornicești, Olt County. It did not escape Ceaușescu’s official biographers that in the same 1918 all Romanians united in one independent state. As for January 26, it was close to January 24 when, back in 1859, Alexandru Ioan Cuza united two of the Romanian historical provinces (Hamelet 1971, 376–377). The de­ velopment of the cult of personality pushed the idea of Ceaușescu’s predes­ tination for guarding of national unity even more strongly. Scornicești was the place of origin of four captains and other “courageous soldiers” of Mi­ hai Viteazu’s army, and thus it was considered likely that one of Ceaușescu’s

232  Manuela Marin ancestors “has fought with a gun in his hand for the ideals of Union, of independence” (Purcaru, 5). Accordingly, the paintings reproduced on the pages of Romanian offi­ cial publications associated Nicolae Ceaușescu with some of the abovemen­ tioned historical personalities. In Constantin Piliuta’s well­known painting The First President, Ceaușescu is depicted standing in front of the tribune wearing the scepter, the sash and also the medal “The Star of the Republic.” Behind him stand several historical leaders of Romania including Bureb­ ista, Mircea cel Batrân, Ștefan cel Mare, Mihai Viteazu, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and Nicolae Bălcescu. This selection was not accidental as they were precisely the very statesmen whose biographies were rewritten to stress their contribution to independence and unity. The organization of the painting suggests that Ceaușescu’s place was among the most important Romanian political leaders, and that his commitment to defending the country’s main values had already secured him a place in the Romanian national pantheon (Drăguşanu 2002, 148; Mocănescu 2010, 432–433).

Conclusion Protests against Ceaușescu and his regime began in December 1989 in the main cities of Romania. People shouted anti­communist slogans, forced their entrance in the party and state buildings and directed their anger against Ceaușescu’s image. His portraits that adorned official offices were taken down from the walls, trampled upon, and set on fire by protestors in a symbolical cleansing of the public spaces from any communist remains. The identification of Nicolae Ceaușescu with the Romanian communist re­ gime was the consequence of his cult of personality. My paper shows that the cult of personality developed gradually beginning with August 1968 and reached its peaks during the 1980s when Ceaușescu’s dominance over the Party and state apparatus became virtually unchallengeable. The four im­ ages of the Romanian leader created by the official propaganda identified his person as being the source of the economic and political performance of the regime and thus, of its failures. As the gap between the gray reality and false images of socialist prosperity widened, the cult of personality, instead of commanding popular support, only paved the way to the end of Ceaușes­ cu’s regime.

Note

Nicolae Ceaușescu’s cult of personality  233

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234  Manuela Marin Mocănescu, Alice. 2010. “Practicing Immortality: Schemes for Conquering Time during Ceausescu Era.” Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism 10: 426–427. Mușat, Mircea. 1986. “50 de ani de la procesul militanţilor comunişti şi antifascişti de la Braşov” [50 Years since the Trial of Communist and Anti­fascist Militants in Brașov]. România Literară, 5: 12. Muzeul Doftana. [Doftana Museum]. 1960. Bucharest: Editura Politică. Preda, Caterina. 2017. Art and Politics under Modern Dictatorships: A Comparison of Chile and Romania. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Programul PCR de făurire a societăţii socialiste multilateral dezvoltate şi înaintare a României spre communism [Program of RCP for the Building of the Multilaterally Developed Socialist Society and Romania’s Advancement toward Communism]. 1975. Bucharest: Editura Politică. Purcaru, Ilie. 1978. “La Scorniceşti, în satul natal al tovarăşului Nicolae Ceauşescu. Conducător, sătean şi tovarăş, aşa cum îl ştim spre bucuria şi spre mândria noas­ tră” [In Scorniceşti, in the Native Village of the Comrade Nicolae Ceauşescu: Leader, Villager and Comrade, as We Know Him to Our Joy and Pride]. Flacăra, 19 January 1978, 5. Purcaru, Ilie. 1986. “Un tânăr curajos vorbea în numele viitorului” [A Brave Young Man Spoke in the Name of the Future]. Flacăra, 23 May 1986, 7. Roman jr., Toma. 2008. “Cum a fost arestat în '36 Nicolae Ceauşescu” [How Nicolae Ceaușescu was Arrested in '36]. Jurnalul Naţional, 28 May 2008, 5. România Literară. 1979. “Înalta preţuire” [High Value]. 26 July 1979, 2. Verdery, Katherine. 1991. National Ideology under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Berkeley: University of California Press. Shafir, Michael. 1995. Romania. Politics, Economics and Society. Boulder, CO: Lynne Press. Tismăneanu, Vladimir. 2005. Stalinism pentru eternitate. O istorie politică a comunismului românesc [Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism]. Iaşi: Polirom.

11 Embodied practices of leadership The case of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Charlotte Joppien In Turkey, politics is done by touching the people. This is different to where you come from, but here you are shaking hands, you are hugging, you are kissing and while they are kissing you, you pat their back. We cannot do such a distant, official, remote or plain politics as in your place. Our philosophy is to touch people’s confidence and their hearts. […] It is indispensable that you touch them. You do not give much importance to that, but here we do. For example, shaking hands is not enough, you need to hug us. Hugging is not enough, you kiss each other. Kissing is not enough, you cuddle each other and so on; our task here is much more difficult than where you come from (Interview with mayor of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), May 6, 2011, quoted in Joppien 2018, 83)

It is not only in Turkey that the bodies of politicians play an important role as tools for relating to the people and transmitting a political mes­ sage. However, they are generally overlooked as an analytical category. Following Kantorowicz’s idea of the king’s two bodies, I assume that po­ litical representatives also have two bodies, a physical one, and a symbolic­ representative one (Kantorowicz 1990). In what follows, I analyze how these two bodies are attuned in the realm of political practice and in connection to ‘stage’ politics. The ‘staging’ of politics is no invention of our times. On the contrary, it has been a vital aspect of political practice since ancient times (Flaig 2003, and virtually all chapters in this volume). Political representation embodies (as e.g. Hobbe’s Leviathan) the omnipresent state and brings it into exist­ ence (Gürez 2007). Louis XIV has expressed this quite impressively by his dictum ‘L’etat, c’est moi’. Although the personification of political power becomes most obvious in monarchic or totalitarian systems, it can also be observed in other political systems (including parliamentary democra­ cies) (Ennker and Hein­Kircher 2010; Joppien 2014; Morrell and Hartley 2006). As a result, the body is both a tool of representation and a projection screen. The body is thus understood to express power, but also to locate the ruler within a certain socio­cultural context and express certain values (strength, honour, kindness etc.). By minding these aspects, the ruler takes

236  Charlotte Joppien on different roles in the eyes of the public, such as a father of the state and the nation, a military guarantor of security and peace or as a charismatic, if not sacred personality (Delaney 1995; Gencer 2012; Tikhomirov 2017). In this framework, the article asks how the staging of the physical body creates the political one and what role elements such as clothing, gestures and body language play. The Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is increasingly omnipresent in Turkish media and in public space, a phenomenon described as Turkey’s Erdoğan gerçeği (Erdoğan reality). With regard to the 100th anniversary of the Turkish Republic in 2023, the ruling party AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Justice and Development Party) attempts to establish new national narratives and – in competition with the ‘eternal leader’ Mustafa Kemal Atatürk – to build up Erdoğan as the country’s new hero. This is done on the one hand by emphasizing his exceptionalism, his heroism and his historic greatness, and, on the other hand, by weaving narratives on the subject of internal and external enemies. This chapter analyzes the bodily aspects of political practice by the exam­ ple of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. It commences with some theoretical consid­ erations on the staging of politics and the body’s role in it. It then provides an overview of Erdoğan’s use of body language in relation to his biography. In what follows, other political leaders of the past are presented and it is demonstrated that every bodily comportment unfolds against the example of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the ‘ultimate leader’. More generally, I also dwell on the use of body language which situates political leaders in a concrete socio­cultural milieu as well as with respect to the Black Turk­White Turk divide. In addition, I explore Erdoğan’s ‘Islamic’ body language against the background of today’s Turkey’s claim to a leadership role in Sunni Islam. President Erdoğan appears in the media on a daily basis, and is subject to a large number of biographical and/or psychological publications, judging his character as democratic or dictatorial, or asking ‘how he became, who he is’ (Akyol 2016; Çakır and Sakallı 2014; Görener and Ucal 2013; Ohm 2015), research analyzing his performative dimension and visual representa­ tion is lacking. This is even more surprising, given that with regard to these aspects of rule intricate analysis on Turkey’s first president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk does exist. Atatürk has, even if not without challenges, the role of a symbol of the Turkish nation, a founding father, a leading teacher, a vision­ ary, a war hero and an eternal leader.1 Some authors go as far as arguing that Kemalism, the political ideology based on him, is a civil religion with religious symbols being replaced by civil ones, and labelling Atatürk’s mau­ soleum, Anıtkabir, as the ‘holy shrine’ of Kemalism (Bozdoğan and Kasaba 1997; Navaro­Yashin 2002; Özyürek 2004; Plaggenborg 2012). Whereas the logic of a text is based on arguments, the logic of an image is based on associations. Thus taking a visual angle may afford us a more profound knowledge about the functioning (and use!) of images in political contexts, the symbolic forms of political practice and the emotional impact

Embodied practices of leadership  237 of images on recipients. Whereas every observer of an image looks at it with her/his own eyes, we also see as a ‘social collective’. As social norms and values, established patterns of interaction as well as political cultures are elements of the (invisible) pedigree of an image, any analysis needs to situate an image in historic and social strata. Methodologically, this chapter argues that understanding images as mere ‘illustration’, is tantamount to underestimating their impact on us. Central to this approach was the work of the Hamburg art historian Erwin Panof­ sky, who split images into single elements (symbols) in order to analyze the whole picture iconographically (Panofsky 1978; Panofsky 1985, 85–97) and thus analytically combined symbols with their socio­cultural and political background. The following analysis is thus situated in the field of politi­ cal iconography, that is the analysis of the reproduction of political power through still images, moving images and statues (Diers 1997; Fleckner et al. 2011). It should be mentioned that any study of this length may only catch a glimpse of the phenomenon and will in any case leave important aspects, such as the production process of images or a comprehensive look at their reception, out.

Embodied practices of leadership – bodily comportment as an analytical category Political leadership is constructed and occurs in and through the expressive and experiencing bodies (Ropo et al. 2013). As Küpers defines: “Bodily gestures and postures, facial mimic, tones of voice, and other forms of expression are part of an embodied practicing of leadership, which also include aesthetic sensibilities and competencies, as well as felt meaning” (Küpers 2013, 336). In addition to most academics, practitioners such as political spin doctors and consultants are well aware of the fact that bodily aspects help politicians to convince the audience, with citizens and voters judging the quality and per­ suasive power of such performances. The body is associated with possible action and/or character traits and expressive ‘virtues’ (decisiveness, patriot­ ism, honour, respect, etc.) by the observer. Therefore, interaction between politicians and ordinary people is a process of interpretation and assumed meaning. These perceptions are socio­culturally and historically influenced as well as endowed with a gender dimension. Whereas ceremony and ritual predetermine political staging, every politician develops his or her personal variations on the theme. Thus, clothing, jewellery, hairstyle, cosmetics and even perfume are ways of expressing the body in culture­specific, ritualized ways (Küpers 2013, 339). As body language in general, and gestures in particular are in focus here, they are briefly introduced as analytical categories. Gestures are, as Young describes them, a “peak of body motion” (Young 2000, 81). Similarly, Ken­ don defines gestures as (more or less) voluntary movements of the body ex­ pressing thought or feeling. In most cases, a strong relation between speech

238  Charlotte Joppien and gesture exists. He differentiates between ‘quotable gestures’ which he calls emblems and which have abstract but stable meanings and illustrators which are more spontaneous movements of the hand. In a similar vein, he notes that it is impossible to always distinguish between what is manipula­ tive or spontaneous gesturing. Further he points to the fact that our ability to read gestures is determined by our cultural knowledge as many gestures are culture­specific (Kendon 1992). In addition, gesturing is influenced by class background and upbringing, as well as relations of power. With regard to habitus, Bordieu explores how body language and gesturing distinguish between different members of society. While they are experienced individ­ ually, they also unfold as collective phenomena of belonging (or not). The example of the female Turkish prime minister Tansu Ҫiller shows that gen­ der is also an important influence. She had to employ ‘male gesturing’ to be accepted as prime minister, as women in Turkish politics are rare and no female political gesturing repertoire existed (Arat 1998). Kendon rightly concludes that gesturing is “adjusted according to the setting, social circumstance, and micro-organization of any given occasion of interaction” (1997, 117). Thus, any analysis needs to take these elements into consideration as well as the context, political culture and related events.

‘Boyun eğmedi’ – ‘He never ducked down’ Four main observations can be made with regard to Erdoğan’s staging of himself. First, it may be noted that he actively uses his body to transmit and stress his political message. Due to the importance of public image and bod­ ily conduct revealed at inner­AKP training, I suggest that Erdoğan’s body language is not an immediate expression of an emotional state, but rather the product of a concise political strategy. As part of fieldwork on Turkish municipal practice in 2013, I took part in the ‘AK Parti Siyasi Akademi’ (Political Academy), an eight­week train­ ing program for activists, members and interested citizens offered by local party branches. One particularly interesting lecture concerned the manner whereby AKP members should present themselves to the public (e.g., stand straight, smile and wear good clothing). Men should wear plain white (sig­ nalling self­respect) or blue shirts (signalling inner balance). Brown suits in particular should be avoided so as not to get lost in the shuffle. In little role plays the lecturer demonstrated how one should not behave in front of citizens or activists, displaying inattentive, disrespecting or neglectful body language. Most important, the speaker stressed, was tuning in to the other. This included being interested in what the counterpart was saying and im­ itating their body language, inflection and even breathing rhythm to create syncronization. Activists should communicate hope, and statements should not be too long, nor contain foreign vocabulary, but should be metaphor­ ical, e.g., through the use of sayings to avoid any association with elitism. All of the above demonstrates that attuning oneself to a local context is not

Embodied practices of leadership  239 something the AKP leaves to the talent of its activists. Instead, it has a tacti­ cal approach to the emotional aspects of everyday politics whereby activists are trained to orientate themselves even to the other’s body language and breathing rhythm (Joppien 2018). Furthermore, by the standardization of member comportment members come to embody the party, being the phys­ ical realization of an abstract political ideology. Secondly, it becomes obvious, that Erdoğan is exceptionally gifted with regard to transporting and underlining his political message by the use of body language and voice. Since his youth, Erdoğan stood out by his talent for recitation. With respect to his voice, a very good voice modulation with regard to amplitude and frequency is mentioned by ordinary observers and politicans alike. Thus initially he made only very little in the way of body movements to strengthen his personal appeal and political message. When looking simply at his national rulership, two periods of political content and staging may be stressed. The first period dates from 2001 (founding of the AKP and its coming to power in 2002) to 2011 (as a starting point of increased conflict), the second – from 2011 until today (with the referendum in 2017 as a preliminary end date for analysis). Whereas the first period was characterized by a rather guarded rhetoric and body language and more adjustment to the counterpart as well as a comprehensive use of the voice, Erdoğan has become a full­hearted authoritarian leader with a more con­ frontational rhetoric and body language after 2011. Thirdly, the degree of modesty in clothing is striking, particularly when compared to his current domicile, the Cumhurbaşkanlığı Sarayı, a palace with 40,000 square meters, around a 1,000 rooms and an estimated construc­ tion cost of 490 million Euros. The degree to which he keeps a lower­class clothing style that easily relates him to a population with provincial roots is remarkable. Furthermore, he also shows a chameleonic talent by adapting to the work clothes worn at the places he visits, e.g. at a railway company, at construction sites, etc. Fourthly, he uses his body language to (re­)situ­ ate himself in his past, or, to put it differently, to confirm that he has not changed despite many years in top power. Thus, whereas other politicians possibly try to distance themselves from their humble upbringing by change of clothing and body language, or by working on their accent, Erdoğan cul­ tivates and displays his humble upbringing in Istanbul’s Kasımpaşa working class neighbourhood. Apart from the four general observations made above, two main roles may be distinguished when analyzing how Erdoğan presents himself to the public: The first role is that of ‘the elderly statesman’ and caring father; the second – the impatient, hot­tempered authoritarian leader. The ‘stately wave’, performed at military receptions, at election rallies, when getting on or off a plane, may be described as a paternal wave conveying a positive, gracious underlying mood. It is performed with half open palms, a sym­ bol of openness and trustworthiness, pointing to the top and moving slowly in a reassuring way. In a manner similar to the hugging of young children

240  Charlotte Joppien and old women, the stately wave is a gesture expressing paternal concern, moral integrity and caring. Another way of greeting is by touching his heart with the right hand, often combined with a little nod of the head, a ges­ ture symbolizing respect and approval of the counterpart. These relate to an established social patronage practice, himaye, described by White as a “mobilizing bond among members of a community” resonating with Islamic principles of responsibility, generosity, obligation, hierarchy and social jus­ tice (White 2002, 75, 125). In short, Erdoğan uses his body to relate to the people. Examples include the frequent hugging of small children and elderly people, which is also reproduced frequently by AKP propaganda. In this way, he presents himself as a kind, paternal figure taking care of particu­ larly vulnerable figures, who may be deemed ‘unsexual’. The second role – as an authoritarian leader, is a counterpart to the stately wave mentioned before. He conveys this, for example, by a shooing gesture performed with rather closed palms below the waistline moving fast from one side to the other. It contains impatience and authoritarian­ ism. He uses it for citizens who ‘don’t behave properly’ or disapoint his expectations, e.g. by acting disrespectfully, smoking or such. Furthermore, Erdoğan has become well­known for his threatening gestures. By threaten­ ing, Erdoğan presents himself as a strong leader and a guarantee for sta­ bility, as a politician who is (also physically) ready to defend ‘his people’s’ needs. An intensifying use of a threatening body language may be observed in times of crisis, e.g. during the Gezi protests in 2013, but even more so after the coup attempt in 2016, and prior to the referendum in 2017. With regard to the political context of his bodily expressions, one may note that this is also a time of changing political culture and of a change from a (relatively) representative democracy to an authoritarian democracy. The use of threatening gestures increased parallel to the increasing authoritar­ ian character of Turkish politics. In the field of threatening gestures, one may distinguish between a more general threat and the threatening of a particular person/group of persons. An example for a more general threat dates from March 2017, prior to the referendum on a presidential system in Turkey, when Erdoğan accused Europe of mistreating Turkey and the Turkish people and warned that soon no European, no citizen of ‘the West’ would be safe. He claimed that Turkey was not a country with whose hon­ our Europe could play. By calling on Europe to respect democracy, human rights and basic freedoms, he made himself not only protector of Turkey, but of universal values as well. In terms of gesture, he expresses a more gen­ eral threat by a wagging forefinger. However, when threatening someone in particular, he raises his hand and makes a more precise pointing move­ ment with his finger as if that person were present, e.g., when addressing Turkey’s so­called internal and external enemies as the PKK, the Fethullah Gülen community, as well as other countries. Similar observations can be made with regard to Erdoğan’s body language on the international scene. Whereas in the early days in government he behaved politely, often with a

Embodied practices of leadership  241 body language oriented to his counterpart, he has become more aggressive, using an instructing forefinger, an accusing pointing finger or a clinched fist to make his point. For example, Erdoğan also used the pointing finger to address the Dutch government and accuse them of fascism when they did not allow AKP politicians to come to the Netherlands in support of the AKP’s yes­campaign prior to the referendum in 2017. In this context, he intensified his threat with a clenched fist when accusing German politicians of fascism, and referring to the victims of the NSU­murders. The ‘us’ vs. ‘them’ rhetoric of his speech corresponds with the fist, a clear symbol of aggression. The shaking of the fist might be interpreted as a first step to a fisticuffs. Similarly, Erdoğan used his finger when (symbolically) pointing at Angela Merkel with the question why she hid Kurdish terrorists. By his pointing finger, he directly addressed and accused her. His speech thus gave the im­ pression of a dialogue in which the accused (because of guilt?) remained silent. Taken together, the two gestures (stately and threatening) exemplify the two sides of paternalist power; the ruler (monarch) who gracefully ap­ proves and protects (waves and hugs) or who impatiently punishes (shoos and threatens).

Biographical background and bodily comportment Erdoğan’s threatening body language relates well to his constituency which praises him for his confrontational style. Adherents often mention the say­ ing‚ Boyun eğmedi that translates as‚ He never ducked down’ to describe (in bodily terms) an upright and strong character. They stress that despite a long time in national politics, Erdoğan has retained the roughness of a street boy. He is not only a statesman but still the guy next door who keeps the neighbourhood together. Erdoğan was born in 1954 in Kasımpaşa, a rather poor neighbourhood in Istanbul at the shore of the Golden Horn. His father was a low­income captain, and young Recep Tayyip sold simit (sesame buns) to contribute to the family income. After finishing high school, he attended the local İmam Hatip School (a vocational school for preachers) until 1973. In his youth, Erdoğan showed two strong talents – he was passionate about reciting poems and he was also a gifted football player. For a long time, he kept his football secret from his father, who, coming from a religious­ conservative milieu, did not approve of the shorts players wore (Akyol 2016). Erdoğan’s passion for recitation on the other hand received his father’s ap­ proval and proved handy for his political career. In 1976, he was elected president of the Beyoğlu Youth Branch of the National Salvation Party (MSP, Milli Selamet Partisi), an Islamist political party. His talent was soon discovered by Necmettin Erbakan, the party’s founder and president, who was also the founder of the Milli Görüş (National Outlook) Movement, and the main figure of political Islam in Turkey. After the military coup in 1980, political activism was forbidden. From the 1980s, he became active in its

242  Charlotte Joppien successor party – the Welfare Party (RP, Refah Partisi) and in 1994 he was elected mayor of Istanbul – an experience he still draws much stock from. In December 1997, Erdoğan was sentenced to ten months in jail for citing a poem by Ziya Gökalp, which, according to the court, was against the state’s secular nature. In 2001, Erdoğan and other influential figures of political Islam in Turkey, such as Abdullah Gül and Bülent Arınç, founded the AKP. Already in the following year, the party won the election with 34%. Due to his conviction in 1997, Erdoğan could not stand for election at first. How­ ever, a constitutional amendment in 2003 allowed him to run. He won the election and replaced Abdullah Gül as prime minister, a position he held until 2014 when he became president (Joppien 2011).

Competing heroic narratives Despite his significant political gifts and the talent, with which he uses body and voice, Erdoğan is no singular phenomenon with regard to the ‘staging’ of politics in Turkey. In 2015, a British newspaper The Telegraph wrote that it would not be an exaggeration to say Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is cur­ rently one of the world’s most charismatic leaders. Any conversation about Turkey always includes a reference to Mr Erdoğan ­ such is the growing cult of personality ­ and in a country which reveres great lead­ ers, i.e. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, it is not surprising either. (Akkoc 2015) Political action and comportment by Erdoğan therefore unfolds in the con­ text of, or in competition with the example set by Atatürk. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) is Turkey’s larger­than­life hero who has become the main symbol of the Republic or rather synonymous with it, being presented as its teacher, founding father, visionary, gazi (independence fighter) and eternal leader. As the ultimate symbol of nation and state, he fulfilled an im­ portant role as an embodiment of the new Turkish Republic after its found­ ing in 1923. He was elected president of the Turkish Republic in October 1923 and remained in this position until his death in 1938. As Walzer rightly points out, any state is invisible and must be personified before it can be seen, and it must become a symbol before it can be loved (1967). In Turkey, the equivalence between the leader and the state refers to a pre­Republican theme of the state as a father figure (devlet baba). Although most leading pol­ iticians in Turkey managed to develop recognizable images by the language they used, the clothes they wore and the body language they employed, no one came up against the ‘ultimate leader’. This transformation of Atatürk from a military leader and a ‘founder’ of the republic into a cult hero began already in his lifetime. He was named by parliament – on his own initiative – as Atatürk (father of the Turks). By his modern clothing, his attention

Embodied practices of leadership  243 to detail and the confident walk and upright posture Atatürk had, as a for­ mer military man, embodied a new, westernized and confident Turkey (De­ laney 1995). Until today, his legacy is kept alive. At the national monument, Atatürk’s mausoleum Anıtkabir, his clothes are displayed and iconic photos show heroic postures and a ‘decisive gaze’. From the early days of Erdoğan’s premiership and later presidency, many of the critics often made a reference to Atatürk as the other, positive end of the spectrum. They found the former not ‘worthy’ of the position, or, when he became president, a shame for the presidential palace. Erdoğan with his conservative­religious background and (as they claim) lack of education and manners was seen as unworthy of taking Atatürk’s place. Facebook accounts of Kemalists showed collages of images juxtaposing Atatürk and Erdoğan, which represented Atatürk as fine­mannered and civilized, depict­ ing him at elegant receptions or dinners. Erdoğan, on the other hand, was depicted eating with obviously bad manners, grabbing food, e.g., chicken drumsticks, with his hands and stuffing it into his mouth. At that time, crit­ ics mainly focused on Erdoğan’s ‘non­belonging’ to the political scene, as someone ‘unworthy’ for the office of prime minister. The distinction is not only between Erdoğan and Atatürk as ‘hero’ and ‘anti­hero’ individually. By their appearance, language, gesturing and body language the two also act as symbols of different socio­cultural and economic camps.

Elites and populists – ‘Black Turks’ and ‘White Turks’ The elite­populist divide is alternatively labelled as the ‘Black Turk’ – ‘White Turk’ divide. The term ‘Black Turks’ refers to citizens with a rural, conservative­religious background who allegedly do not drink alcohol, have women cover their heads and have a lower educational background. Kemal­ ists also imply that ‘Black Turks’ are ‘backward’ and due to their ‘refusal of modernization’, less ‘enlightened’ than themselves. ‘White Turks’, on the other hand, are associated with dominating the country both politically, as well as behind the scenes, e.g., by their strong presence in influential posts in the military, the judiciary and the economy. With Erdoğan declaring himself as a ‘Black Turk’, the discourse also became politicized. In a clever move, by presenting his background as more authentic, Erdoğan successfully turned around his non­approval by the political elites. One important tool to this effect was his use of body language. He expresses this, e.g., by his walking style which, with its upright posture but rather sagging steps reminds one of a tired boxer or a person coming home from physical (‘honest’) work. It thus communicates a feeling of honour but also of working with one’s body, of being real and authentic. Normative political gesturing is an expression of a country’s political habitus and culture.2 In his refusal to conform to established patterns of bodily conduct, Erdogan is not unlike other popu­ list politicians (e.g., Donald Trump) (Hall 2016). Deliberately, such figures

244  Charlotte Joppien dismiss the unwritten rules of political habitus and gesturing, while claim­ ing to spell out the people’s real problems and concerns. Further, thus, it is not only Erdoğan and Atatürk who played with dif­ ferent techniques for staging themselves, although they are by far the most impressive examples. Much of such distinction is also due to the language used. For example, greater usage of loanwords (particularly French) or pro­ fessionalized terminology is more typical for leftist parties, whereas the use of proverbs, Ottoman Turkish or Arabic words, or metaphors from a reli­ gious context point to conservative or Islamist parties. Furthermore, the different style of address, e.g., cordial, emotional, technical or threatening points towards a certain type of leader and is equated with the ‘character of the state’. All use populist language and refer to the citizens as fellow coun­ trymen (hemşehrim, or sevgili vatandaşım). In general, party presidents and leading politicians from the Kemalist CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, Re­ publican People’s Party) have always been perceived as rather elitist. Let us take the example of Bülent Ecevit (1925–2006) who despite redirecting the CHP towards more populist, socially inclusive politics in the 1970s, was, due to his personal background (an urban upbringing in Istanbul, being a stu­ dent at Robert College and thus fluent in English, becoming professor, ac­ tive in writing, literature, etc.), perceived as highly elitist. Süleyman Demirel (1924–2005), an influential leader of several centre­right parties in Turkey, on the other hand, had a very different public image. Hailing from provin­ cial İsparta, he was called father (baba) or çoban Sülü (shepherd Süleyman – the shephard being an important leadership figure/role in Turkish culture). His provincial upbringing and rural accent clearly distinguished him – for better or worse  – from Ankara’s bureaucratic circles. Another interesting figure is Turgut Özal (1927–1993), the dominant politician after Turkey’s military coup in 1980. Of Kurdish background and clear religious leanings, he was perceived as populist by the public – his good financial situation and working experience at the World Bank in the United States did not alter his public perception as ‘one of us’. The perception of political leaders as elitist or populist is related to their clothes, body language and use of voice or accent. It may be concluded that personification is an important element of the political game in Turkey. In this sense, staging politicians by using their visual and verbal articulations as ‘embodiments’ of character traits, morals, or power is key. Another common denominator between Turkish political leaders is the frequent use of patriarchical elements, which is also related to the severe underrepresentation of women in Turkish politics. The patriarchal family is hierarchically structured with the father, the main authority and breadwin­ ner, on top. Whereas the children have to respect the father and obey him, the mother upholds the father’s authority and supports him by taking care of the children and the household. This resonates well with Turkish political culture which categorizes the state as a strong father, the nation as a family and the citizens as children.

Embodied practices of leadership  245

Erdoğan and the Umma – representing Muslims worldwide As the frequent reference to ‘Black Turks’ and ‘White Turks’ in the political discourse shows, religion plays an important role with regard to (political) identity and its ‘staging’ in Turkey. However, both religious and secular sym­ bols originate in the Turkey­specific tension between religion and state (Ersan 2007). Even before the foundation of a secular Turkish Republic in 1923, the topic of the ‘right’ relation between state and religion was hotly debated within Ottoman political circles and among Muslim intellectuals. After 1923, the state was secularized in the name of laicism, religion was subsumed by state institutions, e.g., the Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affairs), the highest religious authority in Turkey, established in 1924, after the abolition of the Caliphate, and it is responsible for mosques and religious education. After the 1950s, the state became less rigid and more pragmatic with regard to religion and began to employ it in the service of public morals and a united society. Today, the AKP aims to develop a ‘new Turkey’ by a religious­conservative change of society and the development of a pious generation (Dreßler 2017). Because of laicism, the use of religious symbols in political discourse was always a taboo; this has changed only very recently under the AKP govern­ ment. Since the 2010s, the AKP actively fosters the use of Islamic symbols and stresses the importance of religious holidays. Religious references are also part of Erdoğan’ body language. A gesture Erdoğan employs much is the placement of his right hand on the heart. This gesture, on the one hand, situates its performer in a Muslim milieu as it is a widespread form of greeting (instead of the typically Western handshake). In more general terms, it signals the performer’s openness to his/her people, hu­ mility and a certain kind of moral nobility. Another prominent gesture is the ‘Rabia­Wave’, four fingers up and a folded thumb, whereby Erdoğan shows his solidarity with followers of the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood. In August 2013, several hundred of them were killed by security forces at the Rabaa al­Adawiyya Square in Cairo. Whereas the gesture was first only used by followers and sympathizers of the Muslim brotherhood, it also gained inter­ national prominence due to Erdoğan’s frequent use of it. As a result, the use of this symbol soon became a discursive gesture which demonstrated one’s political stance, Muslim identity and location within political Islam. Citizens employ the sign to demonstrate their approval of the AKP government thus turning it into a discursive symbol. A prominent example is the Turkish foot­ ball player Emre Belezoğlu (well­known for his support of the AKP), who showed the Rabia gesture after scoring a goal. A parallel can be drawn to Christian football players making the sign of the cross or kneeling down in a prayer position, despite the fact that the Rabbia sign has primarily a political meaning and only indirectly relates to religion as such. The use of the Rabbia wave goes hand in hand with Erdoğan’s engage­ ment with the Muslim world, e.g., with regard to the Israel­Palestinian con­ flict (as demonstrated in the ‘One Minute Speech’ conflict with Simon Peres

246  Charlotte Joppien at Davos in 2009) or the 2010 diplomatic crisis on Mavi Marmara, leading to Erdoğan’s high popularity in the Islamic world. When claiming Sunni Islam’s leadership, Erdoğan argues that Turkey’s religious tradition and its long experience with religious (and ethnic) diversity predestines the country for a leadership role. Erdoğan’s becoming president of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in 2016 during its 13th meeting as well as his speech at the World Islamic Scholars Initiative for Peace Summit that took place in Istanbul in 2014 calling Muslims, both Shi’i and Sunni, as well as of all Islamic schools (mezhep) to unite were very popular events among Turkey’s pious population. Erdoğan has his political roots in the Milli Görüş (National Outlook) Movement founded in 1969 by Necmettin Erbakan (1926–2011). Today it is a transnational movement with large numbers of supporters not only in Turkey, but also in European countries such as Germany and beyond, e.g., in Australia. Erbakan’s international aspirations formulated in the 1980s and 1990s, e.g., the closer cooperation of Muslim countries’ and their unity (under Turkish leadership) which he sought to realize by the Union of the Developing Eight (including Turkey, Iran, Malaysia, Indonesia, Egypt, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nigeria) find today’s equivalent in Erdoğan’s at­ tempts to secure a religious leadership role for Turkey. In the early days of AKP rule, Turkey was assigned the function of a bridge between East and West by external actors, an image it willingly adopted. Soon Turkey began to promote itself as a leading example for Arabic coun­ tries and sought to take a leadership role in the region. The ‘intellectual basis’ of it was outlined in Ahmet Davutoğlu’s book Stratejik Derinlik: Türkiye’nin Uluslararası Konumu (Küre Yayınları, Istanbul 2001) whose con­ tent became known as the Zero Problems Strategy. This realignment was a clear break with the country’s previous foreign­policy orientation that was to a large degree influenced by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s dictum to follow a passive foreign policy and minimal contact with Arab neighbours. The new approach was largely spearheaded by religious nationalism and the aspira­ tion to regain Ottoman greatness. Moreover, the country’s pious population suffered from a feeling the Arab world looked down on it, particularly since the reforms initiated by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in the 1920s and 1930s led to the abolishment of the Caliphate in 1924, the suppression of all forms of non­state­organized Islam (e.g., religious brotherhoods or independent ulemas) and subsequently the country’s decline of religious reputation in the Islamic/Arabic world. The longing for the leadership of Sunni Islam is at the same time a longing for the Ottoman Classical age, as one of the high­water marks in Islamic world civilization. In short, what is meant is not only a religious but also a civilizational leadership. It may be concluded that by the use of the Rabbia sign, Erdoğan not only situates the AKP government do­ mestically as a counter­revolution of a social periphery against a perceived domination of Kemalist elites, but equally importantly demonstrates the

Embodied practices of leadership  247 internationally (regained) strength of a country which traditionally feels ne­ glected, supressed or not sufficiently valued by the West.

Conclusion: Erdoğan and the masses? Mediatized culture and entertainment As demonstrated above, over the years, Erdoğan’s body language has be­ come more and more important as a part of his political staging and per­ formativity. It has become more threatening and has carried more frequent references to religious themes. However, this is not seen as a disadvantage by his followers, who perceive his controversial political style as strength and argue that he made ‘Turkey great again’. Followers repeatedly point out that he dominates the news, a fact they perceive as very positive. If being aggressive meant that Turkey was recognized internationally, that others possibly felt fear, then that was to the country’s advantage, the ar­ gument went. Erdoğan is not a singular phenomenon, but needs to be ana­ lyzed against the background of the country’s political culture and historic development, as well as in relation to Turkey’s ‘ultimate leader’, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. Whereas many similarities exist between the skills both brought to bear on the staging of themselves, a significant difference clearly lies in the different technological context. Whereas Atatürk above all strived to be exemplary, this does not seem to be Erdoğan’s main con­ cern. In today’s mediatized culture, entertainment does not mean that one has to be likeable as any publicity is good publicity. Kertzer rightly sug­ gests that not only in pre­modern societies but equally today “the important thing is public performance, not substantive action (Kertzer 1988, 107).” Also Hall et al. note: Politicians become fragments of bodies and voices spread daily across thousands of media platforms. Their every step is converted into digi­ tal material recontextualized for different sectors of consuming audi­ ence. […] today’s fragmentation of the body […is…] continuous with courtly culture, where royals manifest sovereign power through looks and poses. The branding of US presidential politicians through gestural metonymy – for example, Nixon’s double­V victory gesture, Clinton’s thumbs up gesture, Obama’s fist bump, Merkel’s diamond – is thus a contemporary version of an old practice. (Hall et al. 2016, 81–82) Irrespective of whether Erdoğan’s gestures are ‘real’ or ‘fake’, whether they are a spontaneous expression of his inner world or a result of political strat­ egy and coaching, they undeniably have a strong communicative and emo­ tional effect on Turkish citizens as well as on international observers, in the process profoundly altering Turkish political culture.

248  Charlotte Joppien

Notes

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Embodied practices of leadership  249 Fuss, Jürgen P. 2011. Erdogan—ein Meister der Täuschung. Was Europa von der Türkei wirklich zu erwarten hat. Beltheim­Schnellbach: Verlag Bublies. Flaig, Egon. 2003. Ritualisierte Politik. Zeichen, Gesten und Herrschaft im Alten Rom. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Gencer, Yasemin. 2012. “We Are Family: The Child and Modern Nationhood in Early Turkish Republican Cartoons (1923–28).” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 32, no. 2: 294–309. Görener, Aylin Ş., and Meltem Ş. Ucal. 2013. “The Personality and Leadership Style of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Implications for Turkish Foreign Policy.” Turkish Studies 12, no. 3: 357–381. Gürez, Sevgi. 2007. “Repräsentation und Körper.” In Repräsentation in Politik, Medien und Gesellschaft, edited by Lutz Huth and Michael Krzeminski, 203–211. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Hall, Jonathan. 2004. “Cicero and Quintilian on the Oratorical Use of Hand Ges­ tures.” Classical Quarterly 54, no. 1: 143–160. Hall, Kira, Donna M. Goldstein, aand Matthew B. Ingram. 2016. “The hands of Donald Trump.” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 6, no. 2: 71–100. Heper, Metin. 2013. “Islam, Conservatism, and Democracy in Turkey: Comparing Turgut Özal and Recep Tayyip Erdogan.” Insight Turkey 15, no. 2: 141–156. Joppien, Charlotte. 2011. Die türkische Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP). Eine Untersuchung des Programms „Muhafazakar Demokrasi“. Berlin: Klaus­Schwarz. Joppien, Charlotte. 2014. “Ohne Leader Geht Hier Nichts. Eine Untersuchung der Kommunalen Sichtbarkeit und Einflussnahme des Parteivorsitzenden.” In Junge Perspektiven der Türkeiforschung in Deutschland I, eidted by Klaus Kreiser, Raoul Motika, Udo Steinbach, Charlotte Joppien, and L. Schulz, 117–132. Wiesbaden: Springer. Joppien, Charlotte. 2017. Turkey: Aspirations to take the Leadership Role in Sunni Islam?, unpublished paper, GIGA Workshop, Who Speaks for Political Islam?, Berlin. Joppien, Charlotte. 2018. Municipal Politics in Turkey. Local Government and Party Organisation. Abingdon: Routledge. Kendon, Adam. 1992. “Some Recent Work from Italy on ‘Quotable Gestures (Em­ blems).” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 1: 92–108. Kendon, Adam 1997. “Gesture.” Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 109–128. Kantorowicz, Ernst. 1957. The King‘s Two Bodies: A Study in medieval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kertzer, David. 1988. Ritual, Politics and Power. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Küpers, Wendelin M. 2013. “Embodied Inter­Practices of Leadership— Phenomenological Perspectives on Relational and Responsive Leading and Fol­ lowing.” Leadership 9, no. 3: 335–357. Morrell, Kevin., and Jean Hartley. 2006. “A Model of Political Leadership.” Human Relations 59, no. 4: 483–504. Navaro­Yashin, Yael. 2002. Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ohm, Britta. 2015. “Organizing Popular Discourse with and against the Media: Notes on the Making of Narendra Modi and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as Leaders without Alternative.” Television & Media 16, no. 4: 370–377. Özyürek, Esra. 2004. “Miniaturizing Atatürk. Privatization of State Imagery and Ideology in Turkey.” American Ethnologist 31, no. 3: 374–391.

250  Charlotte Joppien Panofsky, Erwin. 1955. Meaning in the Visual Arts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni­ versity Press. Panofsky, Erwin. [1932] 1985. Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft. Ber­ lin: Wissenschaftsverlag Volker Spiess. Plaggenborg, Stefan. 2012. Ordnung und Gewalt. Kemalismus—Faschismus— Sozialismus. München: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag. Ropo, Arja., Erika Sauer, and Perttu Salovaara. 2013. “Embodiment of Leadership through Material Place.” Leadership 9, no. 3: 378–395. Walzer, Michael. 1967. “On the Role of Symbolism in Political Thought.” Political Science Quarterly 82, no. 2: 191–204. White, Jenny B. 2002. Islamist Mobilization in Turkey. A Study in Venacular Politics. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Young, Katharine. (2000). “Gestures and the phenomenology of emotion.” Semiotica 131, no. 1/2: 79–112.

12 Symbolic patterns and interactional dynamics in ruler personality cults Responding to questions and formulating ideas for future research Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov As promised in the opening chapter, this conclusion sums up and contextu­ alizes some thoughts on interaction in personality cults, taking as a point of departure the questions posed at the very beginning of this collaboration to all its participants:

What are the origins, drivers and constituent elements of personality cults? Omnipotent leaders The analogy between rulers and the sun is a typical strategy of adding lus­ ter to personality cults (XM; Eitrem 1936, 126; Karayannopulos 1956, 357; Cerfaux and Tondriau 1957, 93; Tran Huan 1959, 162; Turcan 1978, 1048; 503; Štaerman 1990, 376; Bergmann 1998, 110), but it can also be helpful in ex­ plaining their mechanics. Unremarkable in relation to other stars, the sun is the dominating presence in its own surroundings: while its gravity prevents the solar system from breaking up, the sunlight constantly dispatched to the Earth from afar makes life on our planet possible and even, for the most part, enjoyable. The same dependence upon strong, ongoing asymmetries of political, economic, cultural and moral power is manifest in leader cults (DS): the presence and activity of a living, if at times distant, manifestation of social, artistic, intellectual, economical or ethical supremacy sets per­ sonality cults apart from the largely inconsequential nostalgic adoration of past conquerors, geniuses and diviners. Whenever the preexisting autocratic domination of entire societies ossifies into impersonal norm and routine, ruler cults could be jump­started by the further radicalization of executive absolutism, as was the case with Louis XIV’s decision to rule without a first minister (Burke 1992, 49). Admittedly, what makes the sun such an attractive moniker for kings and presidents is not its sheer, intimidating size but rather its uncontested

252  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov ability to create and sustain life under given conditions. Whereas the over­ bearing power of such inanimate monsters as Leviathan or Moloch feels alienating and destructive (Hobbes 1651, Čapek 1936), the cultic personality is perceived by its followers as the human safeguard of each individual and the whole community from pervasive discord, strife and starvation (Chani­ otis 2003, 431). For this reason, Roman senators were vying for Caligula’s protection, German correspondents of Wilhelm II considered their Kaiser to be the inexhaustible reservoir of social, political and economic capital, and many Romanians looked up to the pater patriae Nicolae Ceaușescu as the source of their welfare (XM; EG; MM; for the general perspective see Pfeiffer 2008, 35). To be sure, a few leader cults have developed and even thrived in the absence of considerable power differential, Queen Victoria, Tomáš G. Masaryk and Aleksandr Kerensky being notable examples (JP; Orzoff 2008; Kolonitsky 2020). In such cases, the cults were not suppress­ ing but supplementing institution­driven politics, moving into the otherwise neglected but vital areas of the national, cultural or religious communities. Disjointed followers In all of the above (and many similar) cases, the institutional authority of the leaders in question was a secondary consideration compared to the actual resources under their personal control. Given this ascription of power to specific individuals, how credible was the perception of their omnipotence? Even if all planets revolving around the sun merged into a single celestial body, they would still be barely noticeable compared to the bright giant tak­ ing up 99.8% of the solar system’s weight. However, the combined resource poverty of the ruled in kingdoms, empires and federal states has apparently never been as drastic as that (Curtis 2016, 173). Rather, the weakness of any cult adherents lies in their disconnection (XM): however sensible it is for the cultic community to conspire against presumably powerful rulers or at least keep their wasteful glorification in check, there is no way around the deadly risk posed by such and similar activities to the volunteering individu­ als (Schelling 1978, 126; Acemoglu, Robinson and Verdier 2004). Risky environment Although not every single personality cult arises out of a crisis (see below), the circular co­dependency between societal uncertainty and personal­ ity cults is a common sight in politics, going back to the earliest example of ruler veneration (Brisch 2013, 43). As long as acute internal discord or strong external pressure help shifting popular attention from ostensibly de­ funct rules and procedures to the unique individuals supposedly capable of overcoming difficulties against all odds, unstable circumstances would fa­ vor cultic personalities, and vice versa. In other words, personality cults tend to flourish when their high social costs appear tolerable for both leaders

Responding to questions, formulating ideas  253 (unable or unwilling to choose less dangerous paths to power) and followers (disappointed by standard, “low­cost” political routines, rules and organi­ zations). So while it was quite natural for Augustus and Josip Broz Tito to rely upon their military and state reputations for building personality cults more or less from scratch, it was no less reasonable for them to keep cultivat­ ing reverential attitudes among all strata of the population in order to coun­ ter political instability (the threat of senatorial conspiracy in Rome  – see XM) or divert attention from questionable activities in the past (Tito’s meet­ ings with Nazis during WWII – see TT). In its turn, while Joseph Stalin’s leadership cult was initially an attempt to cover up his low standing among Bolsheviks (including widely suspected contacts with the tsarist security services – see Shubin 2009, 27–29), his subsequent adulation was fostered by feeding governmental narratives of local and global conspiracies against the “great leader” (Trotskyism, “aggravation of the class struggle,” etc.) to the anxious Soviet population (Baberowski 2003, 11). Overall, the image of a hero coming “out of nowhere” to save an empire, a nation, a language or a class has been serving as a popular template for per­ sonality cults from early Antiquity to our time (AT, 402; Bentley 1957; Nagy 1998; Segal 1990; Gordon 2001, 47; Edelmann 2007, 103; Strong and Killing­ sworth 2011; Coppola 2016): popular examples include Demetrius Poliorcetes (driving off the dangerous tyrant Lachares from the gates of Athens), Augus­ tus (pacifying an unruly empire), Ceaușescu (preserving Romanian sover­ eignty and world peace), Ante Paveliċ (securing Croatian independence), Józef Piłsudski (saving Poland from the Soviets), Kim Il Sung (shielding the Korean language from Japanese encroachment) and, most recently, Recep Tayyip Er­ doğan (protecting Turkey from diverse underspecified threats – see XM; MM; AT; Tondriau 1947,107; Yim 1980, 229; Bosworth 1999; Goldstein 2006, 228; Litwa 2012, 71, 6; CJ). Alternatively (but less commonly), the single­handed protection of the threatened status quo could be replaced in heroic personality cults with the miraculous creation of a new religion, social system or state: in the political realm, the obvious examples are Vladimir Lenin (“the state of peasants and workers”), Giuseppe Garibaldi (Italy) and, of course, Otto von Bismarck (Germany – see AT; Mori 2007; Riall 2007). In its turn, the abandonment of the top executive position by the cultic per­ sonality has been commonly presented, and often perceived, as being fraught with existential risks for the whole community: it was largely due to this senti­ ment that Gamal 'Abd al­Nasser remained the President of Egypt after the dis­ astrous Six­Day War (Melcangi 2007, 351–352). The official Romanian media of the 1970s extended this indispensability claim to the whole world, portraying the state leader as the only safeguard from a global nuclear conflict (MM). Public settings The above­listed features of personal rule in politics would hardly matter for personality cults if the “visibility” of contacts between rulers and followers

254  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov was ignored (DS; AT; Etienne 1958, 113; Price 1984, 117; Leese 2014, 342): indeed, the dictatorships in Myanmar, Greece and Argentina, despite fit­ ting the pattern omnipotent leaders-disjointed followers-risky environments, were carried out by faceless juntas with no truly cultic personalities at the forefront (Inside the colonels' Greece 1972, 71; Houtman 2005, 135; Svolik 2012, 19). In contrast, and notwithstanding all secrecy inherent in non­ deliberative politics, the cultic adoration of leaders takes place in the open, allowing all members of the community some degree of active participation, or at least passive knowledge thereof. In fact, while only the inhabitants of the four major cities in seventeenth­century Mughal India had had a chance to gaze at the emperor Jahangir during sunrise, many of his less privileged subjects could still indirectly participate in this ceremony by acquiring some knowledge about its daily occurrence (AA). Generally speaking, the opposition between leaders and followers in public would be expressed not only as a static relation (where rulers typ­ ically occupy the central and/or elevated position – see Leach 1976, 53; Rolf 2004a), but also as a dynamic interplay of stability and motion: in the latter case, the rulers’ function could vary between a passive acceptance of acclamations at festivals and demonstrations (Kantorowicz 1958; Herz 1983; Rolf 2006), and an active performance of triumphus or other majes­ tic self­presentation (Versnel 1970). In a typical case, the public perfor­ mance of personality cults mirrors, complicates and sometimes moderates the power gap between leaders and followers: while the former sparingly dispense with time and other resources, rarely granting wishes, answering letters, or visiting locals, the latter flock to crowded squares, desperately beg for audiences or pen series of letters unlikely to be answered (AT; EG; KP; Baxa 2013). Small regional and media differences aside, this pattern of behavior persists all over the globe without much change (Merriam 1981, 395), down to the highly specific formula of “being close” to the leader readily employed in France, Russia and Germany under different political and historical circumstances (DS; EG; KP; Melzer and Norberg 1998, 2–3). Inversion (1): the political role as an attribute of personal power The ultimate dependence of the communal well­being upon the personal talents of a given executive turns the latter’s submission to the impersonal norms of political rotation (succession rules, elections, term limits) into a needless test of political stability. Hence, the relation between the substan­ tial core and accidental properties of representative politics, already quite wobbly in non­cultic personal rule (Roth 1968, 195: Jackson and Rosberg 1984; Guliyev 2011), has been positively turned on its head in personality cults: while the inimitable traits of a given personality are regarded as es­ sential for the survival of the community, state or empire, the offices held by the cultic personalities usually play a subservient role, dressing power

Responding to questions, formulating ideas  255 management in the patchwork cloak of diverse traditional legitimations (Ursprung 2010, 153). The casualness of many autocrats toward both piling up and changing their official roles often correlates with a naked opportun­ ism intended to prolong staying in power, manifest in the long careers of Nicolae Ceaușescu, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (MM; Hill 2017; CJ). Yet it would be unfair to dismiss the subordination of a govern­ mental role to personal power as a cunning trick of political adventurers: in fact, the ruler cults originating within durable, time­honored systems of governance such as hereditary monarchy display the same inversion (Leese 2014, 341). Indeed, the common characterization of Queen Victoria as the “mother, wife and queen” – in that order – was clearly, if allegorically, pro­ moting personal affection toward the subjects as the foundation of success­ ful imperial rule (JP). Even more common, however, was the masculine version of political familiarization, celebrating the indiscriminate paternal love and care of leaders as prerequisites for executive efficiency and popu­ lar legitimacy (Alföldi 1971; Gill 1989; Strothmann 2000, 73): whereas the paeans to Alexander I holding all Russian subjects in his strong arms were a common allegory of his steady management of the vast empire (DS), the nickname dziadek (grandfather) stuck with Józef Piłsudski long before the revered commander became the official leader of Poland, and the percep­ tion of cultic leaders as fathers of their nations was a staple of African per­ sonality cults of the last century (Nałęcz 1974; Schatzberg 1993, 450–451; Hein 2002, 46). Expectedly, children provided an indispensable cast for this kind of performance: whereas in the lap of empresses and queens their own offspring served as a living synecdoche for the familiar comfort and protection of the countries in question, the good­looking little strangers, eagerly (and sometimes awkwardly) hugged and entertained by kings, pres­ idents and other leaders turned whole states and empires into the extended families of cultic personalities (EG; DZ; AT; KP; Ragache 1995; Orzoff 2008, 124; Bernasconi 2013, 139). Alternatively, the bare masculinity of Be­ nito Mussolini and Vladimir Putin, stripped of family responsibilities and (some) clothing, was targeting the more alienated followers impervious to family tales (Sperling 2014; Antola Swan 2016). Inversion (2), split and redoubling: otherworldliness within (and alongside) commonality Since the immediately perceptible and instantly efficacious features of the particular cultic personalities push their formal and traditional ruling cre­ dentials to the background, the transformation of the timeless properties of royal sovereignty or democratic power into the private attributes of indi­ vidual leaders should not cause much surprise. In fact, both the crown and the communist system were expected to beat adversaries hands down and last forever, guided by the divine (or Marxist) foresight (Kantorowicz 1957a,

256  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov 256; Pipes 2011, 492). Given these high expectations, it was almost natural to believe that the deified personifications of these and other states could stop running elephants (Emperor Jahangir), solve all imaginable problems on the spot (Mao Tse­tung, Ceaușescu, Hugo Chávez), set standards for cultural and economic goods (Ceaușescu, Wilhelm II), summarily fulfill the national ideals of all times (Mátyás Rákosi), predict the future (Benito Mussolini, Jo­ seph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mobutu Sese Seko, Francisco Franco), possess all thinkable knowledge (Emperor Jahangir, Joseph Stalin), heal the sick by touch (Vespasian, Henry IV, Charles II, Alexander I) and even live longer than all their followers (AA; Gandhi 1975, 47; Hasler 1980, 482–483; Apor 2009, 55; Tarasova 2009, 24; MM; EG; XM; Rougier 1959, 614; Bloch 1924; 614; Ziethen, 1994, 182; KP). However, confining these transcendent properties of cultic rulers to their public accessibility has always been a daunting task (Nilsson 1978, 298): the ability to reach out to the distant past and the future, make universally valid judgments or perform magic tricks was sitting incongruously with famil­ ial lovingness or extended visibility. As a result, many, if not most, images of the cultic personalities were split between otherworldly transcendence and down­to­earth immanence (DZ; EG; KP). The two obvious routines of employing the ensuing binaries in personality cults were the simultaneous presentation of the two polar opposites in public and their alternating use depending on political considerations. The first option, closest to – but by no means identical with – “the king’s two bodies” (Kantorowicz 1957b) consisted of staging and, whenever ap­ plicable, perpetually reproducing in the media face­to­face interactions between rulers and their subjects on equal terms (chatting, parading, working together, etc.) concurrently with the followers’ deferential uphold­ ing of the leaders’ unsurpassed greatness (from ceremonial uses of over­ sized portraits and insignia to overblown praise and applause). Alexander I’s patient and apparently cordial conversations with ordinary subjects, Joseph Stalin’s humble marching with workers (on a photomontage poster) or Adolf Hitler’s meal with soldiers at the field kitchen ran more or less parallel to the magnificent fireworks surrounding Alexander’s monogram, Stalin’s gigantic monuments at squares and memorials and Hitler’s deusex-machina­like descent from the skies to the Nuremberg Party Rally at the beginning of Leni Riefenstahl’s staged documentary Triumph of the Will (DS; KP). The second option of consecutively combining the otherworldly and the down­to­earth images in the performance of the same cultic personality seems to be working best with the unscrupulous (or desperate) chancers ca­ pable of self­invention: the list of examples could stretch all the way from Caligula (who switched from humility to self­deification, XM) to Erdoğan (who proceeded from the role of a conversation partner eagerly feigning in­ teractional parity to that of a confrontational tribune angrily reproaching and threatening his absent interlocutors, CJ).

Responding to questions, formulating ideas  257

How the changes of codes, channels and media affect ruler personality cults? New codes: conservation of otherworldliness Expectedly, quite a few communicative devices and interactional schemes employed in the production of personality cults predate this relatively new and sophisticated socio­cultural practice. Whereas the prostration in front of the powerful (proskynēsis) – a staple of some early personality cults (XM; DZ) – comes straight from the animal world (Taylor 1927; Pannwitz 1968, 65), the exchange of random gifts/signals between anxious communities and powerful superhuman agencies has been equally prevalent among humans since time immemorial, equally noticeable in Ancient Greece, Jahangir’s Mughal India and Stalin’s Soviet Union (AA; AT; EG; KP; Charlesworth 1935, 9). While both practices, strictly speaking, may work without any re­ course to specialized, context­independent sign systems, it is the impact of such systems that turns personality cults into diverse, robust and durable enterprises. At some point in the distant past, the growing reflexivity of interaction gave birth to a handful of dedicated codes that enabled development, diver­ sification and transmission of cults beyond their immediate terrain (Hahn 2000, 241). From this moment on the new, efficient ways of interaction could either lend quantitative support to the traditional modes of personality cults or cause profound qualitative changes, adding new functional capacities to the cultic veneration. As an example of the first option, the rituals express­ ing superiority by means of unmediated bodily dominance – for instance, the aforementioned prostration – could be metonymically transposed into a verbal code: “bending knees” was an eighteenth­century reference to the cultic veneration of ancient classical authors (Perrault 1687, 10). In a similar vein, the ostensibly universal digital codes could still preserve the sover­ eign’s egocentric mode of power by coding it in such words and numbers that would only make sense as interactive extensions of the cultic speaker’s body (Frazer 1890, 168; Plamper 2004). Whereas Louis XIV’s L’État c’est moi was a deictic summary of the court’s dutiful shuttling with the monarch between Paris, Versailles and Marly (Elias 1969, 68–101), the use of a ruler’s personal chronology as a blueprint for the ceremonial calendar in Ancient Rome and tsarist Russia provided a temporal correlate to the spatial self­understanding and expression of the French king (DS; Immisch 1931, 148). Needless to say, both models are symptomatic of the trends productive across different his­ torical periods and political cultures: whereas Louis XIV shared the distinc­ tion of being the “Sun­King” with Nicolae Ceaușescu and Francisco Franco (XM), the ruler’s birthdays doubled as national holidays – or at least served as pretexts for lavish c elebrations – in Ancient Rome, Victorian Great Britain, Nazi Germany, Socialist Yugoslavia and Vietnam, Communist Romania, the Soviet Union and late twentieth century Liberia (JP; MM;

258  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov AT; Kraaz 1993, 47; Herz 2003, 51; Gabanyi 1978; Dror 2016, 448; Sretenovic and Puto, 211; Wievorka 2010, 160–161; Ennker 1987, 543; Kieh 1988, 15). These examples aside, writing and print do not always have to play such a subservient role in personality cults. On the contrary, their invention for the first time in history allowed for both preservation of information and its consecutive – or simultaneous – reuse in multiple interactional situations, potentially extending personality cults beyond the grave (KP). Safely con­ served in preemptively canonized information storages (books, records, relics) and activated on demand in efficacious rituals (processions, recita­ tions, strategic interpretation by influential exegetes), the power of a person in question could well remain intact after his or her physical death (KP). To be sure, the post­mortem personality cults are much more common in the arts and religion (which, for the most part, are outside the scope of this volume) than in politics, which, as a rule, leans toward short­term goals and context­bound interaction (van Dijk 2008, 178; Garri 2010). Instead, some political personality cults, turning the rulers’ otherworldliness into a feature of everyday life (see above), ascribe canonic status to some texts in which rulers play one or many significant roles (author, source of inspiration, main protagonist – see McGurk 1988; Knight 1991; Terzic 1995; von Klimó 2004; Kulikova 2006). It is because of this association that some speeches of Joseph Stalin and Nicolae Ceaușescu were treated as the blueprints for every suc­ cessful social development in the respective countries: whatever happened in the Soviet Union or the Socialist Republic of Romania during Stalin’s and Ceaușescu’s rule could be traced back to the respective leaders’ foundational texts composed, for the most part, well in advance of the events they were purported to describe, predict or even warn against (MM; KP). New channels: globalization of commonality In the late nineteenth – early twentieth century, it was commonplace to de­ scribe autocratic rulers as savages armed with trendy gadgets (see the anal­ ogous characterizations of Stalin, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II discussed in DZ and EG). Even if there was more than a grain of truth in this contemp­ tuous irony, the opportunity of transmitting messages, pictures and mov­ ing images instantly and simultaneously did add a new dimension to the perceived closeness between leaders and their followers. In the world not yet entangled in telegraph cables, gazing at the emperor had been regarded as a privilege, a step on a ladder leading all the way up to a face­to­face encounter (AA). However, from the middle of the nineteenth century, the personal messages from, say, Queen Victoria could rapidly reach the re­ motest corners of the British Empire (JP), swiftly putting the ruler in touch with her subjects at no social cost to them. In their turn, print, photography and the film industry turned not only narcissistic populists (such as Benito Mussolini) but also undemocratic snobs (such as Wilhelm II) into household images (EG). A century later, such non­interactive mass media as radio and

Responding to questions, formulating ideas  259 television amplified these tendencies, giving cultic personalities (Ceaușescu, Chavez, Erdoğan) unlimited – and uncontested time on air (MM; CJ). New media: totalization of followership Although “the crowd /…which…/ draws the crowd” (Tarde 1901, 42) has been first observed at the dawn of the new media age, the autocatalytic growth of followership got a crucial boost much earlier from the functional differen­ tiation of media at the disposal of rulers, which led to both accidental and deliberate multiplication of medial references to the same individuals and groups (Dobry 2006, 171; Devadevan 2017, 131). In the first case, the indi­ viduals gathering next to the press bulletins to read news about the health of Queen Victoria could become themselves the objects of summary photo portraiture and subsequent press coverage, encouraging mimetic behavior among newspaper readers (JP). In the second case, the feedback forgery could credibly exaggerate the support of a cult in question: Rafael Trujillo, the longtime dictator of the Dominican Republic, bombarded newspapers with fake letters of support on his own behalf (XM), whereas the real ap­ plause accompanying Hitler’s speeches was at some public gatherings sup­ plemented by the recorded one (Atkinson 1984, 13–14; Thamer 1988, 367; Zelnhefer 1992, 92; Birdsall 2012, 45). On top of this, the totalizing media claims of “unanimous” loyalty to rulers, common in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and many other countries, could effectively deprive dissenters of medial representation, putting their very existence in doubt. New codes, channels and media: turbocharging cults and aggravating socio-political risks Making personality cults run on overdrive by enhancing their medial in­ ventories is nearly always beneficial in the short term but comes at a price when cultic communications spiral out of control. As long as the leaders in question maintain strategic command of their personal and medial avail­ ability to followers, using appointments, photo images and autographs as graded rewards for loyalty, cults do not seem to be in danger. Indeed, Adolf Hitler’s strict control over his words and images in public, coupled with the carefully calibrated dispensation of his artifacts, worked well for most of the Nazi period (KP), as did the dialectics of granting and withholding the emperor’s portraits in Mughal India (AA). Under such circumstances, the relative scarcity of cultic representations kept their value reasonably high, as could be attested by the humble request of the Moscow Noble Assembly for the portrait of Alexander I, or the public display of Wilhelm II’s letter to a landowner by the proud recipient (DS; EG). Alternatively, the unchecked proliferation and distribution of leader ar­ tifacts can quickly devaluate them, turning adulation into indifference and even scorn (Burton 1912, 82), and triggering an increasingly costly search for

260  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov reliable signaling in loyalty/protection tradeoffs. Roman emperors learned this correlation the hard way when the monetary value of silver coins with their portraits went bust in the fourth century following overproduction and debasement of the currency (Jones 1953; Butcher 2015), whereas in the So­ viet Union the omnipresent Stalin portraits outraged even the most loyal outsiders (Barbusse 1935, 6–7; Feuchtwanger 1937, 73), and in Togo the gro­ tesque aggrandizement of President Gnassingbé Eyadéma was punctured by its carnivalistic subversion (Ellis 2009, 473). The same consequences accompanied the trivializing institutionalization of distinctions and ritu­ als: the ubiquitous Mao badges in China (XM; Schrift 2001, 72) and the never­ending applause to Stalin (Solzhenitsyn 1986, 28) quickly ceased to convey any meaningful information between leaders and followers, making the already risky interaction between the two poles potentially even more treacherous than before (XM). Last but not least, the empowerment of fol­ lowers by means of their medial multiplication could lift their spirits to the extent that rulers could be seen as redundant, or at least not indispensable: at any rate, the crowds directed to the Romanian Communist Party head­ quarters for listening to Ceaușescu’s ill­advised public speech in a split second turned from supporters to gravediggers of the cult (Marin 2011).

How different are personality cults in monarchies and republics, theocracies and secular states? What continuities and discontinuities can we identify in the history of personality cults – at least during the last five centuries? What are the significant regional differences, if any? Although the material gathered in the volume is clearly insufficient to an­ swer these questions in depth, the cultic variations appear to be smaller than their regional or political disparities may suggest; at any rate, the list of re­ current rituals, narratives and representational similes for the last two mil­ lennia is impressive (DZ). On the one hand, the relentless cross­fertilization of religious, cultural and political personality cults has served to smooth away their differences, as the competition for the title “Son of God” be­ tween the founder of Christianity and a handful of Roman emperors seems to prove (Prümm 1928, 16; Frankfort 1948, 299–300; Cuss 1974, 71–73; Bayet 1959, 429; Broad 2015; for the earlier origins of the designation, see Beurlier 1890, 1; Seltman 1953, 314; Cerfaux and Tondriau 1957, 93). On the other hand, monarchs, presidents and dictators alike were prone to invented gene­ alogies weaving together disparate epochs, communicative genres, political systems and national traditions (Koortbojian 2013, 9; Popan 2015, 44–49). To be sure, some hereditary monarchs with little job insecurity were not above navigating their cultic performance with the assistance of evoca­ tive references to the past: the intentional modeling of Wilhelm II’s offi­ cial portraits upon Hyacinthe Rigaud’s pompous visualizations of Louis XIV was a blunt rejection of the democratic style promoted by Wilhelm I,

Responding to questions, formulating ideas  261 the grandfather of the last German Kaiser (EG). However, for reasons dis­ cussed above, revolutionary tyrants were particularly prone to beefing up their legitimacies by casually claiming descent from some charismatic pre­ decessors. Depending on political objectives, lineages could be retroactively constructed along ideological (Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels – Vladimir Lenin – Joseph Stalin), national (Burebista – Mircea cel Bătrân – Ștefan cel Mare – Mihai Viteazul – Alexandru Ioan Cuza – Nicolae Ceaușescu; Friedrich II – Otto von Bismarck – Paul von Hindenburg – Adolf Hitler), imperial (Ceasar – Augustus – Benito Mussolini) or mixed lines which could freely blend various state forms with heroic myths and miscellaneous super­ ficial affinities (Prophet Muhammad – Muhammad Ahmad; Ammon/Zeus – Alexander the Great; Franz Josef I – Tomáš G. Masaryk; Napoleon I – Napoleon III; Prince Vladimir – Vladimir Putin) (MM; Dekmejian and Wyszomir­ ski 1972, 203–205; Georgesku 1983, 138; Hogart 1887, 318; 398. Kornemann 1901, 55; Dominique 1959; Wilcken 1938, 219; Robinson 1943, 288; Tondriau 1948, 26–27; Balsdon 1950, 371; Versnel 1974, 130; Fishwick 1987,9; Laruelle 2009, 160; España 2001, 154; Melograni 1976, 230; Marcello 2011; Hille 2010, 46). Francisco Franco had the particularly colorful cult pedigree stretching back from Napoleon, Charles V and the Spanish “Golden Age” monarchs all the way to El Cid, Charlemagne and Julius Caesar (XM). In situations of political instability, this work of imagination has often been constrained by a multiplicity of competitive claims to the particularly valuable legacy: in the interwar China, Wang Jingwei and Chiang Kai­shek were disputing the legacy of their cultic predecessor Sun Yat­Sen for decades (Taylor 2015).

How “collaborative” are ruler personality cults? Could a ruler personality cult arise “by popular demand”? Both this chapter and some other studies in this volume and beyond attest to the considerable possibility of grassroots personality cults catering to pop­ ular tastes (KP; DS; TT; Sweet 1919, 67–68; Alföldy 1996, 255). To be sure, many skillful rulers merely distanced themselves from the routine manage­ ment of their cults, feigning humility and occasionally curbing extreme ven­ eration: whereas the Spartan king and noble warrior Agesilaus II was only equivocal about the offer of divine honors (Charlesworth 1935, 12; Flower 1988, 129), in Mughal India and Bolshevik Russia the relegation of respon­ sibility for balancing political goals with public visions to the mid­level cult managers was apparently a thought­out policy (AA; Brooks 2000, 13). How­ ever, despite recurrent calls for “great men” and “chiefs” (KP; DS; AT; Serra 1991; Morgan 2017, 294–295; Brown 2016), the popular readiness for a per­ sonality cult remains just one of its many preconditions (Kallis 2006). Still, at least a couple of bottom­up scenarios related to existing person­ ality cults appear to work without considerable executive supervision. The first is the spontaneous creative and economic activity filling the gaps inten­ tionally or inadvertently left in the cultic narratives: whereas the large­scale

262  Kirill Postoutenko and Darin Stephanov production of the leaders’ images, busts and writings in Fascist Italy and Russia of the last two decades was benevolently observed and silently ap­ proved from the top (Hille 2010, 46; Cassiday and Johnson 2010, 707), the fictitious narratives of family life at the late­nineteenth­century German court were published and sold en masse despite the outright hostility of the main prototype (EG). The second, more intricate development is the politi­ cal instrumentalization of deceased rulers for political purposes in pluralis­ tic societies. Whereas some retroactively instituted cults (Chinggis Khan in Mongolia) were uncontroversial (Bulag 1988), the recycling of cultic person­ alities has been often accompanied by fierce contestation of hagiographical narratives, outbreaks of iconoclasm and idolatry: the examples of Simon Bolivar, Queens Elisabeth I and Victoria, Tito, Stalin and Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) are quite telling in this respect (JP; TT; Carrera Damas 1973, 263; Zeuske 1987; Jowitt 1997; Glyptis 2008; 453; Halder 2013, 275–296; Zürcher 2013, 58).

How do personality cults die? In what ways and to what degree do they sow the seeds of their own destruction? Given that most of the ruler cults hinge on the top­down distribution of personally administered resources ranging from time and compassion to money and fame (see above), the cultic veneration of a leader would nor­ mally cease with his or her death or another form of disempowerment (XM). Nevertheless, the very passing of a single cultic personality does not rule out the possibility of subsequent veneration of a successor, particularly if the social, political and economic presuppositions of the previous cult remain in place (Tucker 1979, 347; Rigby 1980; Gill 1992; Gill 2010, 140; Polese and Horák 2015): in fact, damnatio memoriae was often used in various settings to enable the fresh new start of the next cult (Pailler and Sablayrolles 1994, 28; Warner 2004, 1–20; Najibullah 2018). The latter circumstance explains the curious fact that the dismantling of Joseph Stalin’s cult, symptomati­ cally performed by one of his obedient henchmen – Nikita Khrushchev – was accompanied by the instant canonization of the speeches given by the new First Secretary of the Communist Party (Ennker 1994, 13; Pyzhikov 2003, 54). Inversely, the abrupt change of a political system could turn a per­ sonality cult into an avoidable liability, as was the case with post­war Italy (Cavalli 1998, 170; Gundle 1998, 187; Petrone 2004, 349). On the discursive level, the explicit succession of personality cults is com­ plicated by the unfavorable connotations of the very term: invented by Karl Marx as a negative “asymmetrical concept” (Marx 1877; Koselleck 1989, 212–215; Plamper 2004, 25; Kirchner 2011, 883), the word combination is predominantly employed for the Orientalist othering of the alleged enemies of Western civilizations such as Persians, ancient Greeks, Mongols and Rus­ sians (as opposed to ancient Greeks, Romans, Russians and “Westerners”, respectively – see DZ; Pippidi 1941, 9; Sartre 1947, 93; Said 2003, 54; Madsen

Responding to questions, formulating ideas  263 Majbom 2009, 153). This state of affairs made many scholars doubt its schol­ arly value (Odesskiī and Fel’dman 2004, 77; Apor 2017, 27–30). Yet the spe­ cial role of ruling persons (as opposed to institutions) in the power system of personality cults, reverberated on discursive, medial and interactional levels, makes a strong case for sticking to the old terminology despite all its flaws (Pittman 2017, 535–536).

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Index

adoration 190, 251; of leaders 6, 8, 76, 179, 188, 190, 254; rituals 22 Aeschylus 7 Afinogenov, Alexander 185 Agra 47 Akbar 46, 48, 56, 60 AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, Party for Justice and Development) 235, 236, 238–241, 242, 245–246; Siyasi Akademi (AKP Political Academy) 238 al­Assad, Hafiz 21–22, 27 Alexander I 65, 67, 69–70, 73–75, 255; accessibility of 67, 70, 76; birthday of 65; commercial exploitation of image 73, 74–75; conversations with ordinary subjects 69–71, 256; cult of 64, 71, 72, 73, 75–77; as father of the fatherland 67, 68; funerary procession 73; healing royal touch of 71, 256; humility of 69, 76; and micro cross-dating 72; and myth of naming 72; monogram of 66–77, 69, 76, 256; name day of 66, 68; and Nicholas I 73–75, 77; portrait of 65, 66, 69, 75, 76, 259; and power/ status differential 70–71, 76; simplicity of 69, 71, 76; visibility of 69, 70; visits to the countryside 68–72 Alexander the Great 8, 11, 170, 261 al­Fazl, Abu 48, 58, 59 alien observation 7 all­seeing eye/eye of Providence 73, 74 Andreeva, Maria 185 Anıtkabir (Mustafa Kemal’s Mausoleum) 236, 243 anti­fascist 146, 152, 153, 155, 224, 231; partisan movement 145, 148; struggle 221; symbols 144 Antique 6–7, 9, 13 Aristotle 168

Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal 132, 236, 242, 246, 247, 262 Augustus 1, 34–36, 38, 171, 253, 261 Baharistan-i Ghaybi 46, 51–53, 57–58 Bengal 46, 50, 51, 53–54, 56, 59 Biao, Lin 25 birthday: of Emperor Alexander I 65; of Ceaușescu 220; of Empress Elizaveta 66; of Hitler 191; of the ruler 65, 129, 131; of Stalin 25, 26, 128, 130, 187; of Tito 130; of Kaiser Wilhelm I 114; of Kaiser Wilhelm II 107, 110 Black Turks – White Turks 243, 245 Bible 58, 164, 172–173, 188, 190, 194 Big Brother 171 body language 236–245; and Bordieu 238; “Islamic” 236; as political strategy 236, 238, 239, 247; and religious references 245 Bokassa I 1 Bolshevism i, 120, 164 de Bordeaux, Austin 58 Bosnia and Herzegovina 146, 149, 152 boyars 9 Bucharest 10, 220, 222, 224 Bukharin, Nikolai 10, 185 Byzantine 11, 105 Caesar 12 Caligula 8, 22, 33, 35–37, 105, 256 canon 172, 174, 189, 193, 194; legal 194; Nazi textual 187, 191; political 164 canonic texts 163, 173–174 canonization 163, 172, 183; of Constitution of the Soviet Union 184, 187, 189–190; of Constitution of the United States 193; definition of 163; and deification 163, 167, 173–174,

274 Index 194; Hitler’s 181; Khrushchev’s 262; of Mein Kampf 184, 187–188, 190; practices 163, 174, 188, 194; and random signaling 166–168, 174, 179; Roosevelt’s 179, 194; Stalin’s 181; textual 173–174, 179, 186, 191, 194, 262 Carol II, King 224 carte­de­visite 98, 107, 112 Casimir IV, King 9 Ceaușescu, Nicolae 218–219, 221–226, 231, 255, 256, 258; as architect of modern Romania 220, 225–228; and birth support policy 228; as champion of world peace 220, 228–230, 253; at construction sites 226; and consumer goods 228, 256; cult of 218–224, 227, 229–232, 259; doctrine 226; epithets 21, 24; and the new international economic order 229; and past Romanian rulers 219, 231–232, 261; as pater patriae 252; portraits 229, 232; protests against 232; slogans 227, 229–230; as „Sun King” 257; and urbanization 228, 231; as young revolutionary 219–225; as warden of national independence and unity 220, 230–232, 253; working visits 226–227 Chancellor: of Britain 14; of Germany 14–16; Lord 86 charisma: al­Assad’s 22; Ceaușescu’s 21; and cult communicative artifacts 23–24; Elizabeth I’s 126; Mao’s 23; and modern media 79; and the Mughal cult 47; routinization of 170; a ruler’s 22–25, 27–28, 30–31, 33, 38–40, 122; Victoria’s 81, 89, 93; in Weber’s sense 22, 121; Wilhelm II’s 105, 115, 117 charismatic authority 22, 23–24, 25–26, 29, 38 Chavez, Hugo 22, 31–33, 256, 259 Četnik movement 146, 147, 149 Ҫiller, Tansu 238 China 31, 96, 261; the Cultural Revolution in 26, 29, 131; and Mao Zedong 11, 22, 127, 129, 260; personality cult in 2, 28, 29 Chishti, Shaykh Salim 56 Chkalov, Valery 171 Claudius 37 Churchill, Winston 183 Collins, Randall 31 commemorations 144, 150, 156

commercial exploitation (of the royal image) 73, 74 communication 2, 23, 74, 124, 167, 184; Beckett’s view of 165; channels 133; charismatic 122; cult 23, 128, 173; cultural 172; and Hitler 186; political 172; and Queen Victoria’s death 85–86, 88; religious 172; and Roosevelt 179–181; and Stalin 186; with the ruler 122, 133 communication codes 3, 163, 166, 175, 257, 259; analogue 174; digital 174, 257; indexical, iconic and symbolic 173 Constitution of the Soviet Union 164, 179, 184, 187–191, 192, 193–194 Constitution of the United States 164, 169, 193–194 consumption 75, 117, 131, 134, 219, 227 Contarini, Ambrogio 9 “counter­memory” 144 creative abstraction 65, 72, 76 Croatia 128, 145–150, 152, 155, 156, 253 cross­dating 65, 68, 72, 73, 74 cues 27, 74, 164–165 cult artefacts 125, 131, 134, 155 cult community 121, 124–130 cult production 21, 24–26, 28–30, 33, 39 cult rituals 33, 37–39, 129 Cultural Revolution 25, 26, 32, 131; and mangoes 23; and Red Guards 25, 28, 29 Curzon, Lord George 93, 94 Cyrus the Great 7 Czechoslovakia 123, 130, 218, 227, 230 Dada, Idi Amin 31 Darshan (ritual gazing on the emperor) 47 deification 163, 172, 174, 179; Alexander the Great’s 170; Caligula’s 256; and canonization 163, 194; chronological dimension of 171; definition of 163; Hitler’s 181, 188, 190; of leaders 6, 174, 182, 187; practices 163; and random signaling 167–168, 179; Roosevelt’s 179, 194; routines of 170; Stalin’s 181; and textual canonization 173, 194 Demirel, Süleyman 244 democracy 150, 154, 168–169, 181, 183, 240; the Front of Socialist Unity and Democracy 219 devlet baba (the state as a fatherly figure) 242

Index  275 dictatorship 122, 134, 194; Argentine 254; Greek 254; Myanmar 254; Nazi 181; Soviet 10, 181 dignitas 168, 170 Diocletian 37 divine cult 7, 33 Duvalier, Francois and Jean Claude 30 Eastern (Oriental) 6 Ecevit, Bülent 244 Eizenstein, Sergey 11 elections 32, 34, 169, 181–183, 254 emotional amplification 22, 31, 38 environmental changes (“events”) 164 Erbakan, Necmettin 241, 246 Erdoğan, Recep Tayyip 235–236, 239, 241–243, 246–247; and Angela Merkel 241; and Atatürk 236, 242–244, 247; as authoritarian leader 239–241, 247, 255–256; biography of 241–242; as a ‘Black Turk’ 243; body language of 236, 239–243, 245–247; cult of 242, 253, 259; as elderly statesmen and caring father 239–240; and Europe 240; and himaye 240; and humble origins 239, 241; and Milli Görüş (National Outlook) Movement 246; and the ‘Rabia Wave’ 245–246; and the stately wave 239–240; and the Umma 245–247; voice of 239, 242 ethno­national(ist) 149, 156 Euromissile crisis 229 evaluative statements 6, 14 fascist 146; Italy 7, 11–12, 262; Germany 146; Romania 221–223, 230–231 fatherland 64, 75, 76; father of 67, 123, 252 father of the people (landesvater) 107, 108–110, 111, 112 Fawā’id al-Fu’ād 56 film 11, 12, 64, 122, 189; Kaiser Wilhelm II on 104, 258; massive street renaming in Serbia on 145, 155; Queen Victoria on 79, 97–98 Filofey of Pskov 11 flattery 21–22, 28–29, 30, 33, 35–37, 39; inflation 22, 33, 35–37, 40 Fletcher, Giles 9–10 Franco, Francisco 26, 256, 257, 261 Frederick the Great 109, 170 Friedrich Wilhelm IV 106, 109, 110 Führer 169, 179, 182, 185–186, 190, 191

Gaius Verres 170 Gawr 51 gender 122, 237, 238 Genghis Khan 10 gesture(s) 7, 10, 72, 226, 236–238, 240–241; Clinton’s thumbs up 247; Erdoğan’s 240, 245, 247; “Merkel rhombus” 14–15; Nazi salute 12; Nixon’s double­V victory 247; ‘Rabia Wave’ 245 Gheorghiu­Dej, Gheorghe 218, 222–223, 225 gift­giving 130–131; counter­gift 107, 114 God 67–68, 73–74, 86, 97, 105, 173; Caligula as 36; Hindu 52–53; House of [Kaaba] 52; Islamic 50; Jahangir and 50, 52, 56–58; and Kabiraj 49; and Mirza Nathan 49–52; Persian ruler as 8; prostrations before 7, 10; and Raja Kalyan 50, 52; as shahanshah 53; “Son of ” 260; Trujillo and 31; worship as 34 Godunov, Boris 9 Goli Otok 148 Gorky, Maxim 185 Greek 6–9, 33, 38–39, 74 Gripenberg, Sebastian 70, 75–76 Heraklitus 172 Herodot Halikarnassos 7 Herzen, Alexander 10 Hess, Rudolf 179 himaye (a social patronage practice) 240 Hitler, Adolf 165, 169, 171, 177–178, 181–182, 184; cult of 11, 22; as leader 186; letters to 106, 108, 184, 186; and Mein Kampf 164, 188, 190, 191, 192; and national genealogies/lineages 170, 261; and personal deification 186, 194; political rivals of 11; and random signaling 174, 186; salute 12; and textual canonization 186, 188, 194; and Third Reich 12; and Tito’s partisan movement 147, 153 Hofmann, Heinrich 177 Hohenzollern 105 Homer 164, 189; Iliad 164, 189 Horace 173 humanization (of the monarchy) 106–107, 109–111, 117 identification (with the monarch) 107, 113–114, 117, 129, 134 Ihtimam Khan 49–50, 54 Il Sung, Kim 253 imperialism 84, 95

276 Index informational: asymmetries 180; exchange 180; noise 164–165; overload 181; privileges 182; value 165, 173, 183, 185 interaction 3, 164–168, 172, 184, 237–238, 260; context­bound 258; in personality cults 4, 251, 257; reflexivity of 257; rituals 31–32, 39; ruler­ruled 67, 69, 71, 182; rules 191; social 106, 183 International Year of Peace (1986) 229 Islam 58, 246; fate in 49; political 241–242, 245; Sunni 236, 246 Islamic: body language 236; cosmology 50; God 50; idea 53; millennium 48; principles 240; schools 246; symbols 245; world 246; world civilization 246 Islamist parties 241, 244 Islam Khan 52, 54–55 Islam Khan Chishti 59 Isocrates 7 Italy 8, 123, 128, 132, 253, 262; Fascist 11–12, 22, 120, 127, 262 Ivan IV the Terrible 9 Jahangir 48, 51–54, 56–58, 254, 256; cult of 46, 60 Jesuit 9, 58 Jesus 164, 173 Jinping, Xi 29 Jong­il, Kim 28 Julius Caesar 21, 34, 35, 261 Kabiraj (Bengali physician) 49–51 Kaganovich, Lazar 25 Khrushchev, Nikita 10–11, 14, 121, 262 kings 1, 14, 53, 57, 251, 255; of Assam 57; cult of 132; divine right of 105, 122, 132; Hellenistic 38; of the “Golden Age” of Spain 21; Mesopotamian 163; Persian 96 kissing 235; the foot 7, 34, 51; the knee 7 Klutsis, Gustav 176, 177 kneeling 8, 9; as greeting 9; as praying 7, 245; as veneration 7, 8; as worship 9, 11 Lahuri, ʻAbd al­Sattar 55–56 laicism 245 legitimacy 26, 133, 173; of the American president 181; authoritarian regime 121; charismatic 26; déficit of 73, 77; of deified individuals 184; leader 26, 39–40, 129; in personality cults, 170;

popular 255; Rakosi cult 132; rational­ legal 26; reflexive, 183; ruler 122; of sacred authority 124; Soviet regime 26; of state or party organizations 26 Lenin, Vladimir 11–12, 151, 170, 187, 261; cult of 22, 30, 129, 253; as Oriental despot 10 Liszt, Franz 116 lithographs 75, 111 Louis XIV 104, 105, 109, 235, 257, 260 love/affection 129, 147; familial, 80; of good 84; for the ruled 67, 70, 81, 95, 124, 255; for the ruler 68, 70, 73, 79, 82, 89, 113, 124, 127, 128, 130, 178; paternal 255 loyalty signaling 22, 25, 27–28, 30–31, 34, 37–40 Luise, Queen 111, 112 Lysander 170, 172 Macedonia (North) 146, 149, 153 Macron, Emmanuel 16 Mahdi 58 Majalis-i Jahangiri (”Jahangir’s Assemblies”) 55 Mao 127, 256; badges 29, 128, 131, 260; cult of 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 129; and mangoes 23; as ”a new Stalin” 11; portrait of 24; and Red Guards 29 Margeret, Jacques 10 master(ship): Chishti 56; in the Mughal cult 48, 52–53, 55–57; of the Russian Emperor 65, 66, 68, 74; of Kaiser Wilhelm II 105 Mazzini, Giuseppe 12 Mecca 52 Mein Kampf 188, 193; canonization of 179, 184, 188, 190; dust cover of 188, 191, 192; editions of 193; manuscript of 191; as Nazi textual canon 164, 187, 191; recitation of 190, 194 memory agents 144, 146, 156 memory­making 143–146, 150, 155–56 memoryscapes 156 Merkel, Angela 14, 15, 241; as Germany’s Madonna 15–16; as mother of the nation 16; “rhombus” 14–15 messages 134, 164, 182–186, 190, 194, 258; canonic 164, 172–173, 190; and canonization 163; coded 164; deified individuals’ 164, 171; ideological 27; Hitler’s 177, 186; Mughal Emperor’s 57; oracle 172; oral 172; in personality cults 173; Queen Victoria’s 258; and

Index  277 random signaling 164; to Roosevelt 179, 181; Stalin’s 177; US President’s 180–181 Milli Görüş (National Outlook) Movement 241, 246 Mirza Nathan 46, 49–50, 52–55, 57–58, 60 modernity 1, 12, 107, 122, 132 Mongol 8, 10, 51 Morris, Lewis 84–85, 97 Moses 173, 179 Mughal India 46, 47, 254, 257, 259, 261 Muhammad 51, 164, 173, 189, 261 murid (disciple) 46, 53 Muscovy, Great Duc of 9, 11 Mussolini, Benito 11–12, 22, 255, 256, 258, 261 mystique (of the Mughal Emperor) 47–48, 54 myth of naming 72 Napoleon I Bonaparte 1, 16, 261 nationalism 156; Ceaușescu’s (Romanian) 218–220; German 132; Indian 94; Italian 132; methodological 145, 156; and militarization 132; Polish 132; Serbian 149; religious (Turkish) 246; Soviet 132; Turkish 132 nationalistic: agendas 149; feelings 132; memory work 156; turn 219 nation­building 121, 122, 143, 156 Naumann, Friedrich 105, 116 Nazism 12, 120, 164 “New Deal” 164, 194 new international economic order 229 new international political order 229 Nicholas I 73–74 “noise”: informational 164–165; rhetorical 69 non­aligned movement 145, 146, 148 nostalgia 134, 143, 146 Nuremberg Party Rallies 2, 31, 171, 256 objectifying observation 6 occidental 7 Olearius, Adam 10 oracle of Delphi 165 oriental 7, 10, 93 Ottoman Empire 11, 124 Özal, Turgut 244 Paleologue, Sophia 11 Panofsky, Erwin 237 partisan: heroes 151; movement 145, 146, 147, 148

Pasternak, Boris 185 pater patriae (father of the fatherland) 123, 252 patriarchal 109, 123, 125, 244 patrimonial regimes 30–31 patronage 106, 107, 114; of the imperial household 38; letters 107, 114; networks 30; practice 240; of Queen Victoria 94; relationships 30, 39; of state 30 Persian 7, 8, 51, 60, 96; personality cult 7–8 personalization (of the monarchy) 107, 110–113, 117 Peter I the Great 9, 68, 121 petitions (to the monarch) 106, 107 pharaohs, Egyptian 163 Philon 8 photography 97, 111, 122, 258 Plato 168 Poland 9, 68, 132, 253, 255 political iconography 237 Possevino, Antonino 9, 10 power/status differential 64, 70, 76; and reversal 70, 71, 76 presidents 183, 251, 255, 260; party 244; U.S. 169 princeps 13–14, 34 propaganda 25, 26, 27, 46–47, 57; AKP 240; Bolshevik 27; cult 27; Louis XIV 109; North Korean cult 27; Romanian 130, 219–221, 225, 228–229, 232 prophets 53, 164, 172, 179, 183 prostration 7, 8, 10, 34, 54, 257 proximity: rules of 13; to the emperor 54 public sphere 122, 126, 134 Putin, Vladimir 14, 16, 30, 255, 261 qalandar (mendicant) 55 qiblah (the direction of the Kaaba) 52, 56–57 Raja Kalyan 50, 52 random signaling 163–164, 182–184, 188; and canonization 166–168; and Constitution of the Soviet Union 179; definition of 163–164; and deification 179; and Hitler 174, 181; and Mein Kampf 179; in Nazi Germany 182, 184, 186; and Roosevelt 174, 179; practices 163; in the Soviet Union 182, 184, 186; and Stalin 174, 181; and turn­taking 165, 189 Rathenau, Walther 105 RCP (Romanian Communist Party) 218–225, 227, 230–231

278 Index Reich: Third 12, 165, 190 revisionism: of Tito’s image 149; of Yugoslav Communist memory 144, 145, 149–150 Roman Empire 1, 8, 11–12, 33–34, 59; Holy 11, 12, 131 Romania 218–220, 222, 224–225, 229–232, 257–258; and the godparent institution 125; national minorities in 229; personality cult in 2; slogans about 227, 229–230; and Stalin 130 Romanov dynasty 9 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 164, 169, 175, 179–181, 256; and the American Constitution 194; and the composite Christian deity 179; Fireside Chats 177, 180, 182; personality cult 193–194; and random signaling 174 royal 57, 73, 76, 98, 104, 109–110, 112–113, 117, 124; accessibility 67, 70, 76, 256; accession 64; birthday 65; busts 75, 76, 126, 151; capital 51; ceremonial 85; coronation 64, 74, 130, 219; dignity 84, 117; family 64, 69, 73, 74, 80, 82, 112, 132; glorification 73, 75; house 108, 111; humility 36–37, 69, 76, 256, 261; iconography 104, 107, 117; monogram 66; name day 66, 68; palace 8; persona 67, 98; portrait 65; postcards 105; simplicity 69, 71, 76, 93; sovereignty 255; status 39; touch 71, 173; visit 65, 68 RP (Refah Partisi, Welfare Party) 242 ritual amplification 22, 25, 31–33, 38–39 ritual unification 129 ruler cult 8, 121, 123–127, 129, 134 ruler’s posthumous cult 73, 75, 128–129 salutation 8, 12 scenario of power 73, 75 Secretary General: in Romania 218, 219, 225, 229; in the Soviet Union 169, 182, 185, 186, 189 self­observation 7, 17 Serbia 2, 145–149, 151–153, 155, 157 Sese Seko, Mobutu 21, 256 shabīh-i aqdas (imperial portrait) 54, 57 signals 23, 28–29, 164–165, 257 society: functional differentiation of 167; instability of 169, 253, 261; stratification of 166 Sophokles 166; Oedipus the King 166 staging 128, 256; of Atatürk 244, 247; of the Atatürk cult 132; of bonds of

trust 131; of Erdoğan 238, 244, 247; of the leader 126; of the physical body in Turkey 236; of politics in Turkey 236–237, 239, 242, 244–245 Stalin, Joseph 11, 14, 130, 176, 181–182, 184–187; and Bukharin 10, 185; and Constitution of the Soviet Union 164, 189, 191, 192, 193; cult of 11, 22, 25–26, 30, 171, 262; as “coryphaeus of science” 30; as “Father of Peoples” 24, 124; and followers 177; as “Genghis Khan with a phone” 10, 258; gifts to 128; as God 178; as leader 165, 179; letters to 184, 186; mourning of 128; never­ending applause to 260; as “Oriental despot” 10; and personal deification 194, 256; portraits of 260; and post factum genealogies/national lineages 170, 261; and random signaling 174, 186; and state posts 169; and textual canonization 174, 186, 194, 258; Tito’s defiance to 145, 147, 148 Stalinism 12, 185 Stoics 7 Sufi 48, 50, 53–56, 58, 60 symbolic kernel 69, 71 symbols 31, 121–122, 134, 164–165, 237, 243; anti­fascist 144; Caligula 37; of communal identity 32; of imperial rule 99; Islamic 245; kingship 35; of Mughal political authority 46; national 144; regime 129; religious 236, 245; secular 245; of senatorial identity 37; Tito 144; of the Victorian cultus 81 Tarikh-i Alfi (“Millennial History”) 48 telegraph 10, 128, 242, 258; and Queen Victoria 81, 86–89, 93, 98, 128 Tennyson, Lord Alfred 81, 84, 94 textbooks 31, 144, 147, 150 Thompson, John B. 107 Tiberius 35–36 Tito, Josip Broz 143–152, 154–156; baton of 130; birthday of 128, 130; birthplace of 128, 146; cult of 143–144, 146–147, 156, 253, 262; death of 147; image of 143, 145–146, 149, 151–152, 156; memory of 143, 145, 147–148, 150–152, 154; monuments of 144–145, 150–152, 154; narratives of 146–147, 149–150, 153, 156; and Nazis 253; partisans

Index  279 148–149, 150, 153; sign 153–154; slogans 152; and Stalin 148; street names 145, 151, 155; and Yugoslavia 127, 143, 146–149 Titostalgia 143, 147 totalization 72, 259 totalitarian: commemoration 150; leaders 183; political orders 121; states 121, 133; symbolism 150; systems 235; theory 122 “translatio imperii” 11, 12 Trotsky, Leon 10, 187 Trujillo, Rafael 31, 259 Tsar 8–10, 14, 16, 126–127; Alexander I 65, 68, 73; Fedor 9; Ivan IV the Terrible 9; Mikhail Romanov 9; Nicholas II 10, 11, 98; Persian 7 Turkey 2, 132, 235, 240–247, 253 turn­taking 165, 167, 182, 183, 189 Umma (community of Muslim believers) 245 Vasili III 11 veneration: of Alexander I 64, 70, 71, 72; of Alexander the Great 8; cultic 23, 157, 261–262; of Diocletian 37; of gods/God 7, 10; of the House of Arpad 132; of the leader/ruler 1, 7–8, 22–23, 125, 252, 262; of Mao 23; of Mein Kampf 191; of Shaykh Salim Chishti 56; of Roosevelt 180; of Stalin 11, 187; of St. Stephen 132; of the Tsar 8, 11 Victoria, Queen 79–81, 91–93, 259; and British Raj 93–95; and communication 258; and Diamond Jubilee of 1897 82, 85–86, 93, 98; and early cinema 97–98; death 79–81, 85–95, 97–100,

128; and India 80, 93–96; and Indian nationalism 81, 94–96; and maternal discourse 80–85, 96–97, 111, 124, 255; personality cult of 80–82, 86, 99, 252, 262; and photography 97; and power differential 252; and response of Australia 81, 84, 88–89, 91, 92, 93; and telegraph 86, 89, 124; and statuary 81, 91–93, 99 vilāyat (“sainthood”) 48 visibility: of ruler 64–65, 69, 126, 132–133, 253, 256; technologically mediated 89 Vodopyanov, Mikhail 179 Wagner, Richard 116 Warsaw Pact 218, 227, 230 Weber, Max 3, 22, 105, 121, 170, 181 Western (Occidental) 6 Wilhelm I, Kaiser 112, 114; democratic style of 260; portrait of 104; visualization of 111 Wilhelm II, Kaiser 104–107, 112–113, 115, 117, 252, 256, 258, 259; absolutist iconography 105, 107, 109, 112, 117; as Caligula 105; and charisma 105, 115, 117; cult of personality 80, 104–105, 117; on film 104; graphological description of 113; as Sun King 104, 105, 260 World War II 11, 33, 146–147, 225 Xenophon 7 Yugonostalgia 143 Yugoslavia (Socialist Federal Republic of) 2, 125, 143, 145–153, 155, 257; Tito’s 127–128, 130