Soviet propaganda

Résumé du document

Lamarck and Darwin have killed God, finally, and for all time, so that He may never reappear after such blows. These great murderers deserve the gratitude of all mankind. Here is Vladimir Taneev, whose statement, published in 1879 on 'Communism States of the Future', reflects the anti-religious feeling of the socialist doctrine. Likewise, once the Soviet regime was established in 1917, Lenin launched an anti-religious policy, particularly directed against the Russian Orthodox Church. And yet, under the Soviet authorities, we could hear Stalin celebrated as "our happiness" or "our teacher, "our father", "our vozhd". The leaders, Lenin and Stalin were described with superhuman qualities of immortality, infallibility and perfectibility, and their images in political posters were represented the same way as icons in the Russian Orthodox Church. Indeed, these two leaders received the same treatment as the god of a religion, and yet, the regime advocated an anti-religious policy. We will therefore take an interest to the implementation of the anti-religious policy, at the time of the development of the cult, and,we will then deal with the reasons for this cult and the different way it manifested itself.

Extraits

[...] He then appeared as an abstraction, an essence. He was simply required to be, to exist as a presence in painted or sculpted form. In this kind of representation, artists no longer portrayed the man but the idea of the man; he thus had become a concept, the embodiment of all virtue, a divinity. His superhuman nature was sometimes depicted by his monumentality compared to other men by the use of a perspectival distortion. In a sense, we can say that what artists were depicting was God. [...]

[...] This dual representation of Lenin on the one hand as an immortal, infallible man and as an abstraction and on the other hand as simple man of the people is called the phenomenon of leader's two bodies”. The cult of Lenin incorporated this idea after Lenin's death and created a system of visual signs for expressing these concepts in image, Lenin could be thus represented either as the man or the politic body, the notion. The sculpture of S.D. Merkurov, The Funeral of the Vozhd' produced in 1927, reflects the theme of leader two's bodies”. It shows Lenin lying after death, his arms at his side, born aloft by eight male pallbearers. [...]

[...] Thus we can say that these festivals looked like religious commemoration celebrating both soviet values and the leader. Likewise, in the local community the focus for new ritual was the club, which was envisioned by some as a substitute church or a civic temple. Indeed, the decoration could remember this of a church since it was composed of bust or portrait of a leader, slogans on the wall, red table cover and a dais. Moreover, meeting to honour special people or events which were organized in these clubs could be said to be ritual service of a quasi-religious kind. [...]

[...] Thus a movement was launched to promote the cult of Lenin as well as public festivals and new private rituals. Over the next several years following Lenin's death, his cult developed without constraint, since the government itself organized the cult, and artists and writers produced new images, rituals and symbols incorporating both Russian Orthodox and traditional Russian folk rhetoric and practice. Henceforth, Lenin was invoked as dear father”, and at the funeral some people carried Lenin's portrait on sticks, like religious banners in a Russian Orthodox procession. [...]

[...] The visual arts have played a considerable role in promoting the new cult of Stalin. Political posters depicted the relationship between the two men, thus implying the connection between, Lenin's sacred aura and his association with Stalin. But the turning point in the evolution of the cult of Stalin, that is to say the moment since when he was no longer portrayed in Lenin's company as second fiddle, took place in October 1931 when Stalin published a letter defending Lenin's achievements against criticism and asserting his infallibility. [...]