The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire, 1945–1961

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

-- Jan Plamper, University of Limerick

Tikhomirov leads his readers on the remarkable journey that saw East Germans replace the cult of the Führer with the cult of Stalin. His new archival material offers a fascinating glimpse into the East German reception of the myths, symbols, and rituals of communism's preeminent Big Brother. It is always challenging to gauge public opinion in a dictatorship, but it is hard to imagine coming closer to knowing exactly what East Germans made of their new master than we do in this outstanding book.

-- Gary Bruce, University of Waterloo

The Stalin Cult in East Germany and the Making of the Postwar Soviet Empire, 1945—1991 offers an entangled history of the unique case of Sovietization in the German Democratic Republic and the transfer of the Stalin cult from the Soviet Union to its former enemy. This monograph is based on a variety of Russian and German archival sources. It analyzes the role of several different historical actors and casts light on both the organization and reception of the Stalin cult in East German society. Finally available in a revised and expanded English version, this book is invaluable for the study of the Soviet mission abroad, not only in East Germany and Eastern Europe, but also for understanding personality cults and communism globally.

-- Rósa Magnúsdóttir, University of Iceland

Tikhomirov presents us with a comprehensively researched and carefully analyzed history of the Stalin cult in East Germany, from its foundations in the immediate postwar years to its demise with Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. Particularly notable are his explorations of the shifting social and cultural meanings of the cult and of the iconoclasm that inevitably accompanied it.

-- Norman M. Naimark, Stanford University

Tikhomirov’s ground-breaking and highly original research on Soviet propaganda and the Stalin cult in East Germany represents archive-based cultural and social history at its very best.

-- Jeremy E. Taylor, University of Nottingham

Alexey Tikhomirov offers an innovative approach to this phenomenon by analyzing the export and reception of Stalin’s cult in East Germany from 1945 to 1961: his method of entangled history opens new vistas. The study is well-grounded in Russian and German archival sources. It has plenty of archival photographs illustrating the indoctrination practices. The methodology that the author selected— entangled history—proved most productive for analyzing a broad range of historical evidence and factors and raised historical research to a new level.

* The Russian Revi