Jan Plamper

Cultural Production, Cultural Consumption: Post-Stalin Hybrids

In July 1954, Ekaterina Davydovna Voroshilova copied into her diary a letter in which she recounted what appears to have been a private gathering of the Stalinist elite and their children following a Soviet holiday or a family celebration. Voroshilova, the Old Bolshevik and wife of Klimentii Efremovich Voroshilov, undisputed patron of the Socialist Realist easel painters, described a small, private celebration whose participants were mostly family members of the Stalinist elite—Mikoian, Kaganovich, and Shvernik were among the names mentioned. “These are good people,” Voroshilova wrote,

Georgian Koba or Soviet ‘Father of Peoples’? The Stalin Cult and Ethnicity

Stalin came from the periphery of the multiethnic Russian empire. Yet for most of his century he was seen as embodying the supraethnic Bolsheviks. Only recently a pronounced trend in scholarship has begun to emphasise Stalin’s Georgian background and to regard him as a product of Transcaucasia rather than internationalist Marxism. This trend, which one might call the ‘Georgianization’ of Stalin, stresses the formative impact of his region on his behavioural patterns, rhetorical style and personality structure. Specifically, Georgianising scholars have foregrounded the role of Georgian literary models in shaping his rhetoric,2 the socialising impact of the lower-class culture of violence of the Georgian village,3 the continuing dominance of the Caucasian principle of blood vendetta, and the power of personal networks along the lines of Transcaucasian clan relations.4