Professor Stephen Kotkin: The Stalin cult is about his megalomania, but it's also about empowering the millions of people who identified with him, wanted to be like him, wanted to sacrifice for him, and here, he simultaneously blends in with the masses, but he also stands out.
Stalin spoke and wrote very accessibly in a kind of catechism style, rhetorical question and answer. The particular speech that's depicted here was about allowing for higher wages to workers, if they worked better. And this was highly controversial because many people thought the revolution should bring about equality. But Stalin argued in this speech that if you worked harder, you should get paid more, because we need to build our factories, raise our technological level, and compete in the international system.
1931 was a time of unbelievable upheaval, mass violence. About 5 to 7 million people died of starvation. At least 50 million starved but survived. But alongside the mass starvation, there were soaring hopes for a new world of peace, prosperity, social harmony. A world that would not be capitalist but would be socialist. The thrill was that all of this was right around the corner and that you could bring about this new world and you could live in this new world. A revolution is kind of like a social earthquake. The earth opens up, it cracks, and out come all of these people to rise to dizzying heights who, before the revolution, had very limited life chances.
Klutsis served the revolutionary cause. Not everyone understood that in serving this regime, they were effectively giving up their independent agency. Many of them thought that they were making it better. It's the great paradox of the age--an age, which could have so much bloodshed horror and terror, could produce such uplifting iconography and such fantastic works of art.