Daniel Leese

• The modern personality cult, the godlike glorification of a political leader with mass medial techniques supported by excessive popular worship, appears to be a nearly universal feature of the 20th century with leader cults spreading from Albania to Zimbabwe. While the Stalin cult proved to be most influential in providing a blueprint for other socialist leader cults, none was to rival the intensity and scope of the cult of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). Contrary to claims of the Chinese Communist Party that emphasize the traditional nature of the cult or functionalist approaches that reduce it to mere social engineering, I propose to interpret the leader cult as a medium of symbolic power, as the creation of a communicative space that affected both the leadership's performative politics and the populace's adaptation of its directives. Socialist leader cults, unlike their fascist counterparts, relied less on the leader's fervent rhetoric than on the distribution and collective study of his printed works. Intended as a loyalty-creating device to ease the identification with the Communist Movement for its often illiterate supporters, the cult merged the success of the revolution with the fate of a single person. Controlling the leader's powerful image and sayings thus became a formidable task, as the gap between the petrified public image of an omniscient, unmoved mover and day to day politics paved the way for varying interpretations on all levels of society. Perhaps never have these tendencies become more obvious then during the Cultural Revolution, when cult-building came to serve most different purposes oscillating between manipulation, ritual obedience and cult anarchy. Like a magnifying glass, the cultural revolutionary Mao cult presents us with the unique possibility of studying the workings, consequences and defects of personality cults, offering a comparison with the experiences of other countries up to the present day.