Nagornaya O.S. Tikhomirov A. A. “The Best friend of the German people”: the cult of Stalin in Eastern Germany (1945–1961). M.: ROSSPEN, 2014. 310 p.

Abstract: This review presents a critical analysis of A. A. Tikhomirov’s newest study dedicated to the cult of Stalin in Eastern Germany during the formation period of party and government structures. The review’s author notes that the monograph is a worthy contribution to the current discussions regarding the transnational measurement of late Stalinism history, to the reconstruction of the peripheries of the Soviet empire’s symbolic mechanisms of assimilation, and to the study of the working specifics of the “discourse dictatorship” and (self)creation of “dictatorial subject”. The key points of the analysis are the specifics behind the creation of Stalinist symbolic space in Central and Eastern Europe, its homogenisation and encapsulation, as well as the role of government, group, and individual actors. The most significant conclusions the author comes to are his comments on the decisive role of the “patriarch generation”, which lived for a long time in Soviet emigration and thoroughly studied the rules of the Soviet discourse games and sought to follow them for securing and strengthening their own power, and on the mutual beneficial creation of a structure to subordinate the peripheries to the centre of the empire. The reviewer criticises the part of the author’s argument that is based on initially ideologised materials of the West German Social Democratic Party of Germany, logical contradictions, and unbalanced national and transnational perspectives. Valuating positively the book author’s research overall, the reviewer notes possible direction for its continuation as a detailed analysis of the competition of the imperial peripheries between themselves before of Moscow regarding questions of the correct symbolisation of the cult community.

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