Portraits of Comrade Stalin always gaze at you with disapproval, but beneath his mustache, he is smiling- Stalinist era joke

As the above Soviet joke indicates, and a whole host of others made at the Soviet dictator's expense, the Stalin cult was often contradictory and had multiple readings. A cult of personality in an avowedly Marxist-Leninist state was itself a contradiction; Marxism was about the evolution of broad social forces, not the individual leader transcending them. Additionally, the fascism's use of the leader cult made the emergence of a similar cult in the USSR doubly problematic as it was a sign that the two ideological enemies were not so different after all. The Stalin era press often mocked the individual pretensions of both Hitler and Mussolini while simultaneously hewing to the line that both men were the puppets of monopoly capital. Yet, by 1929 there clearly was a personality cult around Stalin, and this cult only grew throughout the 1930s. This early genesis of the Stalin cult posed problems for historians to analyze it as it was deeply intertwined with Stalin's own ascent to power.

One popular interpretation of Stalin cult was that it really was an outgrowth of the Lenin cult and served as a means to a socialist end. Lenin, who was less enthusiastic about a personality cult around his own person, allowed for a cult of personality to emerge around him. Nina Tumarkin notes in her study Lenin Lives! that busts of Lenin, speeches, and portraits all created a mythos around Lenin as the founder of the new Soviet state. Lenin gave his tacit consent to this cult because it served the purposes of state. Given the relative underdevelopment of Russian political life and the novelty of the Soviet experiment, it was important to package the Soviet leadership in familiar forms. Thus a Lenin portrait became something akin to an Orthodox icon displacing the symbolic norms and rituals of the tsarist state. The Lenin cult became more sharply drawn as Lenin receded from the decision making-process because of his illness, and culminated in his embalmed corpse, a move that had universal agreement among the leadership circles of the USSR but was vocally attacked by Lenin's surviving family. The preexistence of the Lenin cult made it much easier for the Stalin cult to cement itself as its natural successor. David Brandenberger observes that the Stalin cult was not only a form of legitimation by continuity, but acted as:

a mechanism for political mobilization by advancing a larger than-life hero capable of embodying the power, legitimacy and appeal of the Soviet 'experiment'.

Thus the cult, which Brandenberger saw as more in line with other dictatorships focused on programs of national development, was more of a propaganda tool than a reflection of Stalin's vanity. In a similar vein, Sarah Davies has argued that Stalin was relatively hands off his own personality cult, intervening when the cult's veneration of Stalin became too personalistic. Stalin instead preferred his depictions to not be Stalin the man, but rather Stalin as the symbol of the cause. Both Davies and Brandenberger's interpretations are in line with the reminiscences of those who penetrated Stalin's inner circle. H. G. Wells, for example, saw Stalin as incredibly modest and not interested in himself as the topic of conversation, while the German intellectual Emil Ludwig's noted in his conversations with Stalin that the Soviet dictator framed the role of the individual in strictly Marxist terms. More tellingly, Stalin reportedly dressed down his son Vasilii for claiming "I'm a Stalin" during one of his drunken benders saying:

You're not Stalin and I'm not Stalin. Stalin is Soviet power. Stalin is what he is in the newspapers and the portraits, not you, not even me!

In this schema, had Stalin not existed, the Soviet state would need to invent "Stalin." The Polish war scare of 1927, the self-imposed failures of the NEP economy, the rise of fascism, and the Depression all culminated in a general pressure for a harder turn to collectivization and crash industrialization. The contours of the Lenin cult had laid the foundations for the Stalin cult, which subsequently thrived under the encouragement of the dictator.

One of the problems with Davies and Brandenberger's interpretation of the Stalin cult is that they leave out agency and often consign Stalin to a more passive role in the construction of the cult. One of the realities of Stalin's political leadership was that as the central node of power, his circle had to placate him. Some historians have argued that Stalin's relative passivity in the cult's construction was part and parcel of his triumph over his rivals. Sheila Fitzpatrick's On Stalin's Team has noted that for some of "Team Stalin", producing these paeans to the Soviet leader was a component of cementing their own power in the hierarchy of the Soviet system. The Vozhd', Fitzpatrick notes, had to have his knights around him and celebrating Stalin became a way to ensure their own subordinate position within a powerful state hierarchy. Beria, for example, produced a fawning biography of Stalin's youth in Georgia, which Stalin dismissed as self-serving fluff. Moreover, the leadership circle's propagation of the Stalin cult also had its own miniature version for them. Both Beria and Molotov had their own anniversary celebrations throughout the USSR, and framed it as a reflection of the larger Stalin one.

The activity of the circle around Stalin in creating the cult has led some historians, most notably Simon Sebag Montefiore to argue that Stalin was a form of neo-tsardom (eg Red Tsar) and the personality cult was a form of court politics in a modern setting. However, such an interpretation ignores the wider gulfs between the tsars and Stalin; unlike Nicholas II's ministers or Peter I's Boyars, the operation of Stalinist government was markedly different than its predecessors. Ministerial operation was more homogeneous under Stalin and Soviet elites seldom had an alternative source of power other than the state. Moreover, as Stephen Kotkin has opined, behind closed doors, the Bolsheviks talked like Bolsheviks, and much of the charged public rhetoric matched what was said in private. This facet of Soviet leadership has led some historians like Jan Plamper to argue that the Stalin cult evolved out of long-standing traditions within the pre-1917 Russian milieu that Stalin later instrumentalized to his own ends. In his The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy in Power, Plamper emerged from divergent historical traditions, but also had to contend with the leadership traditions within the Russian radical environment. leadership cults in these groups were simultaneously both shallow and pervasive, with martyred leaders being both symbols of personal heroism and the movement writ large. This encouraged a type of eschewing of traditional leadership symbolism within the Soviet system, as discerned by Brandenberger and Davies, and was apparent in the Lenin cult. But the advent of Stalin led to an "immodest modesty" in Plamper's estimation, as the Stalin eased himself into the cult as the central figure. Stalin thus tailored his cult to various audiences to suit his own ends. Thus when facing an Central European intellectual like Emil Ludwig, Stalin positioned his personality cult gingerly as an expression of Russian underdevelopment and a necessary evil. "Stalin" as a state image, according to Plamper, had different meanings and goals depending on the context, but the cult was inseparable from the man.

Plamper's assertions on the importance him to the cult were not completely accepted by his colleagues. In spirited 2012 blog debate on the Russian History Blog, Brandenberger, Richard Wortman, and several other prominent Russianists critiqued Plamper's methodology and laid out alternative explanations to his conclusions. But the larger debate itself is reflective of the confusing and nebulous nature of Stalinist rule. Stalin seldom kept a detailed record of his motivations or his overarching rational beyond vague generalities. In his ascent up the greasy pole in the 1920s, Stalin earned the nickname "the grey blur" both for the speed of his actions within the Soviet bureaucracy, but also because he often kept his cards close to his chest during the sharp ideological struggles after Lenin's death. Stalin's talent for ambiguity has made analyzing the genesis of the Stalin cult an exercise in frustration for historians, as Stalin at times appeared to both give his ascent to it one moment, and then critiqued it the next. Like Stalin's mustache, there are multiple historical interpretations of the cult that often depend upon the biases of the beholder.