The Soviet leadership as a whole tended to have a rather strained relationship with the idea of a cult of personality. Although the USSR was a dictatorship, outside of the Stalin period there was no singular "dictator" at the apex of the system. The Soviet government often stressed that its leadership was collective in nature in which various chiefs of state organs came together to form a course of action. Even the Stalin period stressed that the vozhd was just one major cog in the Soviet executive; Mikhail Kalinin was the nominal head of state for a good chunk of the Stalin period and state propaganda often emphasized him as the "all-union peasant elder." Nonetheless, patterns akin to a cult of personality did emerge within the USSR, but such cults were conditioned by ideological factors.

As good Marxists, the leadership of the USSR could never fully embrace a cult of personality akin to that expressed by Hitler or Saddam Hussein. The official state ideology of Marxist-Leninism stressed that the Soviet Union was not the byproduct of the works of great men, but vast and inevitable historical forces that vaulted the proletariat into power. 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 Soviet state often mocked the pretenses of personalist dictatorships. The Bolsheviks heaped scorn on the pretenses of Nicholas II and tsardom in general as an example of foolish individuals who believed that they could stem the course of history. Fascism only added to this critique of dictatorship and its practitioners. The Stalin era press consistently mocked the individual pretensions of both Hitler and Mussolini while simultaneously hewing to the line that both men were the puppets of monopoly capital. In short, the official line of the USSR was that dictators and dictatorship were a tool of capitalism and that their cult of personality was a vain superstructure to the reality of a socioeconomic order in deathly fear of communism.

The emerging cults of personality within the USSR belied this dismissal of non-communist cults. Part of the cult in the 1920s was a natural outgrowth of the experience of revolution and civil war in which the nascent Bolshevik state needed an immediate usable past to erase the traces of tsardom. It simply would not do to have the new Soviet state's cities and metropolitan areas continue the old regime's tsarist names like Tsaritsyn or Yekaterinburg. Keeping these names would suggest a permanent legacy of tsardom when the Bolsheviks insisted that this particular door to the past was now closed. This process of renaming to erase the past was one of the hallmarks of the Soviet cult of personality and names became highly politicized. Of course, renaming was an unstable political construct and prior political heroes did fall out of favor. The newly-christened town of Trotsk did not survive Trotsky's downfall and the post-Lenin government soon renamed the town after the more safe figure of Chapayev. Nor did Tsaritsyn's new moniker Stalingrad survive its namesake's death very long despite the fact that the postwar USSR affixed the Great Patriotic War and the Battle of Stalingrad as key events in the history of the USSR. Monuments and other commemorative practices lionizing the Soviet elite had the same instability. Zhukov in 1945 was a major world celebrity akin to Eisenhower or Montgomery, but his postwar star fell considerably and the various Soviet governments only celebrated him when he was of immediate political use.

The instability of the Soviet cult of personality system only underscored the importance of Lenin to the system as a whole. Lenin was somewhat chary of cults of personality, but he did little to dissuade the media picture of him as a first among equals propagated in the early Soviet state. The Bolsheviks made the most of the failed assassination attempts against Lenin and the Soviet state mythologized the famous "sealed train" that took Lenin from Switzerland to Finland to the point of near absurdity. Although Lenin and his family were opposed to his massive funeral and embalming, the post-Lenin leadership knew he was the lodestone of the Soviet state.

This was the reason why Soviet leaders of differing political temperaments ranging from the iron dictatorship of Stalin to the reformism of Gorbachev portrayed them as akin to Lenin. Stalin's cult would go to great lengths to portray Lenin and Stalin as close collaborators and images of the two men together was a stock image, such as this painting. Each turn in the Soviet executive would go to great lengths to portray themselves as returning to the spirit of Lenin and the promise of the 1917 Revolution. Such political changes threw shade against their immediate predecessors, but Lenin's image was sacrosanct.