What a complicated term.
Do you know what it means?
Well, according to Wikipedia, a cult of personality arises when ‘a country's leader uses mass media to create a heroic public image through unquestioning flattery and praise’.
To put this in the class’ favourite way of explaining things, simple logic or layman’s terms, this quote means that a country’s leader uses newspapers, internet, et cetera to ‘fake’ a good image of him. For example, pretend there was this leader of a country named John. John was a cruel leader, what with threatening the people of the country to do his bidding with force and making them fearful of him. However, he had posters of him doing good things like donating money to orphanages put up around the whole country so people would still respect him for his ‘good deeds’.
Some of the posters of Stalin doing 'good' things
To create this cult personality, Stalin censored everything that put him in a bad light, had many posters and portraits of him doing ‘good’ things as mentioned above, had things spread through word of mouth-mothers told their children that Stalin was ‘the wisest man of age’ so they would tell their own children in the future, and also had people-those who had been involved in the Russian Revolution but had been ‘removed’ from the Soviet Union since-taken out of History about that time; making him the ‘hero’ of the revolution.
Stalin had many villages named after him and the Stalin Prize and Stalin Peace Prize were named in his honor. He also accepted (very complicated) titles such as “Coryphaeus of Science," "Father of Nations," "Brilliant Genius of Humanity," "Great Architect of Communism," "Gardener of Human Happiness," and many others.
This is similar to Napoleon in Animal Farm. Napoleon had a poem composed for him by Minimus and because it was mostly praising him, he had it ‘inscribed on the wall of the big barn, at the opposite end from the seven commandments’. Napoleon also had something named after him: the windmill. Like Stalin, Napoleon had a new decoration created, the Order of the Green Banner. In addition, he had everything good Snowball did ‘erased’.
Napoleon used his cult personality to ‘brainwash’ the animals into thinking that he had been responsible for all the good things that happened on the farm, while blaming all the bad things on Snowball, just like Stalin took the credit for everything good that happened in Russia at that time and blamed Trotsky for everything that went wrong.
Napoleon used his power on the farm to influence all that happened, from the reaction of the animals to certain things to doing things for his own benefit. Let us hope (and try hard) not to become like the animals: indifferent and unthinking.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cult_of_personality
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Cult_of_stalinality.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c6/Roses_for_Stalin_by_Vladimirskij.jpg
http://studenteducationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=627
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