This is an important contribution to the founding history of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Mostly based on Russian and German archival sources, Alexey Tikhomirov shows how the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SVAG) and the leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Socialist Unity Party (SED) used the Stalin cult in order to re-educate the people in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany and to establish a new regime after the collapse of the Third Reich they could control. Eager to win the people's hearts and minds, they put considerable efforts in presenting Iosif Stalin as “the best friend of the German people,” thereby creating a new public space, a new language, a new shared memory, and finally a new society. Stalin, the story behind the abundant propaganda went on, has liberated the Germans from Nazi dictatorship, constantly struggled for German unity and peace, and showed the way to overcome postwar misery, create new wealth in a righteous order, and—most importantly—restore national honor and dignity. By repenting their guilt and accepting Stalin's offer of friendship, Germans could switch to the victor's camp.
It remains somewhat unclear how well these propaganda efforts worked. One the one hand, Tikhomirov maintains that the creation of “spaces of agency enabled people to develop positive modes of self-identification and self-optimization and allowed individuals to generate their private meanings of life under state socialism beyond the binary of belief and cynicism” (309). Engagement in the regime's political initiatives provided not only material advantages, leisure activities, and careers. It also created new self-esteem and inserted personal life and biography into socialist language and behavior patterns. On the other hand, internal reports of the SVAG and of the Social Democratic Party's (SPD) “Eastern Bureau” show a broad panorama of expressions of strong hostility against the occupation authorities and their German agents, as well as the persistence of belief in Nazi propaganda and nostalgia for the mighty national past. The many iconoclastic actions reported in the book may be understood, as Tikhomirov argues, as one possible “way of perceiving, using, manipulating, and negotiating Stalins's image in public spaces” (309). But the reader certainly would have liked to learn more about all the other ways. The cases of pure lip-services, split personalities, and individual constructions of “socialism” are clearly under-represented in the reconstruction of Stalinism from below.
This blurring of the overall picture notwithstanding, the persistence of traditional and Nazi beliefs and the manifestations of collective “revanchist” sentiments during the June 1953 uprising justify Tikhomirov's suggestion to rethink the June 17 events rather as the expression of a nationalistic movement than as an uprising for democracy and rule of law, as they appear in today's official culture of remembrance. “In forming local communities of violence, the insurgents experienced tabooed feelings of national pride and tried to effect healing after the trauma of national and state schism resulting from defeat in World War II by taking vengeance on representatives of SVAG, the Red Army, and the SED regime” (355). The outburst of violence, with the burning of power symbols as high point had a cathartic effect: people were able to discharge their emotions and work out ways in which the regime could be tolerated. Together with the regime's cautious restraint in re-establishing the public power symbols, this led to a new stability of the political system.
The persistence of national feelings in the population can also explain why the SED leadership put the struggle for a speedy end to the schism of the German state and nation and the departure of the occupying forces as the top of reasons to trust Stalin and be proud of belonging to the socialist world (a personal letter written to each adult resident of the GDR in autumn 1951, 157). Obviously, this commitment to German unity also contributed to the relative stability of the regime. The de-sacralization of Stalin after Nikita Khrushchev's unveilings at the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSS) in 1956 led to another de-stabilization. As a Stasi report shows, people now worried if there was still a chance to create a single German state and to improve their living standards (289). Thus, Tikhomirov can also explain why the regime concentrated its propaganda efforts on the perspective of quickly surpassing West German well-being.
