What does 'personality cult' mean?

Solution 1:

The original wording of the term is "cult of personality," and it was popularized in the Soviet Union in 1956, in the Communist Party's discussion of some of the mistakes that had occurred there during the regime of Josef Stalin, who had died two years earlier.

Here is an excerpt from Speeches and Proceedings of the 20th CPSU Congress (1956) [combined snippets] condemning the cult of personality:

Struggling for the multilateral development of the creative activity of Communists and all workers, the Central Committee adopted measures for wide-scale enlightenment on the Marxist-Leninist position on the role of personality in history. The Central Committee resolutely opposed the cult of personality alien to the spirit of Marxism-Leninism, which turns one or another leader into a miracle performing hero and, at the same time, minimizes the role of the Party and the popular masses and reduces their creative activity.

By referring obliquely and disapprovingly to Stalin's demigodlike status in the Soviet Union, the new leaders in the Kremlin hoped to distance themselves from some of the excesses of Stalin's rule. Since ideologically Marxism is opposed to a great man theory of history, criticizing the deification of Stalin (once it was safe to do so) was by no means incompatible with Marxist theory. But because Stalin was so revered in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the leaders couldn't afford to denounce him directly, even if they had wanted to.

Today "cult of personality" usually refers to excessive devotion to a political or cultural figure (most often the former)—to the point where the person's actual merits couldn't possibly justify the level of adulation he or she receives. The machinery of state is often used to promote a cult of personality; one of the most widely recognized such fetishized leaders today is North Korea's Kim Jong-un.

A Google Books search finds a smattering of instances of "cult of personality" from earlier decades of the twentieth century, such as this one from Julian Klaczko, Rome and the Renaissance: The Pontificate of Julius II (1903):

The monument ordered is—strange to say—a tomb, a magnificent dwelling of the dead, where shall finally repose this pontiff, but yesterday elected; anf he is a Franciscan monk! Bramante and his friends consider the undertaking to be of evil omen; but Julius II. puts into it all the fire of his will, and Michelangelo all the ardour of his genius. Athought of Christian humility—the thought: memento mori, memento quia pulvis es—is, be it observed, as far from the mind of the vcrowned monk as from that of the immortal artist; the only motive of action, for the one as for the other, is the universal tendency of the period, the primum mobile of Humanism‚that cult of personality, that appeal to posterity, which Dante has already called lo gran disio dell' eccellenza. Here, it is a Pharaoh's pride, served to its utmost desire by a Titan's daring; ...

And from "Recent German Books," in The Nation (May 7, 1907):

The literature of the period [the German renaissance] shows a remarkable increase of letters and memoirs; the portrait severs its connection with historical painting; "the cult of personality becomes a momentum of social and intellectual development." Of the ten men portrayed in the book, each is a personality standing for the spirit of progress which characterized the period, for consummate scholarship, or for artistic achievement.

And from R. Machell, "Personality in Art," in The Theosophical Path (August 1913):

On the other hand we have two modes of egotism revealed in the works of those who, fully self-conscious in the lowest sense, that is to say completely absorbed in the admiration of their own artistic sensibilities, seek either to give the fullest expression to it, openly professing the cult of personality as their artistic creed, or else elaborately hiding it under cover of an assumed and laboriously cultivated style or method.

Most of these instances refer to what some people might today refer to as the "cult of individualism." There are also occasional instances before 1956 in which the term is applied to political movements, including Hitlerism in an article published in 1932, but very few in comparison to the outpouring from 1956 on. Significantly, I didn't find a single nineteenth-century match in a Google Books search for "cult of personality" that I ran for the period 1800–1970, suggesting that any earlier use of the term was not in wide circulation before the twentieth century.