Mainstream American magazines lionized Stalin as a participatory manager for decades

Evidence

The most startling feature of Duranty’s essay is its characterization of Stalin himself. There, sandwiched between a celebratory feature on a newly released film called The Wizard of Oz and a lengthy spread on embarrassing celebrity pictures, such as the famed ventriloquist’s dummy Charlie McCarthy with a cigarette in his wooden mouth, is a photo of a handsome smiling Joseph Stalin captioned “Stalin, chairman of the inner circle of the Communist Party… does not lay down the law as Lenin did. Stalin prefers to hear the views of his associates before he makes his own decision.” Stalin’s 1939 lionization in Look as an exemplar of participatory management was followed a few months later with his ascension to Time magazine’s cover as “Man of the Year.” Indeed, between 1930 and his death in 1953, Stalin made a total of ten appearances on the cover of Time. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1131

Categorization

• CANDY: Stalin on Time’s cover ten times between 1930 and 1953 is a striking, tweetable fact.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s knowledge of propaganda and soft power from other readings on totalitarianism and media. — connects to: Mainstream reporting normalized Stalin’s atrocities even at their peak — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1130