The Informational Theory of Leadership Cults: Evidence from the Soviet Party Congresses and Plenums, 1924-39

How do autocrats assess whether elites are loyal or not? While elite rhetoric is often dismissed as cheap talk, we argue that public speeches can offer meaningful signals of loyalty—and that the value of these signals shifts as autocrats consolidate power. We identify three phases of elite loyalty signals: pre-consolidation trendsetters (typically close allies), transition-stage early adopters (often lower-ranking figures), and post-transition overpraisers (seeking protection under consolidated personalism). To test this, we examine Josef Stalin’s rise in the USSR (1924–1939), using latent semantic scaling (LSS) on a new corpus of 1,346 Soviet party congress and plenum speeches to map rhetorical strategies of elites seeking to profess their loyalty to the autocrat in public—praising the autocrat, criticizing rivals, and signalling policy alignment. Combined with machine learning and elite biographical data, our analysis reveals how different elite types signal loyalty and how these signals affect career trajectories. Our findings show that public rhetoric, strategically crafted and differentially rewarded, plays a central role in informing the autocrat about elite loyalty, in turn shaping personality cults and elite survival under autocracy.