By IKHIDE R. IKHELOA (MALCOLM KNOX)

From Stalin to Trump: The Politics of Power, Personality & the Pursuit of Permanence

A provocative comparison

AUSTRALIAN journalist and author Malcolm Knox has drawn a provocative historical comparison between Joseph Stalin and Donald Trump, arguing that both leaders have demonstrated an intense desire to attach their personal identities to the institutions, symbols and narratives surrounding their political power.

Knox made the comparison in a recent interview with The Guardian while discussing his new novel, The Second Child, which returns to the Soviet world of Stalin and Lavrentiy Beria. He argued that Stalin and Trump shared an appetite for political self-branding and the creation of a personality cult.

“Stalin was exactly the same as Trump, wanting to put his name on everything, creating this cult of personality,” Knox said.

He went further, arguing that Stalin’s determination to secure permanence ultimately failed. In Knox’s formulation, political power can create the illusion that a leader’s influence is permanent, while history eventually subjects that influence to forces beyond any individual’s control.

The comparison is deliberately provocative. Stalin and Trump emerged from profoundly different political systems and historical circumstances. Stalin ruled the Soviet Union through a one-party dictatorship marked by purges, political terror and extensive state repression. Trump operates within an electoral constitutional system, although his political style and relationship with institutions have generated intense debate about executive power and democratic norms.

The useful question, therefore, is not whether the two men were literally the same. It is whether the mechanisms of personalised political power, symbolic ownership and attempts to dominate historical memory reveal a recurring feature of modern politics.

Stalin & the construction of political mythology

Stalin’s personality cult was not simply a matter of placing his name on buildings.

It involved the systematic construction of an image of Stalin as the indispensable leader of the Soviet state. Official propaganda presented him as a military genius, political philosopher, father figure and architect of Soviet achievements.

The state increasingly connected national success to Stalin personally.

That mythology served a political purpose. By presenting Stalin as uniquely wise and indispensable, the Soviet system could reinforce obedience to his leadership while marginalising alternative centres of authority.

The Wilson Center notes that Stalin’s post-war propaganda elevated his personal role in the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany and helped create a political system in which the regime’s legitimacy was heavily tied to the fear and awe surrounding his person.

The system therefore went beyond conventional political publicity. It attempted to make the leader inseparable from the state itself.

That is the historical phenomenon Knox invokes when he speaks of a “cult of personality”.

The first signs of reversal came quickly

Yet Stalin’s death demonstrated the vulnerability of personality-based political systems.

Stalin died in March 1953. His successors immediately faced the problem of how to govern a country whose political legitimacy had been heavily associated with one man.

The new leadership moved to curb some of the mechanisms of Stalinist repression. Lavrentiy Beria, one of the most powerful figures in Stalin’s security apparatus, was arrested in June 1953 and later executed. The post-Stalin leadership also moved to bring the secret police back under Communist Party control and began dismantling aspects of the system of mass terror.

But the more dramatic attack on Stalin’s political image came three years later.

In February 1956, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev delivered his famous speech, On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences, to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Khrushchev condemned Stalin’s abuses of power and explicitly attacked the elevation of one individual into an almost superhuman figure. The speech became a foundation of the campaign later known as de-Stalinisation.

The historical record therefore complicates Knox’s assertion that Stalin’s legacy began collapsing “a year after he was dead”.

The unwinding did begin rapidly after Stalin’s death, particularly in the security apparatus and the use of mass terror. But the formal ideological assault on Stalin’s personality cult accelerated in 1956, while other symbolic measures followed later.

The body, the monuments & the name

The retreat from Stalin’s political image eventually reached the most powerful symbol of his status.

For years, Stalin’s embalmed body had lain beside Lenin in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow. In 1961, during the later phase of de-Stalinisation, his remains were removed and reburied near the Kremlin wall.

The symbolism was unmistakable.

The man who had once occupied a quasi-sacred position in Soviet political mythology was no longer entitled to share Lenin’s mausoleum.

The broader process also affected streets, cities, institutions and monuments associated with Stalin.

Yet the story did not end with de-Stalinisation. Stalin’s historical image has repeatedly been reconstructed, condemned, softened and rehabilitated according to the political needs of successive Russian governments.

That is one reason political memory matters. Removing a name does not necessarily remove a political mythology. Likewise, preserving a name does not necessarily guarantee that its political meaning will remain unchanged.

Trump & the politics of personal branding

Trump’s relationship with his name is different in origin but striking in its visibility.

Long before entering national politics, Trump built a commercial empire around his surname. His name became a recognisable brand associated with hotels, towers, golf courses, real estate and consumer products.

The political significance of that branding became more apparent during his presidency.

In his second term, Trump’s name has increasingly appeared in connection with government institutions and programmes. Reuters reported in December 2025 that his name had been attached to or proposed for prominent federal initiatives and institutions, including the Kennedy Center, a proposed class of Navy vessels, Trump Accounts and TrumpRx.

The Kennedy Center dispute became particularly revealing.

The centre was established by Congress as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. In 2026, Trump’s allies on the centre’s board attempted to incorporate Trump’s name into the institution’s physical identity. A federal judge ruled that Congress, rather than the board, possessed the authority to rename the centre. The dispute continued after the board voted in August to add language recognising Trump’s role in its renovation and to name the surrounding grounds President Donald J. Trump Plaza.

That episode illustrates the central issue raised by Knox.

The question is not merely whether a leader’s name appears on a building. It is whether public institutions become extensions of the leader’s personal political brand.

Branding versus personality cult

There is, however, a major analytical distinction between commercial branding, democratic political communication and a totalitarian personality cult.

Stalin possessed extraordinary coercive power over the Soviet state. His government imprisoned, deported and executed perceived enemies on a vast scale. Political dissent could carry fatal consequences.

Trump’s political brand operates in a fundamentally different institutional environment.

The United States retains competitive elections, independent courts, opposition parties, a pluralistic media environment and constitutional mechanisms capable of challenging presidential actions. The continuing Kennedy Center litigation demonstrates precisely such institutional friction.

That does not make questions about political personalisation irrelevant.

Rather, it makes them more important.

Democratic systems depend on institutions being stronger than individuals. When political parties, public agencies, national symbols and government programmes become heavily identified with one leader, a change of government can become a struggle over institutional identity rather than merely policy.

The danger of making the leader the institution

Personality politics offers immediate political advantages.

A leader’s name is easy to remember. It can simplify complex policies. It can reinforce loyalty among supporters. It can transform political achievements into personal achievements.

But the same strategy creates a vulnerability.

If the leader becomes inseparable from the institution, criticism of the leader can become criticism of the institution itself. Political disagreement then becomes a struggle over identity.

History provides numerous examples.

Stalin’s Soviet Union attempted to make the leader synonymous with national progress. Khrushchev later had to dismantle much of that mythology because it had become politically dangerous.

The lesson is not simply that political leaders eventually die.

It is that institutions survive more reliably when they do not depend on the permanence of one personality.

What survives when the leader disappears?

Knox’s central argument is ultimately about time.

Political leaders can control governments, shape laws, dominate news cycles and influence public memory. They can rename institutions and surround themselves with symbols of achievement.

But they cannot completely control how later generations interpret them.

Stalin is an instructive example.

His government attempted to establish an almost permanent historical narrative around his leadership. Yet within a few years of his death, his successors publicly denounced his personality cult. Within a decade, his body had been removed from Lenin’s mausoleum.

That does not mean Stalin disappeared from history.

Quite the opposite.

He became one of the most extensively studied and contested political figures of the 20th century.

His name survived.

But it survived largely because of the historical record, not because the political system successfully preserved the image it had constructed.

The real test is institutional memory

Knox’s prediction that Trump’s name will eventually “turn to dust” is an opinion, not a historical certainty.

The future of Trump’s political legacy cannot yet be known.

What can be examined is the mechanism behind his argument.

Names placed on buildings are temporary markers. Political slogans eventually disappear. Government programmes can be renamed. Statues can be removed. Official histories can be rewritten.

Institutions, however, can survive political personalities.

That is why the deeper historical lesson from Stalin is not simply that dictators are forgotten. It is that personality cults can collapse with surprising speed when the political coalition sustaining them changes.

For democracies, the implication is equally important.

The durability of a political system should not depend on whether one leader’s name remains on its buildings.

A government may belong to a particular administration for a limited period. A nation, however, must outlive every administration.

That is the tension at the heart of Knox’s comparison between Stalin and Trump: the powerful may attempt to turn political office into personal legacy, but history ultimately decides which parts of that legacy deserve permanence.