As liberal critics of the Trump presidency have scrambled for traction since January, one historical analogy seems ubiquitous: “If you want a model for what’s happening to America,” economist Paul Krugman wrote in April, “think of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.” From the New York Times to the Guardian to a slew of Substacks, commentators have presented Donald Trump as the U.S. incarnation of the Great Helmsman.
Like Mao Zedong, these pundits say, Trump is mobilizing an insurrectionary base to destroy bureaucratic and cultural elites, has created a cult of personality in which the leader’s will overrides all else, and is brutally intolerant of his ideological enemies.
What are we a bunch of Asians?!
Let's be fair, he was openly tolerant of the cult in some facets of society early in his career and actively supported it later on. He personally awarded the State Stalin Prize, and he was involved in the production of hagiographic movies made mainly about himself.
Early Stalin's opposition to the cult was mostly in terms of how he was represented in Party publications and how other people spoke to him, but the statues and streets and so on didn't meet with the same opposition and he was already giving speeches in rooms with huge portraits of himself in the lead-up to WWII. I don't know the exact history of the naming of Stalingrad, but there's also that to consider.
Also, he competed with Trotsky (albeit much more honestly) in the construction of the cult around Lenin, so even if he did have a firmer stance on his own representation in his own life, he wouldn't have that much ground to stand on.
While Mao definitely could have also been a greater opponent of his own cult, he was much more strongly opposed to it than Stalin was.