The ‘cult of personality’ which developed around Stalin after 1929 (and around Máo in the 1960s) had many purposes. […] It served as a kind of rallying point for much of a population which was used to a system in which one man ruled for life. More importantly, however, the tendency to attribute all things to the ‘wise leadership of Comrade Stalin’ served to hide inner-Party disputes from the public eye.
The oppositional struggles of 1921–1929 had been public disagreements which had nearly torn the Party apart several times. That was not to be allowed in the 1930s. Even though radicals hated moderates and there were serious disagreements about everything from MTS political departments to economic planning, Stalin’s cult of personality managed to hide, but not resolve, the splits until 1937.¹⁷⁷
[…]
Policy disputes and disagreements were hidden behind the iron unity façade of Stalin’s leadership. All policy initiatives were customarily attributed to the ‘great teacher’. […] It would be naïve to assume, as many have done, that Stalin controlled and initiated everything and that his lieutenants simply mechanically carried out his directives on everything from hog breeding to transport. […] Left and right were still there (and, of course, always would be), but were simply not to be allowed to divide the Party as they did in the 1920s.¹⁷⁸
To paraphrase a wise philosopher, if Stalin had not existed, he would have had to be invented. The Stalin cult of personality was invented to fulfil the need for an apparently monolithic leadership and charismatic inspiration in a period of crisis and rapid transformation of institutions and values.
A similar process is common to all societies under similar conditions. The more acute the crisis, the more rapid the transformation, the more intense is the cult of the leader, for example, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill, Cromwell, Napoleon, Castro, Máo Tse-tung, Khoumicni, Attaturk, Hitler, Mussolini, and so on.
The personality cults that developed around these top leaders never meant that the struggles of different interests and the conflicting social forces operating behind the scenes were suspended in favour of the arbitrary will of an omnipotent individual.
(Source.)
Thank you, very elucidating!