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This paper considers the Stalinist cult of the individual in its transnational aspect as represented in the figures of Stalin and the Bulgarian Dimitrov. Focusing on the 1930s, it argues that it was not so much the Stalin cult itself which at this stage was generalized through the Comintern, but the wider turn to the heroic within which the cult must be located. Variations in the incidence and character of cultic types and practices are evaluated using the heuristic devices of the integrating and inspiring figure. Using materials from France and Britain, the paper concludes that it was in the Cold War phase of “high Stalinism” that a fully Stalinized hierarchical system of cults was established on an international scale.