ABSTRACT
In Marx and Engels’s communist society the capitalist divisions of labour were overcome. Mental and physical labour were fused and so were city and countryside. The family as a separate unit was replaced by a wider form of community. Communism promised to be an undifferentiated, homogeneous entity. During the so-called Cultural Revolution of the years 1928 to 1931, the Marxist ideal was translated into a struggle between “bourgeois and proletarian culture.” The goal was to abolish separate institutions like the school, written law, the big city and the family. These should be swallowed up by society. Stalin was never comfortable with this impractical ideal of total homogeneity. Having provided the radicals with some space for a few years, he gave short shrift to them in the early 1930s. The subsequent “Great Retreat” ushered in Stalinist society in the strict sense of the word. 1
