ABSTRACT
The Stalinist cult of personality could be carried out in a backward and isolated Russia, and could perhaps even be regarded as having served its purpose well. But the backwardness disappeared with the advance of the educational system and the increasing degree of industrialization, as did the feeling of isolation from a hostile outside world, when the people’s democratic states and Red China were incorporated in the socialist camp. These developmental tendencies contributed to the feeling that, even during Stalin’s lifetime, the Soviet Union was growing away from Stalinism, which was characterized in foreign policy by an irreconcilable attitude vis-à-vis the Western powers, and in domestic policy by the dominant role of the political police, by an emphasis upon the importance of heavy industry, and by the doctrinaire agricultural policy. In all of these areas, a reorientation was carried out by the men who took charge after Stalin’s death in 1953.
