ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the Stalin period romantically, as a time of heroism. The first Five-Year Plan, Stalin's great push towards the building of 'socialism in one country', was inaugurated in 1928. An orgy of totalitarian coercion in which the country was forced headlong into urban industrialisation and rural collectivisation, it was a time of unprecedented political and economic violence, replete with show trials, mass arrests and punitive mass starvation, ceaselessly accompanied by a din of mass indoctrination that included the hardening of the Stalin personality cult. Shostakovich's rehabilitation became an opportunity for fulsome official self-congratulation. 'One feels that Shostakovich has been through and thought through a great deal', wrote Mikhail Mikhailovich Gromov, the polar aviator and Hero of the Soviet Union, who in a fashion so typical of the day was serving as all-purpose Party mouthpiece.
