ABSTRACT
In 1917 the Bolsheviks seized political power in Russia but, despite sporadic experiments under war communism, they did not radically transform Russia’s social and economic system in their first decade of rule. Beginning in 1928–1929, however, Joseph V. Stalin and the Communist party carried out a second major revolution, one that completely changed the configuration of Soviet society. Between 1924 and 1928 Stalin occupied a middle position, not accepting high-tempo industrialization but criticizing the proposal of the Right as too slow and dangerous. Stalin and the party used three basic instruments to ensure all-out participation by the Soviet people in industrialization and in the Stalinist system: persuasion, incentives, and coercion. The country was a federation of Soviet socialist republics, as Stalin’s new constitution of 1936 confirmed. A puzzling aspect of the Stalinist system was its increasing reliance on terror. An area greatly affected by the conservatism, rigidity, and authoritarianism of the Stalinist system was the arts.
