ABSTRACT
The transition was signalized by the abrupt change in economic policy that occurred in 1928 when the relatively casual dispositions of nep were superseded by aggressive industrialization under the First Five-Year Plan. The massacre of intellectuals and members of the professions was yet to come, and was not to reach its peak until the later years of the decade. But it is only by comparison with rural sufferings that urban intellectual life of the early 1930s may be described as serene, for conditions in the towns soon deteriorated to the point where the 1920s were being wistfully remembered as the Golden Age that they had never been. Mayakovsky’s suicide was a political as well as a literary event, being more serious in its implications than the self-destruction of the wayward alcoholic Yesenin five years earlier. Pasternak rated an improvement in women’s status as one of the major benefits conferred by the Russian Revolution.
