ABSTRACT
The political history of a non-Communist democracy may be written with little or no reference to its social aspects and yet remain complete in itself. In this chapter, the authors shall trace the swing from Stalin's use of coercion to Khrushchev's use of persuasion which led to changes in Soviet social life. The decline of the secret police, the most notorious instrument of coercion in Stalin's time, has been described earlier in this book in its chronological setting. Khrushchev paid particular attention to instruments of persuasion like state education and mass communication. Until 1958 secondary education in the Soviet Union for children between the ages of seven and seventeen was divided into ten grades. Mass communications in the Soviet Union are controlled by the agitation and propaganda section of the Central Committee Secretariat. The uneasy relationship between the political leadership and the writers did not come to an end in 1959.
