ABSTRACT
In the previous two chapters, we have followed the Bolshevik regime’s processes of trial and error in the economic and the political spheres. We have seen economic policy swing from War Communism to NEP, and then to the reborn command economy of five-year planning. We have witnessed how the demands of economic rationality were systematically sacrificed to political expediencies, deemed necessary in order to preserve the power and security of the regime. In the political sphere, we have traced the process leading from the Bolshevik coup d’état in October 1917, via the suppression of the remaining rival socialist political parties in 1918–20, and the ban on factions within the ruling Party in 1921, to the establishment of Stalin’s personal dictatorship and the creation of a ‘new’ Party, in the 1930s. As a result of terror and purges, politics as such was seen to have ceased to exist. For obvious reasons, these developments in the economic and political spheres were matched by similar processes in the ideological sphere. The latent conflict between the respective demands of economic and political rationality simply called for the introduction of another tool, a tool which had to be sought in the sphere of cultural and ideological legitimation. In the present chapter, we shall proceed to outline how such measures were exploited and to look at what degree of success might have been achieved.
