ABSTRACT
The second revolution spread the magical culture across the country. Ruralized cities, bustling construction sites and Soviet institutions bulging with people only uprooted from the peasantry proved fertile breeding grounds for rumour and speculation. The turn towards ‘history from below’ renewed interest in Soviet culture in general, and in particular prompted redefinitions of a metaphor used by both V. I. Lenin and Joseph Stalin — ‘cultural revolution’. In 1978 Fitzpatrick suggested that the Great Breakthrough provided spaces for the release of social tensions brewing since the X party congress. Many historians would see the women involved in bab’i bunty as passive victims, but L. Viola’s research suggests that they collaborated in making what might be termed ‘really existing Stalinism’ — that which arose from strife and compromise as against that which was willed. Most women had a lot to lose from collectivization and so their opposition was in fact rationally predicated.
