Stalin's fascination with writers was fully reciprocated as the many 'Odes to Stalin' show. During the 1970s a hugely elaborated system was established for the regulation of belles-lettres based on institutions, ideas and individuals. This original study, ten years in preparation, is based on extensive access to Soviet archives. Much new evidence has been uncovered about the inner workings of cultural policy in the Stalin period and documents by Stalin himself are published for the first time.

This book provides a wide-ranging history of every aspect of Stalin's dictatorship over the peoples of the Soviet Union. Drawing upon a huge array of primary and secondary sources, The Stalin Era is a first-hand account of Stalinist thought, policy and and their effects. It places the man and his ideology into context both within pre-Revolutionary Russia, Lenin's Soviet Union and post-Stalinist Russia. The Stalin Era examines: * collectivisation * industrialisation * terror * government * the Cult of Stalin * education and Science * family * religion: The Russian Orthodox Church * art and the state.

Despite the appalling record of the Soviet Union on human rights questions, many western intellectuals with otherwise impeccable liberal credentials were strong supporters the Soviet Union in the interwar period. This book explores how this seemingly impossible situation came about. Focusing in particular on the work of various official and semi-official bodies, including Comintern, the International Association of Revolutionary Writers, the All-Union Society for Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries, and the Foreign Commission of the Soviet Writers' Union, this book shows how cultural propaganda was always a high priority for the Soviet Union, and how successful this cultural propaganda was in seducing so many Western thinkers.

The profound economic crisis of 1931-33 undermined the process of industrialisation and the stability of the regime. In spite of feverish efforts to achieve the over ambitious first five-year plan, the great industrial projects lagged far behind schedule. These were years of inflation, economic disorder and of terrible famine in 1933. In response to the crisis, policies and systems changed significantly. Greater realism prevailed: more moderate plans, reduced investment, strict monetary controls, and more emphasis on economic incentives and the role of the market. The reforms failed to prevent the terrible famine of 1933, in which millions of peasants died. But the last months of 1933 saw the first signs of an industrial boom, the outcome of the huge investments of previous years. Using the previously secret archives of the Politburo and the Council of People's Commissars, the author shows how during these formative years the economic system acquired the shape which it retained until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Generation Stalin traces Joseph Stalin's rise as a dominant figure in French political culture from the 1930s through the 1950s. Andrew Sobanet brings to light the crucial role French writers played in building Stalin's cult of personality and in disseminating Stalinist propaganda in the international Communist sphere, including within the USSR. Based on a wide array of sources—literary, cinematic, historical, and archival—Generation Stalin situates in a broad cultural context the work of the most prominent intellectuals affiliated with the French Communist Party, including Goncourt winner Henri Barbusse, Nobel laureate Romain Rolland, renowned poet Paul Eluard, and canonical literary figure Louis Aragon. Generation Stalin arrives at a pivotal moment, with the Stalin cult and elements of Stalinist ideology resurgent in twenty-first-century Russia and authoritarianism on the rise around the world.