Working towards the centre: Leader cults and spatial politics in pre-war stalinism

Abstract

The Soviet Union of the 1930s saw the emergence of a new culture. Stalin’s ‘building of Socialism’ not only meant the radical political and economic transformation of the country. The dawn of the new era also manifested itself in the fundamental reshaping of culture. Stalin’s cultural revolution was not a ‘great retreat’ but rather an attempt to realise the utopian vision of the new socialist person and to define the new aesthetics of a brave new world. It was less a time of ‘war on the dreamers’ than a period of new dream weavers who reinvented culture, and by this the Soviet Union.1.