The "Moral Code of the Builder of Communism," its compilers asserted, was superior to all other ethical systems. Presented as part of the official program at the twenty-second Communist Party Congress in 1961, the code consisted of twelve tenets. First and foremost was "devotion to the Communist cause, love toward the Socialist Motherland and to Socialist countries." The remaining eleven principles were meant to govern human relations on all levels, from international to interpersonal.

The code's issuance represented the culmination of a process: over the course of the previous decade, Soviet party and government officials, scholars, and experts had developed, elaborated, and publicized the principles of Communist morality. Communist morality was supposed to replace coercion as a means of ensuring political and social stability and economic growth; it required political loyalty, hard work, and the proper conduct of private life. Under fully developed communism, public and private interests would be perfectly harmonized. But during the contemporary transitional period, in cases where conflicts arose, personal needs were to be subordinated to public priorities. Professionals and moralists in a variety of fields determined what attitudes and behaviors constituted a correct Communist private life, putting forth specific instructions about sex, love, marriage and child rearing. Trade union, party, Komsomol, and a host of new voluntary organizations were supposed to help enforce these standards. These groups included parent-school associations; apartment house committees; druzhiny, teams that patrolled the streets to arrest hooligans, drunks, and other disturbers of public order; and comrades' courts, which were empowered to reprimand, fine, and shame people who neglected their children, disrespected their parents, damaged their apartments, or failed to get along with their neighbors.

Yet, at the same time, by 1961, Khrushchev's reforms had increased individuals' autonomy over their personal lives. The taming and restructuring of the secret police meant that, for the most part, state terror no longer disrupted family relations as it had under Stalin. Divorce became progressively easier to obtain, and the ban on abortion was lifted. The government launched an ambitious housing construction program with the goal of moving families out of communal apartments, barracks and dormitories and into their own individual apartments. The "Thaw" in literature and film meant that heroes were allowed to demonstrate their concern for intimate relations as well as production.

Thus the Khrushchev government provided new opportunities for professionals, officials, and volunteers to intervene in private life, but also new ways for people to evade, resist, and make use of that interference. Some ignored Communist morality or even made fun of it. For example, in 1961, the same year as the twenty-second party congress, a student at the Moscow Steel Institute wrote a comment in English on the blackboard that turned the Moral Code on its head: "Communism is women and wine." Such rebelliousness was not the only reaction to Communist morality; other people selectively adopted aspects of it, and still others turned it inside out, using its language and supporting institutions to fulfill their individual aspirations. So for example, spouses sometimes accused one another of flouting Communist morality in order to reign in wayward spouses, subdue officious in-laws, or in divorce cases to support claims for custody of children or possessions. In other words, they used the language of Communist morality as a means of advancing the very individual interests that official moralists demanded they suppress. Evidence suggests that this was a strategy deployed more often by women than men. The fundamental gender inequality that persisted in Soviet society, despite claims to the contrary, made women more anxious to preserve marriages or claim possessions. Women received lower salaries than men and so were more often financially dependent on them. It was also more difficult for women to find new spouses; as a result of war casualties, women, especially those aged 35 and older, far outnumbered men. According to the recollections of one scholar, the complaining wife of the Khrushchev era was enough of a cliché to become the subject of a joke: How do women of various nationalities hang on to their husbands? The German by skilled housework, the Spaniard, by passion, the French by elegance, and the Russian by party committee.

The Bolsheviks were journalists long before they were state leaders, and they never forgot the impact of a well-aimed message. Newspapers were the life-line of the underground party. Formative ideological and political debates were conducted in them; reporters and deliverers evolved into party cadres; and readers became rank-and-file supporters. At times, newspapers smuggled from abroad kept the Party alive; and Lenin's editorials often forestalled factional division. Revolutionary struggle taught Bolsheviks the value of mass media, and confirmed their belief that culture is inherently partisan. In times of political turmoil, they exploited it skillfully. Illegal front-line newspapers helped turn soldiers against the Great War; effective propaganda helped win the Civil War.

Yet the revolutionaries knew that the same weapons could be used against them. When they took power, they protected themselves by denying the opposition access to public opinion; printing presses, theaters, movie houses were all eventually confiscated and placed under state monopoly. The Bolsheviks considered these measures necessary and just. Soviet authorities were never ashamed of their monopoly on culture. Culture was a weapon of class struggle. Allowing the enemy access to mass media would have seemed criminally stupid. To debate the ethics of censorship was a waste of time; the Bolsheviks' concern was how to mold popular values, how to reach the masses, reflect the wishes of the state and censure alien ideals.

The early twentieth-century media suited Bolshevik purposes. Under Bolshevik sponsorship, they spoke with one powerful voice, unweakened by dissent or excessive subtlety, unencumbered by complexity. Red propaganda depicted a world of stark contrasts: Bolsheviks were valorous and self-sacrificing; the Whites were cruel and debauched. It was no time for half-tones or self-conscious irony. Bolshevik propaganda might seem heavy-handed, yet judging by its success, much of the public did not resent the overbearing tone. Opponents on both the left and right were no match for the Bolshevik blitz, and some, like the Whites, were particularly ineffective in shaping public opinion.

Discussions of Soviet mass culture have usually dwelt on its administration and rhetoric more than content and reception. This is unfortunate, because mass culture was a rare example of equilateral negotiation in Soviet society. The culture gap could not be forced like a river crossing at war. The economy could be socialized by fiat; industry could be whipped into higher production; and citizens could be made, at tremendous cost, to behave as they should. But socialist society demanded not that people just say the necessary things, but also think them in private. Socialism had to be internalized. Many Bolsheviks saw the mass media as the path from ideology to internal thought. It converted abstract phrases into concrete images. Propaganda demanded the cooperation of three groups: the Party and state, which provided the content; the skills of writers and artists, who made ideas into image; and the audience, which received and digested the images. Leaders, artists, and citizens all acknowledged the wishes of the other. The audience craved interesting material; the state needed its values represented by symbols; artists desired an arena for their creative energies (and a respectable living). One side-the audience-stayed mute about its thoughts, yet even at the height of tyranny, no mass audience could be forced to watch a movie or read a book.

At the time of the February Revolution, the Imperial Russian Army contained some seven and a half million soldiers who were overwhelmingly drawn from the peasantry. The most immediate and tangible effect of the Revolution on the army was Order No. 1 issued by the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies on March 1, 1917 and approved under duress by the Provisional Government. Among other things, the Order called for the election of soldiers' committees under whose disposal all arms were to be placed. Although they were to maintain "the strictest military discipline," soldiers were to enjoy the rights of all citizens outside the service and the ranks. They also were no longer to be addressed by their officers in the familiar (and condescending) form of "you" (ty). The addressing of officers with titles such as "your Excellency" was abolished and replaced by "Mister General," "Mister Colonel," etc.

The first few weeks of the revolution witnessed the desertion of between 100,000 and 150,000 soldiers, most of whom were peasants anxious to return to their villages to participate in what they expected would be a division of the land. There was also a substantial tide of arrests of officers, particularly senior commanders, and their replacement by more popular individuals. Instances of violence, including executions of officers, were recorded in the Baltic Fleet and in the Petrograd garrison, but were relatively rare at the front. In his report of April 16, General Alekseev, the Commander in Chief of the armed forces, complained that "the army is systematically falling apart," a situation that he attributed to the spread of "defeatist literature and propaganda." But what is no less striking about the revolution in the army is the extent to which rank-and-file soldiers justified their actions in the patriotic terms of defending a "free Russia."

Whatever the case, Aleksandr Kerenskii, who had replaced Aleksandr Guchkov as Minister of the Army and Navy in May, became convinced that Russia either had to accept the virtual demobilization of the army and capitulate to Germany or assume the initiative in military operations. Touring the fronts, he sought to whip up enthusiasm for an offensive that he and the leading core of officers hoped would ignite patriotic fervor and bring victory to revolutionary Russia. The offensive, under General A. A. Brusilov, began on June 18 all along the southwestern front. After some initial successes, the Russian army's advances were repulsed, and the desperate attempt to stem the tide of the army's disintegration actually served to accelerate it.

What distinguished the Soviet cities of the sixties -- not Soviet cities in the 1960s but the ones that were created (more or less) ex nihilo during that decade? Did everyday life resemble that of other, older cities, did residents enjoy a better quality of life associated with everything being up-to-date and the product of the scientific-technological revolution then at its (rhetorical) zenith, or was there a darker side to these cities without pasts?

Let us consider the middle Volga city of Tol'iatti, best known as the hometown of VAZ, the Volga Automobile Factory founded in 1966. Named after the long-time Italian Communist Party (PCI) leader, Palmiro Togliatti, who died in 1964, Tol'iatti previously was known as Stavropol'. In the 1950s, the long somnolent town received a jolt -- it literally was displaced -- by construction of the massive Kuibyshev (now Zhiguli) Hydroelectric Station that spanned the river to generate electricity for expanded industrial production. By the mid-1960s, the siting of several petrochemical plants nearby had boosted the number of residents in the town to some 150,000, but also the toxicity of the air they breathed. The building of the giant car factory to turn out Ladas (the Soviet version of the Fiat 124) utterly transformed Tol'iatti. Indeed, it was accompanied by an entirely new district -- Avtograd (Auto Town) or more formally, the Auto Factory District -- designed by a Moscow-based group of architects and urban planners under the direction Boris Rubanenko.

Capable of accommodating upwards of a quarter million people, Avtograd's residential buildings represented the Soviet adaptation of international modernism, the dominant aesthetic of urban architecture from the mid-twentieth century onwards. Linearity, standardization (tipizatsiia) of large ferroconcrete paneling for the exteriors of the nine-, twelve- and sixteen-story tower blocks, and the strict application of the principle of a graded system of services applicable to the entire ensemble of superblocks or micro-districts (mikroraiony) were made possible by the absence of any private property encumbrances. Thus, like Naberezhnye Chelny and other Soviet new towns of the 1960s and '70s, Tol'iatti's Avtograd presented Soviet planners with a supreme opportunity to start over from scratch and build a genuinely "Socialist City" (sotsgorod). In this respect, as well as in its utter dependence for social services and cultural activities on the industrial giant that was its raison d'etre it harkened back to an earlier era of new town construction, the Stalin era, which saw the building of Zaporozh'e (Zaporizhzhia), Magnitogorsk, Komsomol'sk-na-Amure, and the original Avtograd outside Nizhni-Novgorod.

Auto workers and members of their family (who often were also auto workers) dominated the new Tol'iatti. As was common with other new towns, many had been recruited to construct the factory and stayed on, attracted by the prospect of a new apartment and perhaps even a car. They were overwhelmingly young. Indeed, it was common knowledge in the 1970s that at 26, the average age of Tol'iatti's residents was the youngest of any city in the entire USSR. Aside from the youthfulness and lack of indigenousness of the population, the Brave New World character of the cityscapes "deprived the city of an atmosphere of warmth and humanity" (to quote one resident) and created a good deal of anomie. In Avtograd, a novel by Vasilii Volochilov published in 1994 but set in the early 1980s, a temporary resident about to be dropped off at one of the tower blocks says:

Do you know what I think of when I approach these colossal structures? I think that people lose any sense of themselves, become small insects, nonentities, actually nobody. Perhaps the builders specially built them with this subtext so that everyone living here and everyone entering them is turned into a slave deprived of any rights and vested with the obligation only to work.

The rich literary heterodoxy of the 1920s was brought to an end in 1929, when the Party granted the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) hegemony over the lettered world. Publishing houses and literary journals were placed in the hands of self-proclaimed worker-writers, many of whom had little experience writing or running institutions. They did have experience sloganeering: "For the Hegemony of Proletarian Literature! Liquidate Backwardness!" What these imperatives meant was hard to fathom; their consequences, which included the silencing of the most gifted voices of the era, soon became apparent. The compromises of the 1920s were swept aside with the same vigor that introduced Five-Year Plans and shock workers into the industrial world. Literature no longer had autonomous value; its utilitarian tasks were to reflect the "unvarnished" reality of the working class and optimistically describe its new world. Literature was not to create, but to respond to "social demand" (zakaz). Observers who noted contradictions were hounded out of the literary world.

Undisputed king of RAPP was Leopol'd Averbakh (1905-1937), critic and chief editor of On Literary Guard (Na literaturnom postu). Averbakh is often branded as the executioner of Soviet-Russian literature. The chief villains, though, were Stalin and Central Committee, which used RAPP to place literature and the other arts (excepting, for the time being, music) under Party control. Averbakh's notion that content rather than form was primary in literature was hardly new to Russian culture, and his ardor for building a new culture accessible to all social classes was not unique. But when combined with the power of the state, the dictums of RAPP become odious and destructive.

The proletarians in literature, and their comrades in the other arts, had two objectives: to root out class-alien culture, and to create new art forms in its place. The first, at least, was achieved: former aristocrats, unsympathetic intellectuals, nonconformist artists and other dangerous elements were denied access to presses, theaters, and museums. Not only were "fellow travelers" (the contemptuous tag used to condemn non-Party writers) such as Mikhail Bulgakov and Aleksei Tolstoi attacked, but also revolutionists such as Maksim Gorky and Vladimir Maiakovskii. Cultural intolerance ruled. Popular culture came under attack: urban balladeers could find no song-sheet publishers; detective stories and science-fiction novels were condemned. Imports from the bourgeois West were automatically suspect. Even folk ensembles such as the Piatnitsky Folk Chorus and the Andreev Balalaika Orchestra were banned. The campaign reached absurdity when dancing bears were banished from the streets of Moscow.

Many writers who were members of RAPP were not without talent. The novelists Mikhail Sholokhov(Quiet Flows the Don), Dmitrii Furmanov (Chapaev), Aleksandr Fadeev (The Rout), and Iurii Libedinskii (Birth of a Hero) produced work that fell within RAPP canons and can still be read with pleasure. Yet the era is remembered more for its clumsy initiatives, such as "collective" literature--represented by the shock-workers' journal of a trip abroad.

The Cultural Revolution, not the Revolution of 1917, altered the face of mass culture once and for all. Industrialization and collectivization almost destroyed folk and popular culture. The intelligentsia surrendered its independence; the peasantry and its culture almost ceased to exist; the urban audience was transformed. Centralized institutions replaced local cultural production. Cities, towns and villages in the center and the provinces heard and saw approximately the same thing, aided by new expanse-shrinking technologies--foremost the radio. Soviet citizens had few unsupervised channels of communication, and none that could link more than several people at a time; and they had almost no contact with the creators of their culture.

When the Central Committee issued a decree "On Restructuring Literary-Artistic Organizations" (April 23, 1932), in which RAPP was dissolved and the new Writers' Union was created, open to writers of all literary creeds (except those deemed to be anti-Soviet), many writers rejoiced. What they failed to notice was that RAPP had served its purpose, subordinating literary life to political control, and that the union replacing it would play an even more dominant role in their lives. Most RAPP members were allowed to join the union; Averbakh did too, although he would become an early victim of the purges in 1937.