artificially imposed on the people, claiming to sum up all the values
it believed were valid. No values were irrelevant or beyond its total
grasp. In this way, unlike in liberal democracies, the distinction
between public and private was effectively destroyed. What was gen-
erally regarded as private and moral was also public and political.
Censorship and intimidation penetrated the most personal
recesses of private life, effectively destroying the distinction between
public and private. One of the most popular jokes in Moscow in the
1930s concerned a hostess who had invited ten of her closest friends
for a dinner party. Aware of her moral and political obligations to the
state, she submitted the names to the secret police for their approval,
fully expecting the list to be returned with two names added – the
secret police needed their observers to be present to record who said
what to whom. But to her dismay the list was returned unamended- there was no need to add two of their own. Unknown to her they
were already there, among her own trusted friends.
Propaganda assailed individuals on the streets, from the radio, and
in their newspapers, while indoctrination shaped the values of the
future generation in schools, with the leader dictating the books that
could be read, the content of lessons and the teachers who would
teach them. Likewise, all independent institutions, like the church or
professional bodies, capable of throwing doubt on the consensus,
were suppressed.
The only writing and artistic expression that was allowed had
to conform to the officially approved form. In the Soviet Union
many of those who were the most creative influences in the 1920s,
responding to the challenge of revolutionary art by developing
new styles and artistic forms, rapidly became enemies of the people,
perishing in the Gulag or falling silent. In their place emerged
new controls on the form that literature and the arts could take.
A. A. Zhdarnov, in his famous speech at the First Soviet Writers’
Congress in 1934, outlined the task facing writers in the new
revolutionary state and the method of ‘socialist realism’^3 that all
writers were to adopt.
Nevertheless, this sort of control over the private moral side of
people’s lives could only be maintained by keeping everything
around them moving – by creating an atmosphere in which people
were uncertain, fearful and suspicious of everyone else. This is
the third ‘contour ’, that of mass mobilisation. Unlike liberal democ-
racies, where, during times of emergencies like wars, there is a
temporary mass mobilisation of effort to achieve the ultimate
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