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Tensions exploded in the spring of 1928 when fifty-three mining engineers were charged with wrecking and sabotage of mining installations in the Shakhty district of the North Caucasus. What set off the explosion was not so much the trial itself, as the ‘lessons’ that Stalin drew from the affair. In contrast to other high-ranking officials, who warned of the economically disruptive consequences of igniting mass resentment against specialists and therefore sought to play down the case, Stalin invoked ‘class vigilance’, warned that ‘Shakhtyites are now ensconced in every branch of our industry’, and demanded extensive purges not only of industrial administration, but throughout the Soviet, trade-union, and party apparatuses, educational institutions, and central economic organs.

The purges were essentially of two kinds, each extensive and feeding off the other. ‘Social purging’ (i.e. the exclusion of individuals from privileged backgrounds from institutions of higher education) was most pronounced in 1928–9. Usually carried out by Komsomol and local party committees, this type of purge was often spontaneous, irritated authorities in the affected commissariats, and ultimately provoked resolutions of condemnation. The second, more formal, purge was conducted by special commissions of Rabkrin (the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) and the party’s Central Committee. With a mandate from the Sixteenth Party Conference, Rabkrin removed some 164,000 Soviet employees in the course of 1929–30. The purge in the party, which removed about 11 per cent of its members in 1929, sought primarily to expel careerists, corrupt elements, and those guilty of criminal offences, but it also took into account political criteria, such as the failure to carry out the party line in the countryside.

Purges constituted one aspect of the cultural revolution: no less important was the intensification and politicization of struggles within the professions. These conflicts generally pitted the pre-revolutionary (predominantly non-Marxist) intelligentsia against the new Soviet intelligentsia (overwhelmingly communist). What the former interpreted as a full-scale assault against culture itself, the latter saw only as its ‘proletarianization’. The former expected intellectuals to set an example for the masses or to take them under their wing; the latter advocated subordination to and learning from the masses. This reversal of valorization prematurely terminated many careers and led to the temporary abolition of secondary-school education. Not for nothing did the Marx–Engels metaphor of ‘withering away’ of school and law appeal to cultural revolutionaries.

Perhaps the best-documented struggle of the cultural revolution was in literature. Thus, writers and critics affiliated with the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (with the Russian acronym RAPP) fought bitterly against their Marxist rivals in the ‘Literary Front’ (Litfront). And both stridently attacked the political aloofness of ‘fellow travellers’, as well as the decadent individualism of the literary avant-garde. The former Komsomol activist, L. L. Averbakh, helped RAPP to establish, if only briefly, ‘proletarian hegemony’ (typified by its cult of the ‘little man’) over literature. Time Forward!, Valentin Kataev’s novel of 1932 about a record-breaking shift at Magnitogorsk, represented its apotheosis. But what has been called a ‘wave of reaction’ against this ethos of the First Five-Year Plan was apparent even before the end of the Plan. ‘It was as if’, writes Katerina Clark, ‘everyone had tired of the “little man”, of sober reality and efficiency; they looked for something “higher”.’ This yearning corresponded to Stalin’s own impatience with the turbulence of literary politics. On 23 April 1932 a Central Committee resolution ‘On the Reformation of Literary-Artistic Organizations’ formally abolished RAPP and called for the creation of a ‘single Union of Soviet Writers with a communist fraction in it’.

The ‘proletarian episode’ in Soviet literature had its analogues in other fields such as legal theory, pedagogy, and architecture. In each case, rival claimants to the correct interpretation of Marxism battled it out, employing such terms of abuse as ‘bourgeois pseudo-science’, ‘Menshevizing idealism’, and ‘right deviation-ism’. As in literary criticism, the iconoclastic and even nihilistic tendencies of the cultural revolutionaries (E. B. Pashukanis’s ‘commodity exchange’ theory of the law; V. N. Shulgin’s notion of the ‘withering away of the school’; anti-urbanism among town planners) ran their course until the Central Committee—or, in the case of historical writing, Stalin himself—intervened to restore order if not the status quo ante.