Renewed Attacks  

     The pattern of suppressing intellectual activity, with
intermittent periods of relaxation, helped the party leadership
reinforce its authority.  After 1923, when threats to the
revolution's survival had disappeared, intellectuals enjoyed
relative creative freedom while the regime concentrated on
improving the country's economic plight by allowing limited free
enterprise under the Lenin's New Economic Policy.  
     But in 1928, the Central Committee established the right of
the party to exercise guidance over literature; and in 1932
literary and artistic organizations were restructured to promote
a specified style called socialist realism.  Works that did not
contribute to the building of socialism were banned.  Lenin had
seen the need for increasing revolutionary consciousness in
workers.  Stalin now asserted that art should not merely serve
society, but do so in a way determined by the party and its
megalomaniacal plans for transforming society.  As a result,
artists and intellectuals as well as political figures became
victims of the Great Terror of the 1930s.  
     During the war against Nazi Germany, artists were permitted
to infuse their works with patriotism and to direct them against
the enemy.  The victory in 1945, however, brought a return to
repression against deviation from party policy.  Andrei Zhdanov,
who had been Stalin's spokesman on cultural affairs since 1934,
led the attack.  He viciously denounced such writers as Anna
Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, and Mikhail Zoshchenko, who were
labeled "anti-Soviet, underminers of socialist realism, and
unduly pessimistic."  Individuals were expelled from the Union of
Writers, and offending periodicals were either abolished or
brought under direct party control. 
     Zhdanov died in 1948, but the cultural purge known as the
Zhdanovshchina continued for several more years.  The noted
filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein and great composers such as Sergei
Prokofiev and Dmitrii Shostakovich were denounced for "neglect of
ideology and subservience to Western influence."  The attacks
extended to scientists and philosophers and continued until after
Stalin's death in 1953.