Society, Repression and the Great Terror

The social impact of communist policies to 1945 and the methods used to control society. Under Lenin: social welfare and Alexandra Kollontai, the impact on women, the family, abortion and divorce, education and literacy, the Komsomol, and the campaign for atheism (the Union of the Militant Godless). Under Stalin: the Cultural Revolution, the 1935 Education Law, the Great Retreat and the 1936 Family Code; and the methods of control — propaganda and socialist realism, the OGPU/NKVD, Kirov's murder, the Purges, the Great Terror and Show Trials, the Yezhovshchina, the death of Trotsky, and Stalin's cult of personality, assessed against Leninism and Tsarism.