When Lenin asked, 'Who will beat whom?' (Kto kogo?), he had no plan to wage revolutionary class war in culture. Many young Communists thought differently, however. Seeking in the name of the proletariat to wrest 'cultural hegemony' from the intelligentsia, they turned culture into a battlefield in the 1920s. But was this, as Communist militants thought, a genuine class struggle between 'proletarian' Communists and the 'bourgeois' intelligentsia? Or was it, as the intelligentsia believed, an onslaught by the ruling Communist Party on the eternal principles of cultural autonomy and intellectual freedom? In this volume, one of the foremost historians of the Soviet Union chronicles the fierce battle on 'the cultural front' from the October Revolution through the Stalinist 1930s. Sheila Fitzpatrick brings together ten of her essays—two previously unpublished and all revised for inclusion here—which illuminate key arenas of the prolonged struggle over cultural values and institutional
