| Popis: |
The discussion of the peasantry's role offers the appropriate moment to ponder over another significant phenomenon in Stalinism: the return of the modernizing Soviet state under Stalin to the models and trappings of earlier tsardom. The statism of the Civil War period had to be abandoned and was soon repudiated as an ideology of extreme administrative and coercive policies conceived as the main lever of social change. The features of the Russian soul, supposedly balanced between the extremes of downfall and absolute repentance, descent into deepest sin and relief of the fullest confession, were fully catered for in Stalin's "ritual of liquidation". The Stalinist model sensu stricto was powerful enough, mightily favored as it was by the state of social flux in its early stage, and by the whole pattern of social development to which the people have referred. |
