In part 2 of special episode "Life Has Become More Joyous" Jason and Matthew continue with a discussion on the Stalinist Cultural Revolution of the 1930s.

The Cultural Revolution signaled the "Great Break" that promised to generate a new Soviet society. The Communist Party set out to revolutionize Soviet culture. They attacked the old intelligentsia, smashed established hierarchies and sought to create a new socialist man. A few years later, the revolutionaries had built a bureaucracy, the workers and peasants had achieved social mobility, and Stalin was declaring that ‘life had become more joyous.’

Join us as we explore how the Soviet Union progressed from an experimental and unstable revolutionary state to establishing the foundations of a global superpower.

This is Life Has Become More Joyous, the story of how cultural revolution became Stalinist civilization.

The 1930s transformed Soviet society. The state collectivized agriculture, built an enormous industrial economy, reshaped the cities, and established a political system that reached more deeply into everyday life than ever before.

But these transformations did not happen through economic policy and political decrees alone. They also changed by law.

In the 1920s, Soviet law had often been experimental. The Bolsheviks debated whether law itself would eventually disappear as class divisions disappeared. They experimented with revolutionary approaches to marriage, family, labor, property, and criminal justice.

By the 1930s, the Soviet state increasingly used law to protect socialist property, discipline labor, regulate movement, control the countryside, strengthen the family, and punish behavior that it considered threatening to the socialist order.

The internal passport system restricted migration. New laws imposed severe penalties for theft of collective and state property. Labor discipline became increasingly coercive. Family and social legislation reversed some of the radical reforms of the 1920s. And following the assassination of one of their own, Communist leaders demanded extraordinary judicial and extrajudicial procedures that expanded the state's ability to punish its enemies.

Join us as Jason explores this fascinating chapter in Soviet history.

This is: Changes in Soviet Law: "Strengthening Socialist Legality."