By 1928, the Soviet Union had survived revolution, civil war, foreign intervention, and diplomatic isolation. But survival had not made the Soviet state feel secure.

As Stalin and the Bolsheviks turned toward rapid industrialization at home, they also faced a world they believed remained fundamentally hostile to the revolution. Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Japan, and the United States all represented different kinds of danger. And behind them stood a deeper fear: that the capitalist powers might one day unite against the Soviet Union.

This shaped Soviet foreign policy throughout the 1930s.

The story, however, is not simply one of Soviet aggression or isolation. Moscow alternated between revolutionary internationalism and pragmatic diplomacy, between calls for world revolution and attempts to secure recognition, trade, alliances, and ultimately military security.

The Soviet Union supported revolutionary movements abroad, joined the League of Nations, pursued collective security against fascism, intervened in the Spanish Civil War, watched Japan expand across East Asia, and finally signed the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact with Nazi Germany in 1939.

So how did a revolutionary state navigate a world it believed was determined to destroy it?

In this episode, we’re going to trace Soviet foreign policy from the Great Break of 1928 through the outbreak of the Second World War—and ask how the Soviet leadership understood the central problem of its existence: how could the revolution survive in a hostile world? This is: Comintern and Country.

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.