The changes that swept the Soviet Union during the First Five-Year Plan (1928–32) were sufficiently radical and far-reaching in their consequences to warrant the term “revolution.” The fact that this revolution was made in the name of principles that were consistent with Bolshevism and had been invoked at every opportunity since 1917 should not obscure its specific character. It was more than an acceleration of processes and tendencies underway in previous years – though it was that too. It was a Promethean leap into the unknown which left the Soviet state and society deeply marked – scarred we might say – for many decades to come.

Actually, it was several simultaneous revolutions: an agrarian revolution that obliterated communal land tenure, dispossessed millions of households of their livestock and tools and created some 250,000 collective farms; an industrial revolution that transformed the USSR into an industrial power and several millions of its citizens into industrial workers; and a cultural revolution that replaced the pre-revolutionary scientific, technical and cultural elites with a much larger and more plebeian class of mental workers, circumscribed their permissible intellectual discourse, and reduced cultural traffic with other nations to a trickle. Whether it was a political revolution as well is less certain.