he Communist Party of the Soviet Union had a very simple goal: the total transformation of society, economy, government--and, indeed, of human nature itself. To achieve this total transformation, the state required total control. The books people read, the movies they watched, the things children learned in school--all were subject to a pervasive, active censorship that was intended to instill the conviction that the Communist system was ideal, that the Capitalist West was evil, and that utopia would eventually be achieved. Even painters and musicians were required to endow their works with ideological content. The state told people what to think, what to believe, how to act. Obedience was rewarded: if you mouthed the right slogans, marched in parades, and never slipped up, you stood a good chance of gaining entrance to the Party and the privileges that went along with membership. Dissent was punished, with disgrace, exile, prison, or execution.

Mass indoctrination of the virtues of communism began immediately after the Revolution, when the Bolsheviks disbanded all opposition parties, shut down non-Communist newspapers, and stamped out "decadent bourgeois" forms of culture. The Party decreed that only a new "proletarian" literature was suitable in the new Soviet state, one which glorified workers and Communists and pointed the way toward a brighter future.

Communist propaganda reached new heights after Lenin died in 1924. Eulogized as a godlike figure for his role in the Revolution and the establishment of Soviet power, Lenin became the first secular saint in the Soviet canon. Cities and factories were renamed in his honor, including the former Russian capital, St. Petersburg, which now became Leningrad. Masses of adulatory books were published to commemorate his death, including one 500-page volume filled with nothing but photographs of every wreath sent to his funeral. A bust of Lenin occupied the entrance to every major institution. And when his corpse, which had been lying in state throughout the cold winter, began to decompose in the spring, the Politburo quickly decided to embalm it and put it on permanent display in a specially built mausoleum on Red Square.

When Stalin managed, after a vicious power struggle, to claim the mantle of Lenin's heir in the late 1920s, he established a cult of personality for himself that was, if anything, greater than the one around Lenin. He was called "the worthy successor to Lenin," "the father of all peoples," even "the greatest genius of mankind." History books were rewritten to exaggerate his role in the Revolution and his accomplishments since then. Photographs were doctored to show him standing next to Lenin, while his former rivals were airbrushed out. Such was the heroic aura built up around Stalin--perhaps the most brutal dictator of the 20th century--that when he died in 1953, millions of Soviet citizens wept in genuine desolation at their loss.

His successors, unable or unwilling to exert the same level of domination, scaled down the cult of personality. Khrushchev even admitted in a secret speech that Stalin had committed crimes. For a brief period he loosened the controls on censorship, allowing a "thaw" that saw the publication of works like Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a devastating portrait of life in the Gulag. Even when the thaw ended and censorship was reasserted, the use of terror never reached anything resembling its proportions under Stalin. Political dissidents like Solzhenitsyn or Andrei Sakharov were subject to harassment and house arrest, or were expelled from the country, rather than being sent to forced labor camps.

At the same time, the ideological fervor that had gripped so many Soviet citizens during the Stalinist years also diminished. Many Soviets still ardently believed in the future of communism, but many others saw the slogans, rallies, and parades as little more than empty rituals, to be followed because they were obligatory but not because they were believed. Cynicism and apathy grew apace. The Party was finding it harder and harder to seal the country off from contact with the outside world. Elements of Western popular culture filtered in: Soviet teenagers formed underground rock bands, and denim jeans became a coveted item.

When Gorbachev became General Secretary in 1985, he tried something even more dramatic than Khrushchev's "thaw." Glasnost, or openness, was a key part of Gorbachev's plan to revitalize a stagnating Soviet economy that was in dire need of reform. Suddenly people could speak freely, and a flood of publications that had once been unthinkable was unleashed. At first tentatively, then more forcefully, the public criticized the system, and the criticism did what all previous leaders had feared it would do: it chipped away at the credibility of the Communist system as a whole. Gorbachev had hoped that glasnost would spur reform, but what he found was that the system was unreformable. When he shut down the propaganda machine, he shut down the only mechanism that had kept the system running.