1929 has become fixed in our imagination as an infamous year in the Soviet Union. If we are to believe much recent Soviet literature, it is the year all those Marxist Judases with large noses stormed over the countryside destroying Russian culture — a process we used to know as collectivisation. It is also the year countless cultural institutions were purged; the year of the campaign against the non-Party writers Zamiatin and Pilniak; the year Bulgakov's plays were removed from the stage; the year Lunacharsky was removed from office as Minister of Education and Culture, etc. In short, 1929 was one of the darkest of the dark years of Soviet cultural history.