e masses to submit themselves to the principles of Lenin, then confidently lead their comrades forward to a bright Bolshevik future where both nature and human opposition would bow to the power of the Soviets.
             Although the Soviet Union was markedly secular, it adopted Orthodox Russia's replacement of the individual with the collective. Many artists collaborated on gigantic pieces that depicted the immense size and grandeur of their unified country. Overwhelming all other artistic principles, Socialist Realism became synonymous with the state. It modified the past and the future by making both conform to reality and to Lenin's timeless ideals. Most importantly, it portrayed the Soviet Union's future as being filled with unequaled prosperity that would forever shame capitalism and its proponents.
             However, much of the "reality" that Socialist Realism depicted existed solely in the minds of the Soviet people. Socialist Realism portrayed life only as the Bolsheviks wanted it seen, and in many ways created an idealistic world of fantasy that "overlooked massive failures" (Lincoln 335) such as the death and suffering that continued to prosper in labor camps throughout the country. Socialist Realism was Stalin's aesthetic cover-up of the horrid, truly real Soviet reality, and if an artist intentionally or accidentally ventured too far "behind the scenes" in his work, official confession and apology to the state did not always prevent him from being sent to one of many labor camps.
             Socialist Realism was largely effective in indoctrinating simple-minded men and women with Bolshevik ideals. Nowhere else was this practice more effective than in Soviet literature, which was directed towards the unsophisticated, newly literate masses rather than the intellectual elite. Much of this literature focused on the Russian Civil War and the immortalized heroes that were crucial to socialism's victory. It was meant to instill the proletaria...