Zhdanovshchina

The Zhdanovshchina thesis about the party spirit of literature was based on the Marxist-Leninist doctrine of society and of forms of social ideology.

Traditional accounts portray the Zhdanovshchina as a return to the prewar strident party line, the reassertion of ideological control over culture, and the purging of literature and the arts of Western influences.

The commencement of the Zhdanovshchina can be dated to the founding of a newspaper that would be the voice of the Central Committee's cultural apparatus until 1950, when the focus on ideology was supplanted by greater attention to personnel issues.