The Soviet Union claimed to be a state founded on a class alliance of workers and peasants engaged in the world-historical task of building a communist society.1 Workers were explicitly recognised as the senior members of this partnership, leading the way in historical progress by means of their political hegemony over the state, exercised through the monopoly in power of the Communist Party. The Party, as the ‘highest form of [the proletariat’s] class organisation’, united in its ranks the most advanced elements of the working class in the struggle for the ‘victory of socialism’.2 It was, in Lenin’s expression, the vanguard of the proletariat.3 Ever prone to literary references, Stalin once likened the Communist Party to Antaeus, the giant of Greek mythology who was invincible as long as he remained in contact with his mother, the earth.4 By this metaphor, the general secretary suggested that the Soviet Communist Party was not only a leader of the Soviet people, but also born of them and reliant on them for its strength.