The frenzy of industrialization of the first Five-Year Plan (1928–32) had bulldozed and gang-marched a rural society into something resembling modernity—even as officials suppressed details of the millions of deaths from famines brought on by collectivization. In 1931, more than four million peasant refugees flooded the overwhelmed cities. The state needed something to show for all the upheavals. And so in 1935 Stalin uttered one of his most famous pronouncements.

“Life has gotten better, comrades, life has gotten more cheerful,” he declared at the first conference of Stakhanovites, those celebrated over-fulfillers of socialist labor quotas, whose new movement emulated the uberminer Alexei Stakhanov, famed for hewing 102 tons of coal in one workshift. “And when life is happier, work is more effective,” Stalin added.

After the speech, reported one participant, the Leader of Progressive Mankind joined all in a song from the wildly popular screen farce Jolly Fellows, released weeks after Kirov’s murder. The Genius of Humanity liked music, and occasionally even edited song lyrics himself. He had personally instigated Soviet movie musical comedy by expounding to director Grigory Alexandrov—former assistant to Sergei Eisenstein in Hollywood—on the need for fun and cheer in the arts. The melodies and mirth that exploded onto Soviet screens in the late thirties were the socialist realist answer to Hollywood’s dream factory. Instead of Astaire and Rogers, dashing shepherds burst into song and gutsy girl weavers achieved fairy-tale Stakhanovite apotheoses. “Better than a month’s vacation,” pronounced Stalin after seeing Jolly Fellows, which was Alexandrov’s jazzy, madcap debut. The Leader saw the director’s 1938 musical Volga-Volga more than a hundred times. Never mind that the main cameraman had been arrested during filming and executed, and the screenwriter had written the lines in exile.

Quoted on posters and in the press and, of course, set to music, Stalin’s “life is happier” mantra established the tonality for the second half of the decade. It was more than just talk. In a fairly drastic redrawing of Bolshevik values, the State ditched the utopian asceticism of the twenties and encouraged a communist version of bourgeois life. The Radiant Future was arriving, citizens were told. Material rewards—offered for outstanding productivity and political loyalty—were the palpable proof. Promises of prosperity and abundance invaded public discourse so thoroughly, they shimmered like magical incantations in the collective psyche. Stakhanovite superworkers boasted in the pages of Pravda and Izvestia about how many rubles they earned. They stood beaming beside their new furniture sets and gramophones—rewards for “joyous socialist labor.” Anything capitalism could do for hardworking folk, went the message, socialism could do better—and happier.

The masses even got to pop a cork on occasion. Scant years after the paroxysms of the first Five-Year Plan, Stalin turned his thoughts to reviving Russia’s fledgling, pre-revolutionary champagne industry, centered by the Black Sea near the Crimea. Sovetskoye Shampanskoye became a frothy emblem of Stalin’s directive, in his words “an important sign… of the good life.” Garbo’s Ninotchka may have cooed about only knowing bubbly from newsreels. But by the thirties’ end Soviet fizzy, mass-produced in pressurized reservoir vats, would be embraced by the Soviet common man. It could even be found on tap in stores.

Alongside abundance and prosperity, the third pillar of Stalin’s new cultural edifice was kulturnost’ (culturedness). Hence, Soviet citizens—many of them formerly illiterate—were exhorted to civilize themselves. From table manners to tangos, from perfume to Pushkin, from tasseled lampshades to Swan Lake, the activities and mores reviled by the earlier Bolsheviks as bourgeois contamination were embraced as part of the new Homo sovieticus. If a member of the nomenklatura (Communist political elite) showed up at a meeting in his trophy silk pajamas and carrying a chocolate bar, it just went to show that socialism was doing swell. The teetotaler Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet premier, took tango lessons. His imperious wife, Polina Zhemchuzhina, delivered perfume to the masses in her role as chairman of the cosmetics trust. The food supply commissariat established and codified a Soviet cuisine canon.

Russia’s annus horribilus of 1937, which closed with the carnival-esque December election festivities, was launched with a lavish New Year’s Day yolka (fir tree) party for kids at the Kremlin. The tubby comedian Mikhail Garkavi played Ded Moroz (Grandfather Frost), the Russian answer to Santa. Banned by the Bolsheviks for ten years as religious obscurantism, New Year’s fetes—and fir trees—had just returned from the political cold with the Great Leader’s approval, at the initiative of one Pavel Postyshev. This man whom Soviet children could thank for their new winter gaiety was also one of the chief engineers of the Ukrainian famine; he himself would be shot a year later. Still wearing his long, flowing Ded Moroz robe and white beard, Garkavi appeared later that New Year’s Day at a Stakhanovite ball attended by Stalin. “All are strictly cautioned to leave their sadness outside,” joshed a placard inside the ballroom. Garkavi popped a cork of Sovetskoye Shampanskoye. The tradition is still going strong to this day, even if the brand is being eclipsed by Dom Perignon.

When Mom was five and Yulia was four they moved to Moscow. It was 1939. The country was celebrating Stalin’s sixtieth birthday, and Naum his promotion—to the “Capital of the New World,” to Headquarters.

Mom still had her bouts of toska, but life did get a bit better in Moscow. A little jollier, you could say.

For one thing, Moscow wasn’t dark. Their ninth-floor apartment boasted an airy panorama of shingled old city roofs from the window. It was still a communal apartment, to be shared with shrill, dumpling-like Dora and her henpecked husband. But it had new plywood furniture, and it had gas—gas!—in place of their Leningrad burzhuika (bourgeois) coal-burning stove, which always ran out of fuel by morning, leaving a veil of frost on the walls.

Best of all was the building itself. Constructed the year before in the fashionable Stalinist Empire style—a bulky mash-up of deco and neoclassical—it resembled an organ, or perhaps musical staves, its vertical lines zooming up from an imposing ground-floor loggia. The musical reference was not accidental. Neither were the extra-thick walls (such a boon in this era of eavesdropping). The house was created as a co-op for the Union of Soviet Composers, with a small quota of apartments for the military. Songs poured out of the open windows the summer Mother moved in.

I always get goose bumps thinking of my five-year-old mom living among the George Gershwins and Irving Berlins of the socialist order. They were the people whose buoyant, jubilant marches I still sing in the shower. Along with generations of Russians, I’ve got them under my skin—which of course was the plan. “Mass song” was a vital tool in molding the new Soviet consciousness. Song set the romantic-heroic tone of the era. Song fused individual with kollektiv, comrade with State. It carried the spirit of sunny, victorious optimism into every choking communal apartment, glorifying labor, entrenching ideology—all in catchy tunes you couldn’t stop humming.

Mom didn’t actually share the collective zest for mass song. But there was no escaping the iron grip of Ninka, her new best chum in the building. Daughter of a Jewish symphonist and an Armenian pianist, brash and imperious Ninka had raven-black eyebrows and fingertips callused from violin lessons. She appointed herself Mom’s musical instructor.