Stalinist ValuesSoviet official culture underwent a dramatic shift in the mid 1930s, when Stalin and his fellow leaders began to promote conventional norms, patriarchal families, tsarist heroes, and Russian literary classics. For Leon Trotskyand many later commentatorsthis apparent embrace of bourgeois values marked a betrayal of the October Revolution and a retreat from socialism. In the first book to address these developments fully, David L. Hoffmann argues that,