In 1927, the USSR underwent another revolution—quiet, almost invisible, and barely reflected in textbooks. And yet it shaped the entire course of the twentieth century and, it seems, the twenty-first as well.

At first, the Bolsheviks were convinced that a World Revolution was just around the corner—that other countries were only waiting for the chance to join the Soviet Union and begin building socialism. For that goal, Moscow spared no expense and even allowed citizens to get rich temporarily, so the state treasury would have money to support communist parties abroad. That was how the NEP, the New Economic Policy, began.

But ten years after the October coup, it became clear that the sacrifices had not delivered what had been promised. An aging Bolshevik leadership began to sense the outline of total failure: they had not built a society of universal prosperity. If anything, they had impoverished the country and pushed it back by decades. And that meant the most terrifying outcome of all—losing power.

To hold onto it, the Kremlin leaders devised a new strategy: “socialism in one country.” But to make that possible, the country had to be reshaped from the ground up, again. That is how the USSR entered the era of Stalinist terror and furious militarization.

The novel The Prince of the Soviets tells the story of how and why that happened.