Sergei Tretyakov in 1928 claimed that ‘Today’s newspaper is for the Soviet activist what the didactic novel was for the Russian liberal intelligentsia and what the bible was for the medieval Christian: the guide to all life’s situations’. In his essay The New Leo Tolstoy he argues that ‘every epoch has its own written forms, which derive from its economic nature. Monumental forms were typical for feudalism, but in our time they represent only an imitative stylization, a sign of not knowing how to express oneself in contemporary language. We have no reason to wait for Tolstoys. We have our epic literature. Our epic literature is the newspaper…the entire anonymous newspaper mass, from the worker- correspondent to the writer of the lead article, is the collective Tolstoy of our time. Using the Marxist theory of Historical Materialism, how did the changes in the mode of production from 1917-28 effect literary form and thinking?