The author analyses the concept of socialist building and its development in the 1920s. The author contends that it was Vladimir Lenin who developed the key ideas and methods of the ‘cultural revolution'. In the 1920s, the practice of socialist transformation of the country started from the ‘philosophy steamers', then moved on to the public debates about the fate of the intelligentsia in 1923-1925 and finished with the state trials of 1928 and 1929, followed by accelerated building of socialism in the 1930s.