The question of the aesthetic canon of the Stalin era and the related problem of the interaction between aesthetics and politics in the postwar USSR are central and, at the same time, the most understudied fragments of the cultural history of the 'little' 20th century. What institutions and agencies facilitated communication between the political and aesthetic spheres? What role did the Stalin Prize in Literature and Art play in this process? Dmitry Tsyganov's book is the first study based entirely on archival sources and containing a detailed description and comprehensive analysis of the institutional framework of the Stalin Prize in Literature. The author not only examines the details of the Stalin Prize Committee's work and the nuances of the awarding process but also reconstructs the key cultural trends that shaped the development of the socialist realist literary project. By demonstrating the complex interplay of various institutions that shaped the canon of the Stalin era, the researcher leads the reader away from simplistic schematics and offers a more comprehensive understanding of the literary process from the 1930s to the early 1950s. Dmitry Tsyganov is a philologist, cultural historian, and research fellow at the Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.