This paper examines the official discourses that shaped the parameters of everyday life and the reactions of socialist citizens to them in Hungary's first socialist city, Sztálinváros, during the 1950s. Concentrating especially on the regulation of working-class leisure, it argues that the authorities sought to frame social conflict in terms of a struggle between the civilized and the backward, the rural and the urban. In so doing it provides an insight into the nature of early state socialism as a project of cultural transformation.