Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century

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When the newsprint shortage and a transport crisis made communication

difﬁcult, they devised ingenious new methods. ROSTA (Russian Telegraph

Agency), the ﬁrst Soviet press agency, hired artists in a number of large cities

to produce posters on current events in a popular cartoon style presenting

the Bolshevik point of view. The army and Narkompros organised so-called

agit-trains. Staffed by journalists, actors, orators and leading members of the

government, agit-trains would typically arrive in a town or village, interview

local Bolsheviks (if there were any) and residents, write up their ﬁndings into

a newspaper that was printed aboard the train and then show a movie in the

evening. A visible presence could be decisive in bringing locals over to the

Bolshevik cause.

Though instrumental in the civil war effort, agitation could not serve the

Bolsheviks’ long-term needs. Strapped for funds upon conclusion of the war

and with an economy in ruins, the government undertook to create a new

Soviet consciousness. Schools were rebuilt in villages and towns, and new

teachers hired to teach children who, in many cases, had not seen school for

ﬁve years. The Commissariat of Enlightenment issued new curricula based

on the progressive education theories of John Dewey, embodied by the ele-

mentary school curriculum borrowed from Dalton, Massachusetts. A reality

of under-educated and overworked teachers with poor facilities meant that

many reforms were never realised. In higher education, curricular reform was

complicated by ambitious programmes to recruit working-class students, who

never before had access to higher learning. Rabfaks (worker faculties) were cre-

ated to prepare these students for the rigours of study, laying the ground for

years of conﬂict between students and their professors, most of whom still

hailed from the privileged classes. Tensions grew throughout the 1920s until

ﬁnally a new generation of younger ‘Red’ professors replaced older faculty

members.

The belief that Soviet Russia would breed new forms of culture based on

new forms of social life was borne out only partially. The cultural life of most

Russians was vastly different by the mid-1920s from what it had been in the

ﬁnal years of the Romanov dynasty. The face of art had changed as well. Artists

spoke with a voice unimaginable before the revolution, and in the voices of

people – above all the urban working class – silent under the Old Regime. New,

revolutionary art forms represented the fragmented consciousness of modern

20 Larry E. Holmes, The Kremlin and the Schoolhouse: Reforming Education in Soviet Russia,

1917–1931 (Bloomington: Indiana UniversityPress, 1991);Michael David-Fox, Revolutionof

the Mind: Higher Learning among the Bolsheviks, 1918–1929(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University

Press, 1997).

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urban life and its hostility to traditional ruling norms. The need to respond

to new realities, to ﬁnd new purposes for art, to appeal to a new audience

and even to ﬁnd a new language or mode of expression caused an unrivalled

outburst of creative activity.

Writers discovered that the revolution had remade the very stuff of their

work, the Russian language. The coherent social structures that had been the

foundation of the Russian novel had disappeared, and prose writers retreated

to shorter fragmentary forms. Although writers produced very little of lasting

value during the revolution, they responded with a burst of innovative prose

in the early 1920s. Readers who preferred a traditional narrative found the

civil war experience related in Chapaev (1923), a novel by Dmitrii Furmanov,

who had himself served the real Chapaev as commissar. In Cement (1925),

Fedor Gladkov gave readers a working-class hero who fought in the civil war

and returned to civilian life to reconstruct a local cement factory. These two

novels, whose heroes and narratives conformed in many ways to the classic

literary canon, were later declared forerunners of the ofﬁcial Soviet literary

style, socialist realism.

Aleksei Tolstoy published the ﬁrst two volumes of his

trilogy Road to Calvary (Khozhdenie po mukam), which chronicled the tortured

path of a well-born intellectual through the revolution.

The realistic narratives of these and other writers were challenged by a

strong element of modernism in Soviet literature. Fragmented narrative styles

were well suited for a time when prevailing social structures had broken

down. Isaak Babel’ ’s compact tales of the civil war, published under the title

of Red Cavalry (Konarmiia), provided classic heroes of bravery and natural

grace, but disconcerted readers by describing unjustiﬁable acts of brutality.

Boris Pil’niak’s Naked Year (Golyi god)(1921) reﬂected the era through a town

seemingly unaware of the revolution, whose residents slowly succumb to

its dislocations. His prose seems plotless and fragmentary, and his language

heterogeneous, as if overwhelmed by new words and ideas. A more comic

approach to social change was found in the feuilletons of Mikhail Zoshchenko,

an enormously popular writer of the NEP era. Set loose in booming urban

centres, his narrators and characters absorbed the new language of Soviet

Russia without fully understanding it, producing comic malapropisms that

cut to the heart of the new Soviet consciousness.

The poetic heirs of Aleksandr Blok and the Symbolists were many and

diverse, and they met the revolution with responses ranging from hostility to

21 Edward Brown, The Proletarian Episode in Russian Literature, 1928–1932 (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1953); Robert A. Maguire, Red Virgin Soil: Soviet Literature

in the 1920’s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

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welcome. Though he had sought to uncover ineffable truths with his verse,

Blok’s legacy lay equally in changes he brought to Russian poetic language

and form. Blok was able to weave ideal beauty and the coarseness of mod-

ern urban life into a single poetic form. He perceived and responded to the

storm gathering over Russian society in such poems as The Field of Kulikovo (Na

pole Kulikovom)(1908) and Retribution (Vozmezdie)(1910–21). Poets responded

to his challenge either by seeking a new balance for modern verse, as classi-

cal verse had once possessed, or by created a fragmented, unbalanced poetic

form appropriate to modern life. The poetic ideal once created by Pushkin

featured a harmonic expressive control; modern poets no longer had such a

world to describe. Futurist poets such as Velimir Khlebnikov and Vladimir

Mayakovsky sought inspiration in a non-standard sources, including popu-

lar urban ditties called chastushki, and introduced new and sometimes vul-

gar words into the poetic lexicon, to yield a new range of expressive abil-

ities. They grabbed readers’ attention with public scandals and manifestos

that included A Slap in the Face of Public Taste (Poshchechina obshchestvennomu

vkusu), published by David Burliuk, Aleksandr Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky and

Khlebnikov in 1913.

The Futurist taste for urban modernism contrasted

with the classical balance sought by Acmeists, a group organised by Nikolai

Gumilev, whose most elegant voices would be Anna Akhmatova and Osip

Mandel’shtam.

The October Revolution saw young poets respond in a number of ways.

Mayakovsky declared the revolution to be his own and dedicated his work to its

cause. The youngerBoris Pasternak was far more ambivalent towards the revo-

lution. Marina Tsvetaeva rejected the revolution and wrote from the Paris emi-

gration. Each found in modernism a fragmentation of metre, rhyme and the

poetic line that corresponded to their emotional needs and social experience.

Each developed an intensely personal style and lyrical voice. Mayakovsky’s

claim that poetry was obliged to participate in social change proved fertile in

his case, but did not hold true for all. The revolution demanded that literature

change with the times. Yet time has proven the value of poetry that culti-

vated its own values, arranging words in musical patterns and bringing out

the distinct and fundamental meaning of language. Poets who gathered under

the banner of Acmeism, most prominently Akhmatova and Mandel’shtam,

answered to these tasks. Refusing to march with the times, never ignoring

22 Vladimir Markov, Russian Futurism: A History (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1968); Anna Lawton (ed.), Russian Futurism throughits Manifestoes, 1912–1928 (Ithaca, N.Y.:

Cornell University Press, 1988).

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the world around them, both Akhmatova and Mandel’shtam wrote verse of

tremendous gravity and integrity.

Their fates would be tragic, depriving Russia of one of its greatest poetic

generations. Gumilev was executed by the Bolsheviks in 1921 for alleged con-

spiratorial activities. Lyrical poet Sergei Esenin committed suicide in 1925.

Mayakovsky killed himself in 1929. Mandel’shtam would be swallowed by the

prison camps in the 1930s, and is believed to have died in 1938. Tsvetaeva even-

tually returned to an alien Soviet Russia in 1939 and would commit suicide

in 1941. Pasternak, whose intense lyricism had little place in Soviet literature

after 1934, found refuge in secondary work such as translations. Only after

the Second World War did he begin work on his novel Doctor Zhivago, which

eventually brought him the Nobel Prize. Akhmatova’s personal, salon poetry

proved the most capable of bearing witness to the times. Akhmatova suffered

tragedy when ex-husband Gumilev was shot in 1921, and their son Lev was

imprisoned twice in the 1930s. Her Requiem and Poem without a Hero (Poema

bez geroia), written in these years and not published till many years later, are

in their gravity and control of language the most eloquent testaments to the

years of purge and war.

Organisational questions loomed large for other art forms. Music and the-

atre involve complex issues of ﬁnancing and distribution; cinema requires a

vast investment in technology. Artists cannot work alone in these art forms,

and during the revolution they needed to establish a positive relationship with

the state to continue work. State-ﬁnanced theatres found relations with the

new rulers problematic from the start. The Bolsheviks and former imperial

theatres both entered the relationship with the assumption that ballet, opera

and other performing arts were inherently elitist. Opera and ballet, which

required a sophisticated audience, years of intense training and the budget

for several lavish productions a year, seemed unsustainable in a proletarian

state. Only the foresight and tremendous patience of Lunacharskii saved the

enterprises, and allowed for the eventual incorporation of the imperial arts

into the Soviet pantheon. In the ﬁrst years of Soviet rule, the imperial theatres

seemed bent on defying Soviet power. Beginning with strikes in 1917, and then

refusing to adjust the repertory to the tastes of the new audiences, the theatres

could ﬁnd no viable artistic path in Soviet society. Narkompros found itself

responsible not only for former imperial theatres, but for theatres that had

23 Clare Cavanagh, Osip Mandelstam and the Modernist Creation of Tradition (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1995); Anatoly Nayman, Remembering Anna Akhmatova (New

York: Henry Holt, 1991); Alyssa Dinega, A Russian Psyche: The Poetic Mind of Marina

Tsvetae va (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001).

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been privately run under the old regime, most prominently the Moscow Art

Theatre (MKhAT).

The repertory of MKhAT changed little after 1917, featur-

ing the same plays by Chekhov, Gorky, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, which seemed

somewhat irrelevant after 1917. Bewildered by the new realities of the theatre

world, Stanislavsky took his troupe into a long period of touring abroad that

ended only in 1922. Meanwhile, the banner of change in revolutionary Russia

had to be carried by his former student, and later director of the imperial Alek-

sandrinsky Theatre, Vsevolod Meyerhold, who had the audacity to proclaim

an ‘October in the Theatre’ in 1918.

Independent of the avant-garde, and sometimes independent of the prole-

tarian state, popular culture underwent fundamental change in the years of

the New Economic Policy.

Members of the working classes who had seen

military action or had served in emergency economic conditions during the

war now had more leisure time to devote to culture, and possessed a small por-

tion of disposable income. There was a vigorous working press in the capitals

and provincial cities. Inexpensive editions of Russian classics were available,

and competed for audiences with contemporary literary works. Trade unions,

factories and military units gained cheap access to tickets for state-ﬁnanced

theatres, including the once-exclusive imperial theatres. Technologies such as

the gramophone, cinema and radio brought culture to the darkest corners of

the country.

Despite the wealth of native cultural sources for Soviet Russians, the decade

saw a ﬂood of foreign cultural imports, including the same American jazz and

movies that were ﬂooding Europe. Jazz music found native adherents such

as Leonid Utesov and Aleksandr Tsfasman, whose bands remained popular

for decades. Utesov went on to stardom in movie musicals. For all the suc-

cess of imports, the borrowings were not suited to the ideological purposes

of Soviet culture. In fact, jazz would come under heavy restrictions in the

1930s.

A more amenable tactic was to graft socialist content onto native cul-

tural tradition. Examples could be found in music, where the so-called ‘cruel

romance’ was recycled, as in Pavel German’s ‘Brick Factory’ (1922), a story of

24 Konstantin Stanislavsky, My Life in Art (Boston: Little, Brown, 1924).

25 Edward Braun, Meyerhold: A Revolution in Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,

1995); Konstantin Rudnitsky, Meyerhold, the Director (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981).

26 James von Geldern and Richard Stites (eds.), Mass Culture in Soviet Russia: Tales, Poems,

Songs,Movies,Plays,and Folklore, 1917–1953 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995);

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Alexander Rabinowitch and Richard Stites (eds.), Russia in the Era of

NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1991).

27 S. Frederick Starr, Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in the Soviet Union, 1917–1980 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1983).

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working-class woe and redemption.

In literature, writers adapted popular

genres such as the detective story, known as the ‘Pinkerton tale’ in Russian.

Marietta Shaginian’s Mess-Mend (Mess-Mend, ili Ianki v Petrograde)(1924) fea-

tured proletarian detectives who foil a plot by world capitalists to depose the

Soviet government. Such work was often successful with audiences, yet crit-

ics from the proletarian Left claimed that any work adopted from capitalist

cultures could never reﬂect proletarian consciousness.

No cultural form presented greater competition from the capitalist world,

or more opportunity to create distinctly Soviet forms, than the cinema. The

movie business requires tremendous investment and organisational support

for training, production and distribution. The greater part of the movie indus-

try ﬂed Russia after the October Revolution, taking with it equipment, ﬁlm

stock and a generationof actors, scriptwriters and directors. Facedwithrebuild-

ing the movie industry from scratch, and a recognitionthat cinema wouldallow

the party to spread its message across the country, Lunacharskii established

a ﬁlm school in 1921 that, starting with almost nothing, would soon train a

generation of masterful cinematographers and directors. Soviet cinema in the

early 1920s faced overwhelming competition from Western imports, particu-

larly American ﬁlms. Stars such as Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford were

proving irresistible to Russian audiences. In response, the young Soviet ﬁlm

industry experimented with the action format. Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordi-

nary Adventures of Mr WestintheLand of the Bolsheviks (Neobychainye prikliucheniia

Mistera Vesta v strane bol’shevikov)(1924) told the story of an American visitor

to Moscow swindled by a gang of thieves and rescued by honest Soviet police.

The message of proletarian virtue and capitalist trickery was relieved by stunts

and chases worthy of an American movie.

Soviet ﬁlm avoided the Hollywood star system by developing a corpo-

rate or collective production system. Film studios commissioned work from

scriptwriters and directors, and supervised production to ensure ideological

responsibility. Actors worked at the behest of the director, who became the

focal point of the cinematic creative process. A generation of young directors

came of age in the 1920s, producing ﬁlms of aesthetic daring that they believed

embodied the Soviet point of view. The Kinoglaz (Film-Eye) series of newsreel

28 Robert A. Rothstein, ‘The Quiet Rehabilitation of the Brick Factory: Early Soviet Popular

Music and its Critics’, Slavic Review 39 (1980): 373–88.

29 Jay Leyda, Kino, a History of the Russian and Soviet Film (New York: Collier Books, 1973);

Denise J. Youngblood, Movies for the Masses: Popular Cinema and Soviet Society in the 1920s

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Richard Taylor and Ian Christie (eds.),

The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1988).

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director Dziga Vertov coupled the non-ﬁction format with aggressive editing

techniques to present viewers with a world of socialist values. Directors of the

ﬁctional or artistic ﬁlm followed Kuleshov’s lead, coupling action techniques

with revolutionary values. Working on state commissions, Sergei Eisenstein

created Strike (Stachka)(1924) and Battleship Potemkin (Bronenosets Potemkin)

(1925), which attracted the attention of critics around the world. Dedicated to

events from the tsarist past, the ﬁlms used action techniques to create vivid

images of class struggle. Expressive camera angles and visual metaphors, and

editing techniques based on a grammar of conﬂicting images forced view-

ers to become active interpreters of events. The ﬁlms of Vsevolod Pudovkin

often concerned the same eras and events, and boasted the same power of

persuasion. His Mother (Mat’) (1926) and The End of St Petersburg (Konets Sankt-

Peterburga)(1927) offered scenes of great violence and revolutionary passion.

Pudovkin’s editing aimed not at disquieting audiences, as Eisenstein’s did, but

at providing viewers with a coherent vision of the past.

The moderate policies nurtured by Lunacharskii ensured that Soviet cul-

ture under NEP was rich and layered, offering something to many tastes.

Adherents could point with pride to advances in the cinema, to the verses of

Mayakovsky or plays of Meyerhold, to the vigorous worker club movement.

Perhaps their greatest triumph was unprecedented access of the proletariat to

culture. Critics who rejected the revolution or felt that art must follow its own

path could ﬁnd solace in the splendid outburst of poetry, in the riches of the

art world, in the splendid new theatre productions by directors such as Tairov

and Evgenii Vakhtangov, by the reinvigorated opera and ballet companies of

the former imperial theatres.

They could even read the rich ﬂow of novels

and poetry being produced by Russian

emigr

es in Paris and Berlin.

Social

ferment ensured a lively and sometime ferocious debate on cultural issues.

Moderate policies ensured that many modes of cultural expression received

state support. In practice the Bolsheviks accepted the same cultural hierarchies

that radical Leftists would make the primary target of revolution. Despite the

obvious disloyalty of their staffs during the revolution, the former imperial the-

atres received lavish funding. The theatres responded by bringing their work

to working-class audiences and creating a new repertory that tried to respond

30 Sheila Fitzpatrick, ‘The “Soft” Line on Culture and Its Enemies: Soviet Cultural Policy,

1922–1927’, Slavic Review 33, 2 ( June, 1974).

31 Nick Worrall, Modernism to Realism on the Soviet Stage: Tairov, Vakhtangov, Okhlopkov

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Spencer Golub, Evreinov, the Theatre of

Paradox and Transformation (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984).

32 Simon Karlinsky and Alfred Appel, Jr. (eds.), The Bitter Air of Exile: Russian Writers in the

We st , 1922–1972 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

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to revolutionary thematics. Still, much in the ballet and opera harked back

to an aesthetic identiﬁed with imperial society.

Other innately conservative

organisations, such as the musical conservatories and arts academies, contin-

ued to receive generous support, undergoing periodic outbursts of internal

reform in which the state was as likely as not to support the forces of continuity.

Institutions of higher education were still dominated by faculties trained long

before the revolution, a situation that grew tense as the worker faculties

brought more and more students radicalised by the revolution into univer-

sities. Younger people who felt that the revolution had been accomplished in

their name found themselves marginalised within many Soviet institutions.

Many devoted their energies to building secondary cultural organisations that

seemed insigniﬁcant within the diversity of the 1920s, but would later mount

a powerful assault against prevailing orthodoxies. Institutions that provided

refuge for cultural radicals included local branches of the Komsomol, worker

clubs and newspapers that gave space to worker correspondents(rabkors), who

reported on local working-class affairs and whose expos

es of local corruption

were so trenchant that several were murdered.

The fate of two independent proletarian organisations that came to dom-

inate cultural life in the late 1920s illustrates the dynamics of the ‘Cultural

Revolution’, the radicalisation and subordination of culture to the party that

wasinitiatedin the late 1920s.

Artists and critics claiming to speak forthe work-

ing class created the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians (RAPM) and

Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP). They insisted on pursuing

a narrowly proletarian agenda in the arts, and succeeded for several years dur-

ing the First Five-Year Plan when the state gave members control of institutions

of training, publication and production. The proletarians demanded that art

present party agendas and proclaim the slogans of the day. They insisted that

only workers could create a proletarian art (this despite the non-proletarian

background of many RAPP and RAPM members). Above all they worked to

excise certain forms of culture that betrayed bourgeois or aristocratic origins.

Noble-born literary classics such as Pushkin and Tolstoy were declared out of

33 See Katerina Clark, Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

University Press, 1995).

34 The term ‘cultural revolution’ was deﬁned for Russia by Sheila Fitzpatrick in ‘Cultural

Revolution as Class War’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick (ed.), Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–

1931 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), and her ‘Stalin and the Making of a

New Elite’, in The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (1974; reprinted

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992). For discussion, see Michael David-Fox,

‘What Is Cultural Revolution?’ and ‘Mentalit

e or Cultural System: A Reply to Sheila

Fitzpatrick’, Russian Review 58, 2 (Apr. 1999).

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james von geldern

date. Lyric poetry and the realist novel were to be replaced by so-called ‘pro-

duction’ novels, which describe the industrial process as experienced by the

working class.

Folk music, popular urban songs, jazz and most forms of clas-

sical music were no longer supported, and some were actively attacked. The

tumult that accompanied the rise to power of RAPP and RAPM was replicated

in theatres, editorial ofﬁces and educational institutions across the country.

There was a dismal fall-off of artistic production in all branches of culture, and

a wrenching turnover of personnel. Experienced creators and administrators

were silenced or removed from ofﬁce, and classics disappeared from stages

and library shelves. Much of this activity took place in the years 1928–33, which

coincided with radicalisation of Soviet social life. These were the years of the

First Five-Year Plan, and of the collectivisation of agriculture.

Just as it grew wary of policies that alienated common citizens from Soviet

power, the party cooled towards proletarian arts organisations. Soviet lead-

ers sought to stabilise cultural life in ways that would allow them to work

productively with the ‘creative intelligentsia’ (as the artistic world came to be

known in Soviet parlance) and to win back audiences alienated by radical art

forms. Two new policies became the foundation of the state arts administra-

tion. The ﬁrst was the creation of trade unions for creative artists, initially in

literature, then in music and the visual arts. The unions allowed party and

non-party artists to normalise their professional lives, including the commis-

sion and payment for their work. The second was the enunciation of an ofﬁcial

Soviet aesthetic, called socialist realism, which rapidly became obligatory for

all artistic expression.

Socialist realism was declared the reigning method of Soviet literature at the

First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934. Deﬁned by Maxim Gorky as

a continuation of the Russian realist tradition, the doctrine was infused with the

ideology and optimism of socialism. Socialist realism was best characterised by

the watchwords accessibility (dostupnost’), the spirit of the people (narodnost’),

and the spirit of the party (partiinost’). Joseph Stalin provided an authoritative

if vague formulation when he stated that socialist realism was ‘socialist in

content, national in form’. Writers were wise not to use fancy language,

artists and composers not to be too reﬁned in their techniques. The subjects

and heroes of these works were usually uncomplicated, reliable and their

35 Harriet Borland, Soviet Literary Theory and Practice during the First Five-Year Plan, 1928–32

(New York: King’s Crown Press, 1950).

36 Fitzpatrick, Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931.

37 Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

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Culture, 1900–1945

politics predictable (if not always the core of the tale). Such works could be

entertaining, as was Iurii Krymov’s Tanker Derbent (1938), an adventure tale

that hinged on an undisciplined crew brought together by their Communist

captain. Socialist realism was unique only in that it was the sole method

endorsed by the state. Soviet critics would have denied that this was new. Other

ruling classes – the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie – had enforced establishment

aesthetics through sponsorship and taste. Of course the proletariat would do

the same.

Proclaimed as a unitary method, socialist realism took many different forms

depending on the time, the artistic medium and the national culture in which

it was created.

A form of socialist realism fashionable at the time of its

establishment was the so-called production novel. An example of the genre

was Valentin Katayev’s Time Forward! (Vremia vpered)(1932), in which young

workers attempt to build a gigantic steel plant in record time. Painters pro-

duced monumental canvases celebrating the First and Second Five-Year Plans.

Music was a more difﬁcult medium, since there is nothing inherently realistic

in musical composition. Prescribed methods of socialist realism in all media

underwent frequent changes as party factions shifted. At all times the going

description was proclaimed to be permanent, rooted in Marxism-Leninism

and ofﬁcial. Writers, even loyal and servile writers, found it challenging to

follow the line. Soviet culture was riddled with examples of canonic writers

being forced to rewrite their work to conform to changing standards. Fedor

Gladkov, author of Cement, and Aleksandr Fadeev, chairman of the Writers’

Union and author of the classic Rout (Razgrom)(1927)and Young Guard (Molodaia

gvardia)(1945) were forced into rewrites that changed the style of their works

entirely.

TheWriters’ Union regularisedthe business of literature, providing its mem-

bers with a dependable living.

A writer who submitted to its authority would

enjoyavariety of perquisites. The Union distributedassignments to journalists,

controlled which house published which books and doled out foreign delica-

cies, designer clothing and even the highly sought country homes (dachas).

To be a non-member meant not to be published. By the time of the First

Congress, control of printing, distribution, publishing, radio, ﬁlm and theatre

had been ﬁrmly centralised, giving the party Central Committee absolute

38 Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1981); Regine Robin, Socialist Realism: an Impossible Aesthetic (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford

University Press, 1992).

39 A. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928–39 (Basingstoke: Macmillan,

1991).

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