Stalin

As Bedny sank, Gorky rose. (“Previously,” the gifted children’s writer Nikolai Korneychukov, known as Korney Chukovsky, punned slyly in his diary, “literature was impoverished [o-bed-nena]; now it is embittered [o-gor-chena].”)

¹⁵⁵ Stalin, with OGPU assistance, had finally coaxed Gorky, already a literary giant before the revolution, permanently back from fascist Italy. Preparing the ground, on April 23, 1932, the dictator, without warning, had disbanded the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.¹⁵⁶ The zeal of the self-styled proletarians—such as Bedny—with each striving to expose the tiniest ideological deviation in rivals, was outweighed by their lack of creative achievement. At the same time, the deep political suspicion about the non-party writers—such as Bulgakov—was balanced by their usually superior abilities. The abolition decree also established a committee to organize a founding congress for a new Union of Soviet Writers, open to non-party members. (Other arts were supposed to be organized in similar fashion.) Stalin wanted Gorky, whom the Association of Proletarian Writers had denounced as “a man without class consciousness,” to be its head.

Alexander Fadeyev, one of the chairmen of the dissolved Association of Proletarian Writers, wrote in indignation to Kaganovich (May 10).¹⁵⁷

The next day, Stalin sat in his office with Fadeyev, two other leaders of the proletarian writers’ association, two culture apparatchiks, and Kaganovich, for more than five hours. On May 29, the dictator met with some of them again for thirty minutes, just before departing for his long summer holiday.¹⁵⁸ Ivan Gronsky, one of the attendees, would later explain that Stalin had no intention of revisiting the dissolution of the proletarians, but had asked what creative method to propose. Gronsky claimed he had answered that prerevolutionary realism had been “progressive” in its “bourgeois-democratic” day, producing many great works, but now they required a literature to advance the “proletarian socialist” stage, and he suggested “proletarian socialist realism” or “Communist realism.” Stalin countered that they needed an artistic method to unite all cultural figures, and supposedly suggested “socialist realism” for its brevity, intelligibility, and inclusiveness. Whether or not it was actually the dictator who came up with this formulation, he made the decision to adopt it.¹⁵⁹

Stalin named Gorky honorary chairman of the organizing committee for the proposed new writers’ union.¹⁶⁰ On September 17, 1932, the regime awarded Gorky the Order of Lenin, renamed Moscow’s central Tverskaya Street, the Volga city of Nizhny Novgorod (Gorky’s birthplace), and the Moscow Art Theater for him. It also launched a weeklong celebration of forty years of his artistic production, culminating on September 25 in the Bolshoi. Gronsky would later claim he had objected to such excessive adulation, to which Stalin supposedly replied, “He is an ambitious man. It is necessary to bind him to the party.”¹⁶¹

Not long thereafter, Stalin attended two meetings with writers—not at Central Committee headquarters on Old Square, but at the luxurious mansion granted to Gorky in central Moscow (Malaya Nikitskaya, 6), an art moderne masterpiece expropriated from the prerevolutionary industrialist and art patron Stepan Ryabushinsky. At the first session (October 20, 1932), Stalin and entourage met with writers who belonged to the party, and he explained the party decision to disband the Association of Proletarian Writers. He praised the superior power of live theater, citing Alexander Afinogenov’s Fear,

which was seen by millions and dramatizes waverers among intellectuals, but has a party organizer saying, “We are fearless in the class struggle—and merciless with the class enemy,” while an angel child asks, “Papa, which is the greater menace—a left deviation or a right deviation? I think the greatest menace is double-dealers.”¹⁶² But Stalin was trying to urge the gathered party loyalists toward tutelage. “The sea of non-party writers is multiplying, but no one leads them, no one helps them; they are orphans,” he stated. “At one time, I was also non-party and did not understand many things. But senior comrades did not push me away; they taught me how to master the dialectic.”¹⁶³