Tragically, his vast collection of novels, plays and poems was dispersed after his death: it is the gaping hole among the archival remnants of Stalin’s library. Yet we know quite a lot about how he read and appreciated literature because from the late 1920s he was highly active in this realm of Soviet cultural policy. His various interventions reveal how he felt about fiction as well as what he saw as its political function. From his policy pronouncements and detailed criticisms of particular texts we can identify his preferences as a reader.1
Andrei Gromyko was Soviet ambassador to the United States during the Second World War. He attended the Yalta and Potsdam summits in 1945 and served as deputy foreign minister after the war. He recollected of Stalin:
As to his taste in literature, I can state that he read a great deal. This came out in his speeches: he had a good knowledge of the Russian classics, especially Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Also, to my own knowledge, he had read Shakespeare, Heine, Balzac, Hugo, Guy de Maupassant – whom he particularly liked – and many other western European writers.2
FROM NEP TO RAPP
A letter from Trotsky prompted Stalin’s first foray in the field of cultural politics. Trotsky wrote to the Politburo in June 1922 that the party needed to foster relations with young writers. Trotsky proposed a register of writers, and the preparation of dossiers to guide party relations with specific individuals, the aim being to give material support and provide an alternative to bourgeois role models and publishing houses. Trotsky also suggested the creation of a non-party literary journal that would allow scope for ‘individual deviations’.3
In response, Stalin asked deputy party agitprop chief Ya. A. Yakovlev to report on the situation among writers. Yakovlev’s report highlighted the political struggle between the Bolsheviks and counter-revolutionary elements in relation to young writers. He also identified a number of writers who were close to the Bolsheviks politically and suggested organising a non-party association to gather them together, perhaps as a ‘Society for the Development of Russian Culture’. Yakovlev emphasised it would be necessary for the party writers in such a society to avoid ‘unjustifiable communist arrogance’.4
In forwarding the report to the Politburo on 3 July 1922, Stalin endorsed Trotsky’s approach, as well as Yakovlev’s ‘Society’ idea. Such a society, wrote Stalin, would contribute to the development of a ‘Soviet culture’ by bringing together ‘Soviet-inclined’ writers.5 The resultant Politburo resolution combined Trotsky’s and Stalin’s proposals, i.e. various supports for young writers were to be put in place, including a non-party literary publishing house (rather than a journal), and the possibility of establishing a suitable society for sympathetic writers would be investigated.6
This relatively liberal approach to literary affairs was typical of the moderate politics of the NEP era and represented pushback against militants who wanted to impose a uniform ‘proletarian’ culture on all writers. A wide-ranging Politburo resolution ‘On Party Policy in the Sphere of Literature’, dated June 1925, pointed out that it would take the proletariat time to develop its own literature. In the meantime, there had to be an alliance with pro-Soviet ‘fellow traveller’ writers. The party would combat counter-revolutionary manifestations in literature but also be on guard against ‘communist conceit’. It would steer writers’ political preferences but not insist on any particular literary form; it would, indeed, stand for ‘free competition among the various groups and trends in this sphere’.7
At the end of the 1920s Stalin executed a sharp left turn in pursuit of accelerated industrialisation and the forced collectivisation of agriculture. He attacked Bukharin and the so-called Right Opposition, who wanted to continue the moderate economics and politics of the NEP years. Internationally, the Comintern declared world revolution imminent. In the cultural field, the militant campaign was spearheaded by the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (Russian acronym: RAPP). Formed in 1928, the association aimed to achieve ‘proletarian hegemony’ over Soviet literature. In practice that meant pushing for a class-struggle line in creative works and attacking as politically deviant anyone who disagreed with RAPP’s approach.
RAPP’s importance and influence should not be exaggerated. As John Barber pointed out, it ‘never enjoyed anything like complete control over the literary world. It was never acknowledged by the party as its spokesman on literary affairs, never achieved hegemony over other literary groups, and never even succeeded suppressing dissident voices within its own ranks.’8
Certainly, Stalin responded cautiously to the ‘cultural revolution’ he had unleashed. In December 1928 a group of proletarian playwrights wrote warning him of the ‘right-wing’ danger in literature. Their main target was Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) and his plays about the counter-revolutionary White movement of the civil war years, Days of the Turbins and Flight.
Stalin replied on 1 February 1929, writing that he didn’t think it appropriate to talk about a ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ in literature. Better to use descriptive concepts such as ‘Soviet’, ‘anti-Soviet’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘anti-revolutionary’. While he thought that Flight was anti-Soviet, he wasn’t against staging the play if Bulgakov ‘were to add to his eight dreams, one or two more dreams depicting the internal social springs of the civil war in the USSR’.
Why are Bulgakov’s plays produced so often, asked Stalin?
Probably because we don’t have enough of our own plays good enough for staging. In a land without fish, even Days of the Turbins is a fish. It is easy to ‘criticise’ and demand a ban on non-proletarian literature. But easiest is not always best. It is not a matter of ban but of . . . competition . . . only in a situation of competition can we achieve the formation and crystallization of our proletarian literature. As to Days of the Turbins itself, it’s not all that bad, it yields more good than harm. Don’t forget that the main impression the viewer takes away from this play is an impression favourable for the Bolsheviks.
Stalin sprang to Bulgakov’s defence again a couple of weeks later, this time at a meeting with Ukrainian writers. As Leonid Maximenkov has commented, the document recording this meeting has a unique feature: ‘we witness Stalin engaged in a spontaneous dialogue’.9 Stalin spoke a set-piece at the start but most of the meeting consisted of a no-holds-barred discussion in which he was shown little or no deference by his audience.
During the course of this sometimes-raucous exchange, Stalin displayed knowledge of the work of quite a few Russian and Ukrainian writers: Vsevolod Ivanov, Boris Lavrenev, Fedor Panferov, Yakov Korobov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky and Anton Chekhov. But a lot of what he had to say concerned the national question, not literature itself. The way to unite different national cultures, he argued, was to intensify their separate development. This formula – ‘disunite in order to unite’ – he attributed to Lenin, the idea being that once nations stopped being suspicious of one another they would voluntarily coalesce and culturally unify on a socialist basis.
Bulgakov’s work came up because some of those present didn’t like the way Days of the Turbins depicted the civil war in Ukraine. Again, Stalin defended the play (one he was rumoured to have seen fifteen times) on grounds that overall it gave a good impression of the Bolsheviks. He also made some more general points: