I cannot demand of a literary author that he must be a communist and that he must follow the party point of view. For belletristic literature other standards are needed – non-revolutionary and revolutionary, Soviet and non-Soviet, proletarian and non-proletarian. But to demand that literature be Communist – this is impossible. . . . To demand that belletristic literature and the author follow the party line – then all non-party people would have to be driven out.
Stalin also invoked what would later be called reader-reception theory in support of Bulgakov:
Workers go to see that play and they see . . . there’s no power that can beat the Bolsheviks! There you have it – the general impression left by the play, which can in no way be called Soviet. There are negative sides to that play. Those Turbins are, in their own way, honourable people. . . . But Bulgakov . . . doesn’t want to show . . . how these people . . . are sitting on the neck of other people and that’s why they are being driven out. . . . But even from Bulgakov certain useful things can be taken.
In a June 1929 letter to Maxim Gorky, Stalin wrote that a play about the 1918 Baku Commune was ‘generally speaking . . . weak’. The short-lived commune had ended in tragedy when it was overthrown by counter-revolutionaries and its Bolshevik leaders captured and executed. Stalin thought the play sinned against historical truth because it didn’t deal with how and why the Baku Bolsheviks had ‘abandoned power’. Nor did Stalin like the dramatist’s depiction of Caspian sailors as ‘mercenary drunks’ or the absence in the play of Baku’s oil workers ‘as subject’. Stalin, who had been a Bolshevik agitator in Baku before the revolution, concluded that while the play contained a few ‘juicy pages’ that spoke to the author’s talent, its characters were mostly ‘vague and lacklustre’.10
In 1930 the poet and satirist Demyan Bedny – a Bolshevik favourite – upset the authorities by publishing poems that caricatured Russian people as inherently lazy. Having been publicly censured by the central committee, he protested to Stalin, who rejected his pleas for artistic respect and berated him for slandering the USSR. He reminded Bedny that revolutionaries all over the world now looked to the Russian working class for leadership, something that filled ‘the hearts of Russian workers with a feeling of revolutionary national pride. . . . And you? Instead of grasping the meaning of this process . . . retired to a quiet spot in the country and . . . began to shout from the house-tops that Russia was an abomination of desolation . . . that “laziness” and [lying on the couch] are well-nigh national traits of the Russian. . . . And this you call Bolshevik criticism!’11
Stalin’s strictures were mild by Bolshevik standards of robust debate and rudeness. Not until 1932 was Bedny ejected from his Kremlin apartment, ostensibly because of building works, allegedly because he had complained that ‘he didn’t like to lend books to Stalin because of the dirty marks left on the white pages by his greasy fingers’.12
The thrust of the RAPP-led campaign for a strictly proletarian literature was summed up by playwright V. M. Kirshon’s belligerent speech to the 16th party congress:
We must pass over to a decisive offensive, mercilessly liquidating bourgeois ideology. . . . The class enemy on the literary front is becoming active. At a time of sharpened class struggle any liberalism, any respect for aesthetic language . . . is direct aid to the class enemy. . . . The whole purpose of our activity and our work lies in the fight for the building of socialism.13
This was too radical for Stalin, especially since the literature produced by the RAPPers was not particularly good. In April 1932 the Politburo resolved to abolish RAPP on the grounds that it had become an impediment to artistic creativity. Together with all the other writer organisations, it would be replaced by a single union of writers that would unite party members with all those who supported Soviet power and the construction of socialism.14 Further insight into the rationale behind this move may be gleaned from Stalin’s remarks at two informal meetings of writers held in Maxim Gorky’s place in October 1932.
Gorky (1868–1936), a long-time ally of the Bolsheviks, was their most famous and prestigious literary associate. He was critical of the Bolsheviks’ post-revolutionary repressive measures but never an outright opponent. In the 1920s he lived abroad, mostly in Italy, where he had resided before the First World War. In 1928 he returned to Soviet Russia for a countrywide tour and in 1929 published a travelogue, Around the Union of Soviets, that was highly favourable to the regime. Stalin was keen to entice him home permanently and showered him with honours and flattery. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and Moscow’s main street, Tverskaya, was renamed after him, as was his birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod (both street and city reverted to their original names after the collapse of communism). Upon his return to Moscow, Gorky was allocated a grand mansion in the city centre.15
SOCIALIST REALISM
That first meeting at Gorky’s house, on 20 October, was a gathering of communist writers. Stalin told them there had been too many writers’ groupings and too much internal squabbling, at the forefront of which had been RAPP. Non-party writers had been neglected and the task on the literary front was to unite them with party writers. The shared aim of building socialism did not mean destruction of the diversity of literary forms and creative approaches.
Stalin urged communist writers to write plays because staged drama was a very popular form. Poems, novels and short stories remained important but they weren’t going to be discussed by millions of people. Asked about non-party writers and the mastery of Marxist dialectics, he responded:
Tolstoy, Cervantes and Shakespeare were not dialecticians but that did not stop them being great artists. They were great artists and their works reflected their epochs quite well. Those who argue that writers should learn dialectics do not understand that writers have to study the classics of literature as well as those of Marxism. [Lenin] taught us that without the knowledge and preserved experience of past human culture we won’t be able to build a new socialist culture.16
Romanticism, Stalin said, was ‘the idealisation, the embellishment of reality’ but Shakespeare’s romanticism was different from Schiller’s, and Gorky’s radical version had been that of a rising class, struggling for power and humanity’s future. ‘Revolutionary socialist realism must be the main current in the literature of our epoch. But that doesn’t exclude making use of the writers and methods of the romantic school.’17
Non-party as well as party writers were present during the second meeting at Gorky’s place a few days later. As he often did when he addressed two different audiences on the same topic, Stalin recycled the points and formulations he had used a week earlier, including the importance of writing plays. Then he said:
I forgot to talk about what you are ‘producing’. There are different products: artillery, automobiles, machines. You also produce ‘commodities’, ‘works’, ‘products’. Very important things. Interesting things. People’s souls. . . . You are engineers of human souls. . . . Production of souls is more important than the production of tanks. . . . Man is remade by life itself. But you, too, will assist in remaking his soul. This is important, the production of human souls, That is why I propose a toast to writers, to the engineers of human souls.