Six days later, non-party writers were included in a second gathering with the dictator and his entourage. Invitations had gone out only over the phone, with the proviso not to divulge the information, perhaps in order to enhance the sense of being chosen. (Neither Bedny nor Bulgakov was invited.) Few of the fifty assembled literary figures had ever met Stalin, let alone spent an intimate evening with him. Emotions ran high. At the first break, they surrounded Stalin, and one asked about state dachas. “From under his bushy eyebrows, his eyes quickly and carefully survey the rows of those present,” the literary critic Koreli Zelinsky wrote in a private account the next day. “When Stalin laughs—and he does so often and quickly—he squints and bends over the table, his eyebrows and mustache run apart, and his visage becomes sly. . . . What the portraits do not at all convey is that Stalin is very mobile. . . . He is very sensitive to the objections and in general strangely attentive to everything said around him. It seems he does not listen or forget. But, no, it turns out he caught everything at all wavelengths in the radio station of his mind. The answer is ready at once, in the forehead, straightforward, yes or no. Then you understand that he is always ready for combat. And, at the same time, watch out if he wants to please. There is a vast gamut of hypnotic tools at his disposal.”164
Stalin wanted to conjure into being a coterie of writers of stature whose utterances would carry weight and yet who could be more or less controlled. “I forgot to talk about what you are ‘producing,’” he remarked, after allowing many writers to speak. “There are various forms of production: artillery, locomotives, automobiles, trucks. You also produce ‘commodities,’ ‘works,’ ‘products.’ . . . You are engineers of human souls. . . . As some here rightly said, the writer cannot sit still; he must get to know the life of the country. Rightly said. People are transforming life. That is why I propose a toast: ‘To Engineers of Human Souls.’”165 Voroshilov interjected, “Not really.” Everyone applauded. Stalin turned his whole body to the defense commissar: “Your tanks would be worth little if the souls inside them were rotten. No, the production of souls is more important than the production of tanks.”
During a second break, the tables were laid with food and drink (this was still during the famine time), and Fadeyev importuned Stalin to repeat what he had told the Communist writers at the earlier gathering: intimate details of Lenin’s last days. Stalin stood, raised his glass, and said, “To a great man, to a great man,” then repeated it again, as if a little drunk. “Lenin knew he was dying,” Stalin said, and “asked me once when we were alone together to bring him a cyanide capsule. ‘You are the most severe person in the party,’ Lenin said. ‘You are able to do it.’ At first I promised him, but then I could not do it. How could I give Ilich poison? I felt bad. And then, you never know how the illness will progress. So I didn’t give it to him.” There were further toasts, and the atmosphere became ever more visionary (an entire writers’ city; no more paper shortages). “I still remember how Gorky bid farewell to Stalin, kissing like a man on the mustaches,” Zelinsky wrote. “Gorky, tall, stooped to Stalin, who stood straight like a soldier. Gorky’s eyes shone and, ashamedly, unnoticeably, he wiped away a small tear.”166
Fadeyev followed the meeting with a diatribe in Literary Newspaper against his former comrades in the Association of Proletarian Writers and preserved his position of influence with the regime. Gorky faced opportunities and dilemmas he had not encountered back in Sorrento.167 One of the first major services he performed, on August 17, 1933, was to lead a “brigade” of 120 writers who followed Stalin’s tour to the White Sea–Baltic Canal with their own OGPU-supervised visit and glorified slave labor, in the name of a supposedly higher humanism. “I saw grandiose structures—dams, sluices, and a new waterway,” the satirist Mikhail Zoshchenko wrote in one of the many thank-you notes to Yagoda (August 22). “But I was taken more by the people, who worked there and who organized the work. I saw thieves and bandits (now shock workers), who gave speeches in a human tongue, summoning their comrades at work to follow their example. Previously I had not seen the OGPU in the role of educator, and what I saw was for me extraordinarily joyful.”168
WHO WOULD WRITE THE BIOGRAPHY?
Distribution of Stalin’s writings inside the USSR reached an estimated 16.5 million copies as of early 1934.169 His Questions of Leninism alone had been issued, in 17 languages, in more than 8 million copies by then. But the problem of Stalin’s biography remained acute: the only Russian-language text, written by his aide Tovstukha, dated back to the 1920s and was the length of a newspaper essay.170 Although Mikhail Koltsov had written a lively Life of Stalin for serialization in the Village Newspaper, it remained unpublished, evidently because Stalin had rejected it.171
Foreign publications, meanwhile, were making the leader of the world proletariat into a bandit/bank robber, and recounting his alleged betrayals of comrades as an undercover agent for the tsarist secret police.172 A psychoanalytic memoir by a Gori and Tiflis classmate (who had emigrated) alleged that Stalin’s father, Beso, had beaten him, so that, “from childhood on, the realization of his thoughts of revenge became the aim to which everything was subordinated.”173 A Comintern official in Germany wrote alarmingly to Moscow about the sullying of Stalin’s image by enemies, singling out in particular Essad Bey.174 A Baku-born Jew (1905) whose birth name was Lev Nussimbaum, Bey had gone to a Russian gymnasium in Berlin, taken classes in Turkish and Arabic at Friedrich Wilhelm University, begun wearing a turban, reinvented himself as a Muslim prince, and become a bestselling author who frequented the Café Megalomania. His colorful Stalin, published in Berlin in 1931, portrayed an outlaw in vivid orientalist strokes and embellished or invented evidence so that the dubious became possible, the possible probable, and the probable certain. “The difference between poetry and truth,” he wrote, “is not yet recognized in the mountains.”175
Bey’s competition proved to be another orientalist-fabulist: Beria. No sooner had the regional party organization fallen under his control than it established a Stalin Institute to collect materials pertinent to “Stalin’s biography and his role as theoretician and organizer” of the party in the South Caucasus.176 But Stalin’s aide Tovstukha, deputy director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow, started trying to transfer all original Stalin-related materials from Georgia.177 Regime officials, meanwhile, had sounded out Gorky to write the biography, but he demurred.178 Instead, the apparatus accepted a proposal by the French writer Henri Barbusse to write a book about Stalin, with oversight by Tovstukha (to ensure the desired depiction of the struggle against Trotsky).179 Anyone taking on Stalin’s life had to confront his constant discouragement. When the latest History of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) referred to him in standard parlance as “the wise leader of all the toilers,” Stalin wrote, “An apotheosis of individuals? What happened to Marxism?”180 He rejected the Society of Old Bolsheviks’ plan to mount an exhibit about his life as “strengthening a ‘cult of the personality,’ which is harmful and incompatible with the spirit of our party.”181