When novelist Fyodor Gladkov invited Ivan Kirilenko (b. 1902), an infamous hard-liner, and other Ukrainian writers to “tea,” they declined, fearing it would be seen as “a grouping.”376 An NKVD analysis of the delegates turned up several former SRs, anarchists, nationalists, and members of anti-Soviet “organizations.” Someone distributed an unauthorized leaflet to the foreign delegates; nine copies were found, written in pencil, and the NKVD tried handwriting analysis to identify the anonymous author. “You organize various committees to aid the victims of fascism, you gather the antiwar congresses, you establish libraries of books burned by Hitler, all that is wonderful,” the leaflet stated. “But why do we not see your activity in connection with aiding the victims of our Soviet fascism, carried out by Stalin. . . . Why do you not establish libraries to rescue Russian literature. . . . Personally we worry that in a year or two Iosif Jughashvili (Stalin), who did not finish seminary, will not be satisfied with the title of world philosopher and demand, on the example of Nebuchadnezzar, that he be considered, at least, a ‘sacred cow.’”
Stalin, from Sochi, intervened with his whip hand so that the politburo decreed coverage by more than just Evening Moscow and Literary Newspaper.377 “It is necessary for Pravda or Izvestiya to print the speeches of the representatives of Ukraine, Belorussia, the Tatar autonomous republic, Georgia, and other republics,” he had written to Kaganovich and Zhdanov (August 21, 1934). “They need to be printed fully or at a minimum two thirds of each speech. The speeches of the nationals are no less important than others. Without their publication, the congress of writers would be colorless and uninteresting. If this requires that we supplement the number of newspaper pages, then it should be done, without regard for paper.”378 The dictator also expressed outrage at the party organizations of Buryat-Mongolia, Yakutia, the Volga Germans, and Bashkiria for not taking the gathering seriously. “The writers’ congress is a very important matter, for it unites and strengthens the intelligentsia of the peoples of the USSR under the flag of the Soviets, under the flag of socialism. This is very important for us, very important for socialism. The above-named republics turned out to be in the tail of events, they turned out cut off from the living cause and disgraced themselves. We cannot overlook such a failure.”379
The congress would cost 1.2 million rubles, significantly over budget, with breakfasts, lunches, and dinners amounting to about 40 rubles per day per attendee. The average cost of a canteen lunch for a worker was 84 kopecks, for a white-collar employee 1.75 rubles; lunch in a commercial restaurant cost 5.84 rubles.380 (In 1934, worker salaries averaged 125 rubles per month, schoolteacher salaries around 100.)
Delegates could avail themselves of a tour of Moscow’s Museum of Western Painting, an excursion to the planetarium, a trip to the cinema for The Way of the Enthusiasts or Dziga Vertov’s Three Songs About Lenin. A Moscow theater was staging The Miraculous Alloy, Vladimir Kirshon’s comedy of optimistic youth. Pasternak and his company tried Moscow’s recently opened Georgian restaurant, Aragvi, where a meal cost a small fortune. The vast majority of delegates took part in Aviation Day festivities (August 18). Gorky hosted soirées at his dacha for foreign guests and intimates.381 Delegates were also afforded a special showing of the documentary Chelyuskin, about 104 people on an Arctic research mission whose icebreaker of that name had sunk, stranding them on an ice floe for months, until their rescue (on the twenty-eighth landing) by daring Soviet aviators, who were then given a ticker tape parade in Moscow.382 Stalin had gone to greet the returning Chelyuskin expedition scientists and sailors at Moscow’s Belorussia train station. Soviet radio had focused world attention on the expedition’s plight, but the dictator evidently had declined an American offer of assistance.383
FAIRY TALE
Zhdanov, in his speech at the congress, had called for literary depictions of “reality in its revolutionary development,” geared toward “the ideological remolding and education of the toilers in the spirit of socialism.” He demanded “a combination of the most austere, sober, practical work, with supreme heroism and the most grandiose prospects.”384 Some speakers urged multiple ways to achieve this. “We should tell our artists, ‘Everything is permitted,’” urged the thirty-four-year-old screenwriter Natan Zarkhi. “Everything that serves the defense of the motherland, its strengthening, the victory of Communism, Bolshevik ideas, everything that leads to the development of Soviet culture and the flourishing of the creative individuality of the people, growing not in spite of the collective but because of it.”385
Socialist realism’s precise forms, in other words, remained to be adjudicated even just in literature.386 Any definition for music was deferred without end. Musicians effectively lost the ability to experiment at the composition level but could pursue refinement of instrumental and vocal techniques. Many “class enemies” (sons of former tsarist generals, nephews of tsarist interior ministers, daughters of former nobles, former ladies-in-waiting) were allowed to remain at positions in music and conduct training, a tolerance perhaps reflecting Stalin’s intense interest in quality traditional music.387 Painting had its own specificities. Standard realism had already triumphed by the 1920s, but many painters had little experience in narrative forms and had trouble finding a place in the new order.388 Stalin, who in the underground days had collected postcards of famous paintings, in power chose not to live surrounded by oil paintings on the walls. (On the contrary, he had allowed the sale abroad of “bourgeois” artworks accumulated in tsarist Russia, altogether some four thousand paintings, including forty-four of the highest order—Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, van Eyck—until meager receipts and international scandal prompted an end to the fire sales.)389, 390
Pasternak had harbored illusions about the likely philosophical level of the congress. “I am murderously downtrodden,” he was said to have repeated in intimate company. “You understand: murderously.”391 Many writers who disagreed vehemently about aesthetics agreed on the need for top-down imposition of a single approach for everyone. They were also zealous about getting state recognition, as opposed to public favor, and not a few lobbied for or welcomed repressive measures against rivals. Socialist realism served as an administration system as much as an aesthetic: party directives, censorship, prizes, apartments, dachas, travel—or their denial—as well as myriad personnel employed as cultural apparatchiks, editors, and censors, what Bulgakov called “people with ideological eyes.”392
On August 29, 1934, with the congress set to draw to a close in three days and “elections” imminent for the position of writers’ union secretary (or party controller), Zhdanov and Kaganovich wrote to Sochi proposing candidates.393 Stalin narrowed their list to two, and they selected the bespectacled Alexander Shcherbakov (b. 1901), whose education at the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors had been interrupted (on official documents he wrote: “according to my education, a teacher of the history of the party”).394 Summoned out of the blue by Kaganovich, Shcherbakov arrived to find Zhdanov with him. “Here’s the thing,” they told him. “We want to assign you work that is extremely important and difficult; you probably will be stunned when I tell you what kind of work it is.” He was contemplating northeastern Kazakhstan. “I was genuinely stunned,” Shcherbakov recorded in his diary. They dispatched him directly from Old Square to the writers’ milieu. “I spent a half hour at the congress. I left. Nauseating.”395