Aleksei Tolstoy, author of science fiction, historical novels, and children’s books, would call Shcherbakov “a rabbit who swallowed a boa constrictor.”396 Tolstoy (b. 1883), a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, embodied many of the paradoxes Stalin faced with writers. He had emigrated to Paris with the Whites but returned in 1923 to a hero’s welcome, supporting the revolution. He took up residence in a villa with servants in Tsarskoye Selo, where Nicholas and Alexandra had lived, earning the nickname “the workers-and-peasants’ count.” (Stalin first met him in 1932 at Gorky’s.) After the success of the first two installments of Tolstoy’s novel Peter the First (1934), which celebrated the founding of the Russian empire and compared Peter to Stalin, he was told to relocate to Moscow, where he got a state apartment and a dacha in elite Barvikha. (“He collected mahogany and birch pieces made during Paul I’s reign” to furnish his residences, one Soviet musician wrote.)397 The count wore a fur-lined coat with beaver collar, caroused in Moscow’s restaurants with a rat pack, married his young secretary (his fourth wife), and enjoyed permission to travel to Europe at state expense. “The great trait of the personality of Aleksei Tolstoy,” the contemporary literary historian Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky observed, “was the astonishing combination of enormous natural gifts with a complete lack of brains.”398 But he toed the line.
Writing to Zhdanov from Sochi, Stalin, based on newspaper accounts, deemed Gorky’s congress speech “a bit pale from the point of view of Soviet literature,” and complained that Bukharin’s speech had introduced “an element of hysteria,” but concluded that “in general the congress went well.”399 The congress concluded on September 1, 1934, by “electing” thirty-seven preapproved members of the union’s governing body chaired by Gorky, which that same day “elected” Shcherbakov as head of its secretariat.400 The NKVD secretly reported that the writers were busying themselves with personal matters: purchase of cars, construction of dachas, departures on writing trips or holidays, some doing so even before the final day of the congress. “What is striking, above all,” the operative noted, “is that after the congress the writers talk very little about it. It is as if everyone conspired to keep silent.”401 In fact, the writers expended considerable energy parsing the power of this or that person on the governing board, who was up, who down, what it would mean for their careers and the course of literature. Many viewed Gorky as a guarantee of literary values, and a balance of power among egos and tendencies.
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TSARIST CENSORS HAD SUPPRESSED parts of the work of the bravura satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and in the early 1930s, Leningrad writers had issued Unpublished Shchedrin, a compilation Stalin acquired and assiduously marked up in red and blue pencil, indicating multiple readings of its vivid passages about bureaucrats, scoundrels, debauches. “Write your denunciations, wretches,” Stalin underlined. “Grief goes to that city whose boss showers it with decrees without thinking, but still greater grief occurs when the boss is unable to apply any decrees at all.”402 In a gesture calculated to win intelligentsia favor, he allocated state funds to the son of Saltykov-Shchedrin, and the OGPU compiled a report on conversations among Leningrad writers about it. The critic V. Medvedev was quoted to the effect that Stalin was “a most decisive and severe politician,” but also “a great liberal and patron in the best sense of that word. Every day we hear about a conversation between Stalin and some writers, or about some assistance rendered at his initiative to one of the mass of writers. In Stalin, literature and writers have a great friend.”403 That was precisely how the dictator wanted to be seen.
Stalin’s success in getting the creative intelligentsia in line had been uncanny. Every major cultural figure in the USSR in the 1930s had his or her own love affair with him. They exaggerated their own significance, and the attention he paid to them. The best ones, however, were correct: he did oversee them personally. Stalin tended not to imprison or execute those he considered the highest talents (Bulgakov, Akhmatova, Pasternak, even Andrei Platonov), and would accept a lightening of the sentences of those on whom punishment seemed unavoidable, such as with Mandelstam’s exile. Many cultural figures were lied to and coerced to conjure up a socialist paradise of joy and plenty.404 But blandishments and the prospect of a mass audience proved effective in recruitment as well. The prestigious names, like Tolstoy, who were neither Communist nor anti-Communist but cynics, were precisely whom Stalin had in mind when he insisted that art could best be categorized as loyal (or disloyal), that is, as Soviet (or anti-Soviet). The problem, however, was artistic quality. Blast furnaces and even collective farms turned out to be a lot easier than novels, poems, or plays, let alone symphonies or canvases.405 That said, much of the mass Soviet public—who wanted to believe in a brighter future—embraced socialist realism.406 As the opening line had it in a hit song, “Everything Higher: Aviation March,” by Pavel German and Ilya “Yuli” Khait, which would prove popular only in the 1930s: “We were born to turn fairy tale into reality.”
Yenukidze sent Stalin a long, upbeat account of Moscow affairs (September 5, 1934), beginning with the writers’ congress, which he predicted would have “gigantic consequences for the writers of all our republics and not less for the foreign proletarian and in general advanced writers.” He congratulated Stalin on his wisdom for having the speeches published and his advice to Toroshelidze concerning the report on Georgian literature, which Yenukidze, a fellow Georgian writing to Stalin in Russian, singled out for special praise. He touched on the removal of the ancient Kitaigorod walls in front of Old Square, where Stalin had kept his party office, and on reconstruction work inside the Kremlin, where Stalin had his now predominant office. Yenukidze was having the Kremlin walls repainted, the roofs fixed, and interior lawns replaced. He lauded construction of the metro, the liveliness of Moscow streets, the opening of the theater season, and the good weather, lamenting only the pending departure of his close friend Voroshilov for a holiday in Sochi. “The children arrived fine,” Yenukidze concluded in reference to Vasily and Svetlana. “I saw them three times. They are going to school. I’m ending, otherwise you will curse me for these prolix trivialities. Be healthy.”407
CHAPTER 4 TERRORISM
Yesterday I was at the NKVD. . . . I understood that, in order to demonstrate my loyalty, I need to work harder for the NKVD. He said that if I work well, everything will remain a secret, but otherwise I could be deported from Moscow. I was given three main tasks in my work . . . the October Revolution celebrations and conversations. Is an assassination attempt against Stalin not being prepared . . . By the way, in front of him lay a file two fingers high all about me.
Informant’s notes, November 19341