The death of Gorky had removed the intellectuals' only powerful protector, and the last link with the earlier tradition of the relative freedom of Revolutionary art. The most eminent survivors of this period today sit silent and nervous for fear of committing some fatal sin against the Party line, which anyhow was none too clear during the critical years before the war, nor thereafter. Those to fare worst were the writers and authors in closest contact with Western Europe, that is, France and England, since the turning of Soviet foreign policy away from Litvinov's policy of collective security, and towards the isolationism symbolised by the Russo-German Pact, involved individuals regarded as links with Western countries in the general discredit of pro-Western policy.
Bending before authority exceeded all previously known bounds. Sometimes it came too late to save the heretic marked for destruction; in any case it left behind it painful and humiliating memories from which the survivors of this terror are never likely completely to recover. Ezhov's proscriptions, which sent many tens of thousands of intellectuals to their doom, had clearly, by 1938, gone too far even for internal security. A halt was finally called when Stalin made a speech in which he declared that the process of purification had been overdone. A breathing-space followed. The old national tradition re-acquired respectability; the classics were once again treated with respect, and some old street names replaced the Revolutionary nomenclature. The final formulation of faith, beginning with the constitution of 1936, was completed by the Short History of the Communist Party of 1938. The years 1938 to 1940, during which the Communist Party made even greater strides in the strengthening and centralisation of its power and authority - tight enough before this - remained, during the slow convalescence from the wounds of 1938, blank so far as the creative and critical arts were concerned.
The Patriotic War
Then war broke out and the picture altered again. Everything was mobilised for war. Such authors of distinction as survived the Great Purge, and managed to preserve their liberty without bowing too low before the State, seemed to react to the great wave of genuine patriotic feeling if anything even more profoundly than the orthodox Soviet writers, but evidently had gone through too much to be capable of making their art the vehicle of direct expression of the national emotion. The best war poems of Pasternak and Akhmatova sprang from the most profound feeling, but were too pure artistically to be considered as possessing adequate direct propaganda value, and were consequently mildly frowned upon by the literary mandarins of the Communist Party, who guide the fortunes of the official Writers' Union.
This disapproval, with undertones of doubt about his fundamental loyalty, did finally get under Pasternak's skin to so effective a degree that this most incorruptible of artists did produce a handful of pieces close to direct war propaganda which had been too obviously wrung out of him, sounded lame and unconvincing, and were criticised as weak and inadequate by the Party reviewers. Such pieces d'occasion as the Pulkovo Meridian by Vera Inber, and her war diary of the Leningrad blockade, and the more gifted work by Olga Berggolts, were better received.
But what did emerge, possibly somewhat to the surprise of both the authorities and the authors, was an uncommon rise in popularity with the soldiers at the fighting fronts of the least political and most purely personal lyrical verse by Pasternak (whose poetic genius no one has yet ventured to deny); of such wonderful poets as Akhmatova among the living, and Blok, Bely and even Bryusov, Sologub, Tsvetaeva and Mayakovsky among the (post-Revolutionary) dead. Unpublished works by the best of the living poets, circulated privately in manuscript to a few friends, and copied by hand, were passed to one another by soldiers at the front with the same touching zeal and deep feeling as Ehrenburg's eloquent leading articles in the Soviet daily press, or the favourite conformist patriotic novels of this period. Distinguished but hitherto somewhat suspect and lonely writers, especially Pasternak and Akhmatova, began to receive a flood of letters from the front quoting their published and unpublished works, and begging for autographs and confirmation of the authenticity of texts, some of which existed only in manuscript, and for the expression of their authors' attitudes to this or that problem.
This eventually could not fail to impress itself upon responsible Party leaders, and the official attitude towards such writers grew somewhat softer. It was as if their value as institutions of which the State might one day be proud began to be realised by the bureaucrats of literature, and their status and personal security became improved in consequence. This is not likely to last, however: Akhmatova and Pasternak are not loved by the Party and its literary commissars. To be non-propagandist and survive you must be inconspicuous: Akhmatova and Pasternak are too obviously popular to escape suspicion.
the present
The more benevolent, if no less watchful, attitude of the official State censors has enabled the better thought of among the established writers to adjust themselves in what they plainly hope is a series of relatively secure niches; some have avowedly harnessed themselves, with varying degrees of conviction, into the service of the State, and declare that they conform as faithfully as they do, not because they must, but because they are true believers (as Aleksey Tolstoy did with his radical revision of his famous early novel The Road to Golgotha, which originally contained an English hero, and his play about Ivan the Terrible, which, in effect, is a justification of the purges). Others apply themselves to nice calculation of how much they can afford to give up to the demands of State propaganda, how much being left to personal integrity; yet others attempt to develop a friendly neutrality towards the State, not impinging, and hoping not to be impinged upon, careful to do nothing to offend, satisfied if they are suffered to live and work without reward or recognition.
The Party line has suffered a good many changes since its inception, and the writers and artists learn of its latest exigencies from the Central Committee of the Communist Party, which is ultimately responsible for its formulation, through various channels. The final directive is today officially produced by a member of the Politburo, Mikhail Suslov, who for this purpose replaced Georgy Aleksandrov. Aleksandrov was removed, so one is told, for writing a book in which Karl Marx was represented only as the greatest of philosophers, instead of someone different from and greater in kind than any philosopher - an insult, I suppose, rather similar to describing Galileo as the greatest of astrologers.
Suslov is responsible to the Party for propaganda and publicity; the members of the Writers' Union who adapt this to the needs of their colleagues are the Chairman and in particular the Secretary, a direct nominee of the Central Executive Committee of the Party, and often not a writer at all (thus the late Shcherbakov, a purely political figure, a powerful member of the Politburo at the time of his death in 1945, was at one time secretary of the Writers' Union).