The death of Alexander Blok marked the end of an era, the collapse of faith in the revolution on the part of the intelligentsia, the demise of hope. "Life has changed," Blok wrote in his diary on April 17, 1921. Earlier he had written 'The Twelve," a poem in which Christ led the revolutionaries into the future. Now he wrote, "Throughout the world, the louse has conquered and everything will go a different way now, not the way we used to live, the way we loved."229 At his last public appearance, a meeting in honor of the eighty-fourth anniversary of Pushkin's death, Blok spoke of the poet's mission: 'They also take away peace and liberty... not outward peace, but the inner calm of creativity. Not juvenile libertinism... but creative freedom, a secret inner liberty. And the poet dies because he can no longer breathe; life has lost its meaning."230 Within a few months Blok himself died, and his death was quite symbolic. On May 29, 1921, Gorky addressed a letter to Lunacharsky: "Would you please ask the Politburo as quickly as possible to give permission for Blok to leave for Finland." Twelve days later Lunacharsky passed on the request in behalf of Blok, who was seriously ill. The next day the Politburo discussed the question and passed a resolution to "improve the food situation for Alexander Blok." Blok's condition worsened. On July 23 the Politburo agreed to allow the poet to leave the country but would not give permission for his wife to accompany him. The poet was in no condition to travel by himself. On July 29 Gorky sent a telegram to the Kremlin addressed to Lunacharsky: "Urgent. Condition extremely serious. Immediate departure for Finland indispensable."
On August 1 Lunacharsky again raised the question with the Central Committee. This time the authorization was granted.231
On August 7 Blok died at the age of forty. Weeks had passed since Gorky's initial letter. It is common knowledge that it was Lenin who decided questions involving departure from the Soviet Republic by people prominent in science and culture.
Neither the fact that most intellectuals protested against the October revolution nor that numerous cultural figures went into exile stopped the progress in the arts that had been going on in Russia since the turn of the century. Not even the lack of essential materials, such as paints and canvas for artists, marble for sculptors and architects, and paper for writers, stopped this powerful creative impulse. Andrei Bely wrote: "In its most difficult days Russia became like a garden of nightingales. Poets sprang up as never before. People barely had the strength to live but they were all singing."232 However, as Lenin explained to Clara Zetkin, the task of the party was to direct this spontaneous artistic and cultural outpouring into a constructive channel serving the state and to bring it under the control of party institutions.233 Viktor Shklovsky jotted down this note at the time: "Art must move organically, like the heart in the human breast, but they want to regulate it like a train."234
The task of regulating art fell to party members who were connected with one or another artistic endeavor. Proletarian writers and proletarian artists became cultural leaders. The magazine of the proletarian writers, appropriately enough, was named On Guard (Na postu).
In 1923 Trotsky coined a phrase for designating nonproletarian writers and artists who wanted to live and work in the Soviet Republic but were not fully qualified to do so (in the eyes of the party); he called them fellow travelers (poputchiki). Those writers and artists who were not classed as outright enemies could be granted the designation poputchik, but there was a thin line between "enemy" and "fellow traveler." Maxim Gorky, who had left the country and who was regarded with hostility by the proletarian writers, was classed as a fellow traveler. So was Mayakovsky, although one of Pravdas leading journalists, Lev Sosnovsky, denounced Mayakovsky in 1921 for having dared to take "our very old comrade Svortsov-Stepanov" to court because he had "refused in his capacity as director of the State Publishing House, Gosizdat, to pay royalties on some futurist nonsense published in a theatrical journal." The article concluded unequivocally, "So you want to fool around, Messieurs Futurists? We will see that your inappropriate and costly fooling comes to an end."235
This was not the first warning to the fellow travelers. They had been warned by the shooting of Gumilev, the death of Blok, and the deportation of many leading intellectuals from the country; and they had been threatened repeatedly with the "stern whip of the dictatorship" in newspaper and magazine articles. On February 27, 1922, the Orgburo passed a resolution "on the struggle against petit bourgeois ideology in the field of literature and publishing."236 This was the second Central Committee pronouncement on cultural questions. It indicated what should and should not be published. In particular it authorized the printing of works by a group of young writers who had formed the first literary association after the revolution, the Se- rapion Brothers, but only on the condition that "the latter do not contribute to any reactionary publications." Which publications were reactionary, of course, was decided solely by the party.
The danger to culture and free creative activity was first pointed out by Evgeny Zamyatin, who was also the first to disclose the real nature of the October revolution as the beginning of a new era. "We have lived through the epoch of suppression of the masses," he wrote in 1920. "We are living in an epoch of suppression of the individual in the name of the masses."237 With the foresight of genius he wrote the novel We, in which he described the Only State, the state of the future, in which there is only one individual, the Benefactor, and in which the citizens are mere numbers. In this state, where the citizens' capacity to fantasize has been surgically removed so that they can become just like machines, the fate of literature, art, and culture is foreordained. "How is it possible," asks the hero of the novel, "that the ancients did not see as plain as day the total absurdity of their literature and poetry? The grand and majestic power of the written word was spent for nothing. It was simply ridiculous. Everyone wrote whatever came to mind."238 In Zamyatin's negative Utopia, literature is a branch of the civil service. Ten or fifteen years later Zamyatin's terrible prophecy became a reality. Today it seems like a commonplace, but in 1920 the idea of a "state literature" was an entirely new concept.
Zamyatin was the most consistent and fearless defender of creative freedom. He issued his warning about the threat to culture not in We, whose publication was banned, but in an article entitled "I Am Afraid," in which he said,
True literature can exist only where it is created, not by diligent and trustworthy officials, but by madmen, misfits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics. But when a writer must be sensible and rigidly orthodox,... there can be no literature cast in bronze, there can be only a paper literature, a newspaper literature, which is read today and used for wrapping soap tomorrow. 239