Bukharin's speech at this conference showed that the Soviet government had no intention of granting any freedom. The man whom Lenin had called the "favorite of the party" and who at that time was acting as chief theorist for the Stalinist majority, was frank and open. "Freedom in education is a
sophism," he said.255 Such categories as the people, good, and freedom were mere verbal badges, empty shells.256 The party had come to power "by marching over corpses. For this it had to have not only nerves of steel but also a knowledge of the road history had marked out for us, based on Marxist analysis."257 The party's victory had confirmed the accuracy and correctness of Marxist ideology. The party would not renounce the hegemony of Marxism because "it is the most powerful weapon in our hands, allowing us to build what we want."258 "In particular," Bukharin declared, "it is essential to us that intellectual cadres be trained in an ideologically precise way. Yes, we will produce standardized intellectuals, produce them as though in a factory."259
A few months after this conference the Central Committee's press department held a conference on party policies in regard to literature. Thus the Central Committee was proceeding from a definition of the general line to a specific application of its policy toward the most important section of the intelligentsia, the writers.
There was no single, unified point of view. The proletarian writers, who had formed the so-called October Group and had published the magazine On Guard since 1923, called for a big stick policy in relation to the fellow travelers. The fellow travelers were mainly published in a magazine called Red Virgin Soil (Krasnaya nov), run by the Old Bolshevik Aleksandr Vo- ronsky. It was revealed by Vardin, a leader of the On Guard group, that "in 1921 Comrade Voronsky was given certain directives and certain resources in order to keep a certain group of writers in Soviet Russia. ... At the time we had to be careful that the Pilnyaks would not defect to the Whites."260 Voronsky's view was that since proletarian literature did not exist, the party had to give the fellow travelers "a moral working-over," to paraphrase Lenin. This line had Trotsky's support as well. He did not think proletarian literature would have time to come into existence because the period of proletarian dictatorship would be too short. Bukharin on the other hand upheld the theory of socialism in one country and favored the development of proletarian literature. He believed it was necessary to reeducate some of the fellow travelers and get rid of the others.
At the Central Committee conference of July 1925 two different policies were advanced. Voronsky proposed that the party abstain from adopting the viewpoint of any one literary current and instead aid all the revolutionary groupings while prudently seeking to orient them. Vardin proposed that the party install the dictatorship of the party in literature and that the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP) be the instrument of that dictatorship. As to the fellow travelers, he favored the establishment of a "literary Cheka." A letter signed by thirty-seven prominent Soviet writers
was read to the conference. Among the signers were Aleksei Tolstoy, Isaac Babel, Mikhail Zoshchenko, and Sergei Esenin. The writers spoke of their close ties with post-October Soviet Russia, confessed their own errors, but at the same time complained about the attacks upon them by the On Guard group, which was presenting its views as though they were the views of the party as a whole. This letter was a totally new phenomenon. Writers were asking the party for protection, addressing it as a supreme arbiter.
The resolution of the Central Committee combined both points of view on how to control literature. Everyone agreed on the main thing, that it was up to the party to identify without fail the "social and class essence of all literary currents" and to exercise its authority over them.261 The only disagreement was over what kind of sauce to cook the fellow travelers in.
The majority of Soviet writers who felt that they were suffering under the tutelage of the On Guard group accepted the Central Committee resolution as a charter of liberties for the writer. Only a few understood its real meaning. Pasternak commented that the country was not going through a cultural revolution but a "cultural reaction."262 Osip Mandelstam, as his widow Nadezhda tells us in her memoir Hope Against Hope, understood that the noose would be tightened more and more around the neck of literature. There were even some who found the idea of a "literary Cheka" entrancing. Mayakovsky spoke on October 2, 1926, during a discussion on the Soviet government's theatrical policy. He called for legal reprisals against Mikhail Bulgakov for his play The Days of the Turbins, which depicted the Whites rather favorably. It had been staged by the Moscow Art Theater. "Accidentally, and to the great joy of the bourgeois, we gave Bulgakov a chance to whine and squeal—and whine he did, but we won't let him again."263 Mayakovsky totally identified himself with those who would decide whether or not to allow writers to whine and squeal. The former rebel poet had become a hunter of heretics.
After the Central Committee resolution, power in the fields of literature, art, and theater gradually passed into the hands of the On Guard group, to those who were commonly called "the frenzied zealots."
CHAPTER
—4
IN PURSUIT OF CONFLICT, 1926-1928
THE DEATH OF NEP
Historians disagree on exactly when the NEP ended, but it began to die out in late 1926. The "grain procurement crises" of 1927 and 1928—sharp reductions in peasant deliveries of grain to the state—were the visible symptoms of NEP's mortal illness. But sooner or later, one way or another, the NEP was doomed. The Soviet system was not suited to, indeed had not been created for, the resolution of problems through normal, traditional methods under peaceful conditions.
The system had been created by a revolution to carry out a "great leap forward" into Utopia. Under Lenin, during the civil war, primitive but effective forms of government had been worked out: intimidation, open terror, and rule by decree. But they were effective only under crisis conditions. Crisis alone permitted the authorities to demand—and obtain— total submission and all necessary sacrifices from its citizens. The system needed sacrifices and sacrificial victims for the good of the cause and the happiness of future generations. Crises enabled the system in this way to build a bridge from the fictional world of Utopian programs to the world of reality.
In the second half of 1926, the NEP began gasping for breath. The 201
restoration of the economy had, for the most part, been accomplished. It became necessary at that point to decide what direction further economic development should take, especially in regard to heavy industry. Bukharin's program, embodied in the slogan, "Enrich yourselves," represented a peaceful, traditional model of development.
During the NEP years N. Valentinov (whose real name was Nikolai Volsky) edited the Commercial-Industrial Gazette, organ of the Supreme Economic Council, the VSNKH. A Bolshevik until 1905, then a Men- shevik, Valentinov-Volsky knew Lenin and the other Bolshevik leaders well. In his opinion the "right-wing Communists were following a program parallel to Stolypin's."1 In other words, Bukharin's program, supported by Stalin in 1925, was similar to the Stolypin land reform, with the difference that Nicholas II's prime minister believed in the permanence of his reform, whereas the 1925 program only temporarily sanctioned private farming on nationalized land.