The cultural revolution had begun. "Industrial and financial plans" for literature were announced, and the call went out for "shock troops" in literature, which became a very important matter—one that could not be entrusted to mere writers. "We must reexamine our list of coryphaei," wrote Literaturnaya gazeta. "It is essential to conduct a thorough purge. Along with the slogan of a cultural revolution, the task of creating a literature of the masses has taken on urgent meaning." But, explained Literaturnaya gazeta, "the good writers, the coryphaei, are incomprehensible to the masses; their style is too complicated. (The mediocrities have a much simpler style.)" Hence, "more attention to mediocre writers!"138
Writers began to search for ways to liquidate literature. RAPP announced that art was "the most powerful weapon in the class struggle." Mayakovsky urged that writers meet society's demands. S. Tretyakov, a member of LEF (Left Front of Art) declared: "We cannot wait forever while the professional writer tosses and turns in his bed, giving birth at last to something useful and comprehensible only to himself." Tretyakov called for the creation of workshops to which literary workers would bring materials (travel diaries, biographies, etc.). Others would arrange them, and still others would cast them in a language easily understood by the masses. Marxist literary critic V. Pereverzev considered even this measure insufficient:
The creator [the working class—M. H.] does his work himself; he does not contract it out to others. ... He commands others. ... We do not contract work out to the men of LEF, nor to the men of RAPP; as the ruling power, we simply give the order to sing to anyone who knows how to sing the songs we need, and the order not to to those who do not know.139
In January 1929 Voronsky, the principal advocate of the policy of utilizing fellow travelers in Soviet literature, was arrested for 'Trotskyism." In the fall of 1929 a campaign of denunciation against Boris Pilnyak and Evgeny Zamyatin began. They were condemned for having published their books abroad (Pilnyak's Mahogany and Zamyatin's We). This was only a pretext, for until then Soviet writers had regularly published their books abroad. Pilnyak explained that the Soviet magazine Krasnaya nov was about to publish Mahogany, and Zamyatin explained that We had appeared in the West years earlier, in 1926. Actually, the two men were chosen in order to intimidate other nonparty writers in the unaffiliated professional organization, the Writers' Union. Pilnyak was the head of the Moscow branch of that organization, and Zamyatin headed the Leningrad branch.
The authorities had other grievances against both men. Pilnyak had committed a grave sin by publishing his 'Tale of the Unextinguished Moon," which told about the strange death of Red Army Commander Gavrilov on the operating table, where he had been placed by order of "Number One." It was easy to identify Commissar of War Frunze as the model for Gavrilov and Stalin as the model for "Number One." Zamyatin's sins included We and the article "I Am Afraid." Besides that, his uncompromising honesty, which he considered a necessary condition for true literature, was particularly unforgivable.
Literaturnaya gazeta devoted its whole front page to the disgraced writers:
The conception of a Soviet writer is not geographical; it is social. Only the person who links himself and his work with the socialist system in the present period of reconstruction, a period in which the proletariat is attacking the remnants of capitalism, a period of fierce resistance by the class enemy, only this person can call himself a Soviet writer.140
The newspapers devoted much space to indignant telegrams and resolutions condemning Zamyatin's and Pilnyak's "shameless conduct." This was the first time such a campaign had been conducted. Many organizations and individuals in the world of Soviet culture (people who had never read the condemned books) wrote statements with headlines like 'Traitors to the Revolution," "Fraternization with the White Guards," "Literary Sabotage," and 'Treason at the Front." Pilnyak surrendered, asked for permission to revise his book, and wrote a new novel, The Volga Flows to the Caspian, under the literary tutelage of Nikolai Ezhov, then a secretary of the Central Committee, who was to become famous later in areas other than literature. Zamyatin, for his part, wrote to Stalin saying it was impossible for him to be a writer in the Soviet Union. He requested (and with Gorky's help obtained) permission to leave the country.
At the end of 1929 a Central Committee resolution announced that the literary policies of RAPP were closest to those of the party and called for all literary forces to unite around RAPP. Mayakovsky joined RAPP and within the year committed suicide. In his work The Bathhouse (1929) he put the new credo of Soviet literature in the mouth of Pobedonosikov: "I beg you, in the name of all the workers and peasants, don't get me worked up. ... You should soothe my ears and rest my eyes, not get me worked up. ... We want to relax after all our state and civic responsibilities. Back to the classics! Learn from the great geniuses of our accursed past." Even in "stepping on the throat of his own song," Mayakovsky still got people worked up, and that was useless and harmful. If Demyan Bedny could say, "I'm not an organ grinder whom you can just order to play another tune," how much more difficult it was to tell Mayakovsky to change his tune. Yet the officially required theme songs changed daily. Trotsky, in commenting on Demyan Bedny's fall from grace (in 1932), remarked that Bedny had been able to sell himself wholesale but found it hard to do so retail, that is, to follow every minute change of orders, every political zigzag. How much harder for Mayakovsky to "sell himself retail." His suicide allowed him to enter the pantheon nonetheless. Stalin killed him a second time by naming him (in a resolution to Comrade Ezhov) "the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch."141
In 1932 a new Central Committee resolution abolished all literary schools, trends, and associations, including RAPP. This decision was like a bolt from the blue. Averbakh and his henchmen, the leaders of RAPP, had terrorized all of Soviet literature for years; now at a stroke of the pen they had been thrown from their pedestal. When Boris Souvarine asked who had influenced Stalin in this decision, Babel answered that no one had. "Stalin decides everything for himself, on his own. For two weeks he invited in and listened to Averbakh, Bezymensky, and tutti quanti. Then he decided: we'll get nowhere with these fellows. In the Politburo he suddenly proposed his resolution. No one batted an eye."142