Perhaps Babel oversimplified things. Stalin's decision might have been prompted in part by his desire to win over Gorky, who detested the men of RAPP. In 1932 Stalin was a frequent guest at Gorky's house, where he met other writers as well. It was during one of these meetings that Stalin bestowed the noble title "engineers of human souls" on Soviet writers. Undoubtedly, it was at that time, after his letter to Proletarskaya revolutsiya, that Stalin decided to take personal charge of literature, as he had of philosophy and history. He needed efficient and dependable types to serve as "transmission belts," not Marxist ideologues like Averbakh. They "worked people up" too much. Instead of proletarian writers, Stalin decided to rely on fellow travelers, but only those who were ready, as Pereverzev put it, "to sing the songs we need" on command. Stalin counted heavily on Gorky's help to carry out his plan for the final subjugation of literature, and culture in general, to the party.
In 1928 Gorky, who was living on Capri, began receiving numerous letters and telegrams from Soviet institutions and individuals—writers, workers, members of the Pioneer youth organization, and so on—urging him to return to his homeland. The flood of requests, regulated by GPU head Genrikh Yagoda, reached such proportions that Gorky was unable to refuse. Other factors undoubtedly played a part: nostalgia for his homeland, the tempting prospect of assuming first place in Russian culture, and the persuasive arguments of his secretary Kryuchkov, a GPU agent.
At the end of 1928 Gorky returned to Moscow. There is no doubt that many in the Soviet Union looked forward to his return, for his authority as a great writer, a great humanist, and a defender of the oppressed was undeniable. Moreover, he was not a party member. Until 1933 Gorky made occasional visits to the Soviet Union, where he had at his disposal a sumptuous house in Moscow and two luxurious villas (one outside Moscow, the other in the Crimea) and where many factories, schools, even corrective labor camps, and an entire city had been named after him. In 1933 he was refused a visa to leave for Italy and remained in the Soviet Union until his death in July 1936. In 1932 Souvarine asked Babel about Gorky. Babel told him that whenever Stalin left Moscow for one of his country places, his responsibilities were assumed by Kaganovich, but on a more general plane, Gorky was "the number two man."
Civic responsibilities changed Gorky. He continued as before to stigmatize injustice, hunger, and poverty, but only when they occurred in the West. For his homeland he had only praise and approval. In 1930, on the first day of the "Industrial party" trial, he wrote an article that began: "In Moscow the Supreme Court of the workers and peasants of the Union of Socialist Soviets is trying a group of people who organized a counterrevolutionary plot against workers' and peasants' power."143 The great writer could have waited for the end of the trial to make his pronouncement, but no, he already knew that "a counterrevolutionary plot" had been organized. Just two weeks later, Pravda and Izvestia published a new article by Gorky, 'To the Humanists." The proletarian humanist fell upon the bourgeois humanists, particularly "Professor Albert Einstein and Mr. Thomas Mann," for having signed a protest statement by the German League for Human Rights against what Gorky called "the execution of forty-eight criminals, organizers of the famine in the Soviet Union."144 The Gorky who had protested the death penalty in the Bolshevik-organized trial of SR leaders in 1922 and who had railed unceasingly against the monstrous cruelty of bourgeois justice had disappeared. Forty-eight directors of the Soviet food industry were shot after a secret trial—or without a trail, but Gorky said, "I know very well the indescribable vileness of the actions of those forty- eight."145
Aleksandr Orlov, once a highly placed Chekist, wrote that after hearing about the execution of the forty-eight Gorky became hysterical and accused Yagoda of killing innocent people in order to dump the blame for the famine on them.146 If this is true it puts Gorky in a worse light still, for in 1931 he returned to Capri for a vacation from "building socialism" and could have publicly condemned the executions then. Instead, he spoke out against a new group of defendants in another one of Stalin's show trials. This time it was the trial of a group of Mensheviks, which took place March 1-8, 1931. Gorky not only agreed with the verdict ("all of these criminals" had been involved in "wrecking activity over the course of several years"); he also believed that not all of them had been caught and that the hunt should continue.147 One peculiarity of the Menshevik trial and Gorky's article about it was that among the accused were people he knew well, including a close friend, Nikolai Sukhanov, author of a seven-volume history of the Russian revolution. Gorky did not forgo the opportunity to mock Sukhanov, calling him a "conceited scholar."148
In his assertion of the need for "the consoling lie," the lovely mirage, as the best means of educating the people, Gorky displayed such zeal that he earned a gentle rebuke from Stalin himself. In one of the most tragicomic episodes in the history of Soviet culture, Gorky called for the prohibition of self-criticism in the Soviet Union. Stalin admonished him: "We cannot do without self-criticism. We really cannot, Aleksei Maksimovich."149
In his speeches, articles, and letters to foreign friends, Gorky denounced the "legends" about forced labor and terror, collectivization and famine in the Soviet Union. He denied the "very vulgar fable that there is an individual dictator in the Soviet Union."150
After abolishing all literary trends and associations, Stalin wanted to see the establishment of a single writers' organization under the firm control of the party and state. It was partly to accomplish this task that he placed Gorky in charge of all Soviet culture. At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in the summer of 1934, Gorky coped marvelously with his task. He introduced a new obligatory literary style, an "artistic method" that soon became obligatory in all cultural fields: "socialist realism." This was the method of the consoling lie, which Gorky said was necessary to create a "new reality."151 The writers' congress enthusiastically adopted this new ethic for all "engineers of human souls" and builders of the "new reality." From the platform of the congress Viktor Shklovsky denounced Dostoevsky: "If Fedor Mikhailovich were here, we would have to judge him as the heirs of humanity, as people who are judging a traitor. Dostoevsky cannot be understood outside of the revolution, nor can he be understood as anything but a traitor. "152 Dostoevsky had done his time and did not need to fear for the future, but the delegates to the writers' congress engaged in more contemporary denunciations: they denounced each other.153 They also reported with satisfaction that "in our kolkhoz fields ... Pioneer children catch their fathers, accomplices of the class enemy, in the act of stealing socialist property and bring them before the revolutionary tribunals."154 The writers reported with equal pride their trip to the Baltic—White Sea Canal, a trip that produced the most disgraceful book in the history of literature, a glorification of the concentration camp.155
Last but not least, the congress sang the praises of Stalin. Everyone said as much as their literary talents would permit. "Comrade Stalin is a mighty genius of the working class," said one delegate.156 Another called him "the most beloved of all leaders of any epoch and any people."157 Here too Gorky set the tone. "Leaderism," he said, "is a sickness of our century. Internally, it was the result of decadence, impotence, and the poverty of individualism;
externally, it was manifested in the form of such purulent abscesses as, for example, Ebert, Noske, Hitler, and similar heroes of capitalist reality. Here, where we have created a socialist reality, such abscesses are of course impossible."158 He concluded with, "Long live the party of Lenin, the leader of the proletariat. Long live the leader of the party, Joseph Stalin."159