Natasha's Dance полностью

The activities of RAPP (the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers) made life impossible for non-proletarian writers and 'fellow travellers' like Mayakovsky, who disbanded LEF, the Left Front, and joined RAPP in a last desperate bid to save himself in the final few weeks of his life. Formed in 1928 as the literary wing of Stalin's Five-year Plan for industry, RAPP saw itself as the militant vanguard of a cultural revolution against the old intelligentsia. 'The one and only task of Soviet literature', its journal declared in 1930, 'is the depiction of the Five-year Plan and the class war.'⁹¹ The Five-year Plan was intended as the start of a new revolution which would transform Russia into an advanced industrialized state and deliver power to the working class. A new wave of terror began against the so-called 'bourgeois' managers in industry (that is, those who had held their jobs since 1917), and this was followed by a similar assault on 'bourgeois specialists' in the professions and the arts. Supported by the state, RAPP attacked the 'bourgeois enemies' of Soviet literature which it claimed were hidden in the left-wing avant-garde. Just five days before his death, Mayakovsky was condemned at a RAPP meeting at which his critics demanded proof that he would still be read in twenty years.⁹²

By the beginning of the 1930s, any writer with an individual voice was deemed politically suspicious. The satirists who flourished in the relatively liberal climate of the 1920s were the first to come under attack. There was Mikhail Zoshchenko, whose moral satires on the empty verbiage of the Soviet bureaucracy and the cramped conditions of communal flats were suddenly considered anti-Soviet in the new political climate of the Five-year Plan, when writers were expected to be positive and the only acceptable subject for satire were the foreign enemies of the Soviet Union. Then there was Mikhail Bulgakov, whose Gogolian satires about censorship (The Crimson Island), daily life in Moscow in the NEP (Adventures of Chichikov), Soviet xenophobia (Fatal Eggs) and his brilliant comic novel The Heart of a Dog (where a Pavlov like experimental scientist transplants the brain and sexual

organs of a dog into a human being) were not only banned from publication but forbidden to be read when passed as manuscripts from hand to hand. Finally, there was Andrei Platonov, an engineer and Utopian communist (until he was expelled from the Bolshevik Party in 1926) whose own growing doubts about the human costs of the Soviet experiment were reflected in a series of extraordinary dystopian satires: The Epifan Locks (19Z7), a timely allegory on the grandiose but ultimately disastrous canal-building projects of Peter the Great; Chev-engur (also 1927), a fatal odyssey in search of the true communist society; and The Foundation Pit (1930), a nightmare vision of collectivization in which the foundation pit of a huge communal home for the local proletariat turns out to be a monumental grave for humanity. All three were condemned as 'counter-revolutionary' and banned from publication for over sixty years.

RAPP's 'class war' reached fever pitch, however, in 1929 with its organized campaign of vilification against Zamyatin and Pilnyak. Both writers had published works abroad which had been censored in the Soviet Union: Zamyatin's We appeared in Prague in 1927; and Pilnyak's Red Mahogany, a bitter commentary on the decline of the revolutionary ideals of the Soviet state, was published in Berlin in 1929. But the attack on them had a significance beyond the condemnation of particular works. Boris Pilnyak, who was chairman of the Board of the All-Russian Writers' Union and so effectively the Soviet Union's Writer Number One, was perhaps the widest read and most widely imitated serious prose writer in the country.* His persecution was an advance warning of the strict obedience and conformity which the Soviet state would demand of all its writers from the start of the first Five-year Plan.

For the Five-year Plan was not just a programme of industrialization. It was nothing less than a cultural revolution in which all the arts were called up by the state in a campaign to build a new society. According to the plan, the primary goal of the Soviet writer was to raise the workers' consciousness, to enlist them in the 'battle' for 'socialist construction' by writing books with a social content which they could

* Pilnyak's best-known novels are The Naked Year (192.1), Black Bread (1923) and Machines and Wolves (1924).