Stalin полностью

Technically, the Union of Soviet Writers was a civic organization, but it was blatantly an arm of the state.³³⁹ It was spending almost no time on aesthetics.³⁴⁰ Its main activity, in the run-up to the anticipated founding congress, consisted of endless meetings of its governing board and manifold committees, and entertainment. The union’s headquarters occupied a nineteenth-century mansion on Vorovsky (formerly Cooks’) Street, in what had been Moscow’s most aristocratic neighborhood, part of the ancient Dolgorukov estate. (This figured in Tolstoy’s War and Peace as the Rostov estate.) Known as the “Central House of the Writers,” the HQ had a library with newspapers and journals, a restaurant, a competitive billiards team, sport groups for tennis, chess, and horseback riding, and study sections for thematic subjects and foreign languages. It also took over a fledgling dacha colony, at Peredelkino, which, like the Moscow HQ, would afford a certain degree of self-organized intellectual life (circles, house visits), although this was shadowed by willing and blackmailed informants.³⁴¹

Two years after the politburo decree announcing it, the writers’ union’s founding congress had still not met, having been postponed several times. Gorky had been set to deliver the keynote, but on May 11, 1934, his son Maxim Peshkov passed away, at age thirty-eight. He had taken part in a drinking binge with some secret police operatives at a May Day picnic, been left to sleep it off outside on a bench, and been diagnosed with influenza. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery on May 12 (the day before Mężyński’s body was placed on view at the House of Trade Unions). Gorky was shattered. “He no longer belonged to himself, and seemed that he was not a person but an institution,” obliged to carry on, noted one close friend.³⁴² Gossips speculated that the regime had killed Gorky’s son to intimidate him.³⁴³ But as the congress’s new opening date approached, Gorky would write a forceful letter to Stalin, asking to be relieved of his role as chairman, and would submit a heated article for Pravda lashing out at party hacks trying to control literature (which Kaganovich authorized Mekhlis to hold back). “Literary affairs are sharpening,” Kaganovich would write to Stalin, who, preoccupied with other matters on which Kaganovich sought guidance (Japan, grain procurements), would answer, three days later, “It must be explained to all Communist writers that the Master in literature, as in all other areas, is only the Central Committee, and that they are obliged to subordinate themselves unconditionally to the latter.”³⁴⁴

A Literary Fund was established on July 28, 1934, with the aim of subsidizing cultural figures in need, including up-and-coming writers, formalizing an ad hoc practice whereby they were granted shoes or winter coats. The money came from 10 percent deductions in the honoraria paid by publishing houses, as well as 0.5 to 2 percent of the fees for live performances. Additionally, the state budget contributed 25 percent of the Literary Fund’s resources. Soon, about 100,000 requests for aid accumulated (many writers submitted multiple petitions).³⁴⁵ Behind closed doors, writers disagreed vehemently on whether such subsidies enhanced productivity or blocked it by removing hunger.³⁴⁶ The Literary Fund obtained permission to build more dachas at Peredelkino as well. Of the three dozen writers’ families initially granted residency, few were Communist party members. Most writers failed to pay the nominal rent.³⁴⁷

WRITING HISTORY