Zhdanov, in his speech at the congress, had called for literary depictions of “reality in its revolutionary development,” geared toward “the ideological remolding and education of the toilers in the spirit of socialism.” He demanded “a combination of the most austere, sober, practical work, with supreme heroism and the most grandiose prospects.”384 Some speakers urged multiple ways to achieve this. “We should tell our artists, ‘Everything is permitted,’” urged the thirty-four-year-old screenwriter Natan Zarkhi. “Everything that serves the defense of the motherland, its strengthening, the victory of Communism, Bolshevik ideas, everything that leads to the development of Soviet culture and the flourishing of the creative individuality of the people, growing not in spite of the collective but because of it.”385
Socialist realism’s precise forms, in other words, remained to be adjudicated even just in literature.386 Any definition for music was deferred without end. Musicians effectively lost the ability to experiment at the composition level but could pursue refinement of instrumental and vocal techniques. Many “class enemies” (sons of former tsarist generals, nephews of tsarist interior ministers, daughters of former nobles, former ladies-in-waiting) were allowed to remain at positions in music and conduct training, a tolerance perhaps reflecting Stalin’s intense interest in quality traditional music.387 Painting had its own specificities. Standard realism had already triumphed by the 1920s, but many painters had little experience in narrative forms and had trouble finding a place in the new order.388 Stalin, who in the underground days had collected postcards of famous paintings, in power chose not to live surrounded by oil paintings on the walls. (On the contrary, he had allowed the sale abroad of “bourgeois” artworks accumulated in tsarist Russia, altogether some four thousand paintings, including forty-four of the highest order—Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, Titian, van Eyck—until meager receipts and international scandal prompted an end to the fire sales.)389, 390
Pasternak had harbored illusions about the likely philosophical level of the congress. “I am murderously downtrodden,” he was said to have repeated in intimate company. “You understand: murderously.”391 Many writers who disagreed vehemently about aesthetics agreed on the need for top-down imposition of a single approach for everyone. They were also zealous about getting state recognition, as opposed to public favor, and not a few lobbied for or welcomed repressive measures against rivals. Socialist realism served as an administration system as much as an aesthetic: party directives, censorship, prizes, apartments, dachas, travel—or their denial—as well as myriad personnel employed as cultural apparatchiks, editors, and censors, what Bulgakov called “people with ideological eyes.”392
On August 29, 1934, with the congress set to draw to a close in three days and “elections” imminent for the position of writers’ union secretary (or party controller), Zhdanov and Kaganovich wrote to Sochi proposing candidates.393 Stalin narrowed their list to two, and they selected the bespectacled Alexander Shcherbakov (b. 1901), whose education at the Communist Academy and the Institute of Red Professors had been interrupted (on official documents he wrote: “according to my education, a teacher of the history of the party”).394 Summoned out of the blue by Kaganovich, Shcherbakov arrived to find Zhdanov with him. “Here’s the thing,” they told him. “We want to assign you work that is extremely important and difficult; you probably will be stunned when I tell you what kind of work it is.” He was contemplating northeastern Kazakhstan. “I was genuinely stunned,” Shcherbakov recorded in his diary. They dispatched him directly from Old Square to the writers’ milieu. “I spent a half hour at the congress. I left. Nauseating.”395