Aleksei Tolstoy, author of science fiction, historical novels, and children’s books, would call Shcherbakov “a rabbit who swallowed a boa constrictor.”396 Tolstoy (b. 1883), a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev, embodied many of the paradoxes Stalin faced with writers. He had emigrated to Paris with the Whites but returned in 1923 to a hero’s welcome, supporting the revolution. He took up residence in a villa with servants in Tsarskoye Selo, where Nicholas and Alexandra had lived, earning the nickname “the workers-and-peasants’ count.” (Stalin first met him in 1932 at Gorky’s.) After the success of the first two installments of Tolstoy’s novel Peter the First (1934), which celebrated the founding of the Russian empire and compared Peter to Stalin, he was told to relocate to Moscow, where he got a state apartment and a dacha in elite Barvikha. (“He collected mahogany and birch pieces made during Paul I’s reign” to furnish his residences, one Soviet musician wrote.)397 The count wore a fur-lined coat with beaver collar, caroused in Moscow’s restaurants with a rat pack, married his young secretary (his fourth wife), and enjoyed permission to travel to Europe at state expense. “The great trait of the personality of Aleksei Tolstoy,” the contemporary literary historian Dmitry Svyatopolk-Mirsky observed, “was the astonishing combination of enormous natural gifts with a complete lack of brains.”398 But he toed the line.
Writing to Zhdanov from Sochi, Stalin, based on newspaper accounts, deemed Gorky’s congress speech “a bit pale from the point of view of Soviet literature,” and complained that Bukharin’s speech had introduced “an element of hysteria,” but concluded that “in general the congress went well.”399 The congress concluded on September 1, 1934, by “electing” thirty-seven preapproved members of the union’s governing body chaired by Gorky, which that same day “elected” Shcherbakov as head of its secretariat.400 The NKVD secretly reported that the writers were busying themselves with personal matters: purchase of cars, construction of dachas, departures on writing trips or holidays, some doing so even before the final day of the congress. “What is striking, above all,” the operative noted, “is that after the congress the writers talk very little about it. It is as if everyone conspired to keep silent.”401 In fact, the writers expended considerable energy parsing the power of this or that person on the governing board, who was up, who down, what it would mean for their careers and the course of literature. Many viewed Gorky as a guarantee of literary values, and a balance of power among egos and tendencies.
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TSARIST CENSORS HAD SUPPRESSED parts of the work of the bravura satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, and in the early 1930s, Leningrad writers had issued Unpublished Shchedrin, a compilation Stalin acquired and assiduously marked up in red and blue pencil, indicating multiple readings of its vivid passages about bureaucrats, scoundrels, debauches. “Write your denunciations, wretches,” Stalin underlined. “Grief goes to that city whose boss showers it with decrees without thinking, but still greater grief occurs when the boss is unable to apply any decrees at all.”402 In a gesture calculated to win intelligentsia favor, he allocated state funds to the son of Saltykov-Shchedrin, and the OGPU compiled a report on conversations among Leningrad writers about it. The critic V. Medvedev was quoted to the effect that Stalin was “a most decisive and severe politician,” but also “a great liberal and patron in the best sense of that word. Every day we hear about a conversation between Stalin and some writers, or about some assistance rendered at his initiative to one of the mass of writers. In Stalin, literature and writers have a great friend.”403 That was precisely how the dictator wanted to be seen.
