165. Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 131 (citing “vstrecha pisatelei s I. V. Stalinym,” arkhiv A. M. Gor’kogo, Oct. 26, 1932). The phrase resonated for some. “I immediately liked the permanently repeated aphorism: ‘writers are the engineers of human souls,’” Valentin Katayev noted, attributing it, however, to the writer Yuri Olyesha. Kataev, “Sobytie nebyvaloe,” 216.
166. Zelinskii, “Odna vtrecha,” 157, 160–1, 168.
167. “A Russian writer,” Gorky had written in a private letter back in 1902, “should never live in friendship with a Russian government.” Gorky, Letters of Gorky and Andreev, 41.
168. Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 367 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 11, d. 510, l. 60); Antipina, Povsednevnaia zhizn’, 107–10. At the entrance to one prisoner barrack, a “menu” had been hung, surrounded by flowers, with the saying “Eat, and build the way you eat.” The lunch was listed as cabbage soup, porridge with meat, fish cutlets with sauce, and pirohzki with cabbage. (“I with the pen, you with the shovel—together we built the canal,” wrote the prisoner Vladimir Kavshchyn.) Draskoczy, Belomor, 11 (citing RGALI, f. 1885, op. 3, d. 34, l. 100). “From the minute we became guests of the Chekists, complete Communism began for us,” recalled the then fledgling writer Alexander Avdeyenko, during this time of famine. “We ate and drank as we wanted, and paid for nothing. Smoked sausages. Cheeses. Caviar. Fruit. Chocolate. Wines. Brandy.” Avdeenko, “Otluchenie” (no. 3), 11, (no. 4), 80–133. A group of satirists wrote to Yagoda that “they were thrilled by the grandiose work of the OGPU!” Vinogradov, Genrikh Iagoda, 365 (TsA FSB, f. 2, op. 11, d. 510, l. 27: signed Kupriyanov, Krylov, Sokolov), 366 (l. 24, l. 68). The trip culminated in a copiously illustrated 400-page compilation published in early 1934 under Gorky’s name. Gor’kii et al., Belomorsko-Baltiiskii kanal imeni Stalina. Gorky et al., Belomor; Gorky et al., The White Sea Canal (London: National Centre for Marxist and ‘Left’ Literature, 1935). See also Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago, III: 78–101; and Ruder, Making History for Stalin, 47–52, 213–4.
169. XVII s”ezd, 620.
170. Back in 1929, in connection with Stalin’s official fiftieth birthday, Tovstukha’s Short Biography (1927), shorter than a newspaper article, had been slightly enlarged and reissued in Pravda (Dec. 21, 1929). Tovstukha promised more, but there the matter had stood.
171. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11 [4?], d. 1493, l. 50. Orjonikidze did not consider Koltsov’s draft a success, stating of Stalin “he will beat you and thrash me.” Koltsov nonetheless sent his text to the censor, which in turn forwarded it to Stalin, who supposedly read the manuscript, phoned Koltsov, told him “you praise me too much.” True or not, the book never saw the light of day. Chukovskii, Dnevnik, 38–9. Koltsov’s the “Riddle of Stalin,” published in connection with the official fiftieth birthday, had used the conceit that Stalin might be a riddle to the world bourgeoisie—“Stalin the enigma,” “the Communist sphinx,” “the incomprehensible personality”—but not to the Soviet worker. Pravda, Dec. 21, 1929.
172. Days, the émigré paper in Paris edited by Alexander Kerensky, had alleged in Oct. 1929 that members of the so-called right opposition had compromising documents on Stalin’s pre-1917 revolutionary past. They did not. The fabricated Yeremin “document” (a tsarist police official) appeared in the mid-1930s. (It would be published in Life on April 23, 1956.) Valdlen S. Izmozik, Zhendarmy Rossii (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2002), 466–8. The collection Batumskaia demonstratsiia 1902 goda (Moscow: Partizdat, 1937) contained recollections that Stalin had escaped from Eastern Siberian exile and traveled back to the Caucasus using a fabricated police I.D. in his name.
173. The memoirist Iosif “Soso” Iremashvili also claimed Stalin had emerged with “a grim and bitter hatred against the seminary administration, the bourgeoisie, and all that existed in the country and represented tsarism.” Iremashvili, Stalin und die Tragödie Georgiens, 6, 11–2, 24; Tucker, Stalin as Revolutionary, 73.
174. The Comintern operative (Münzenberg) also mentioned Boris Bazhanov, the defector from Stalin’s secretariat, who published a damning exposé in French (1930) and German (1931). Kun, Stalin, 69–70; RGASPI, f. 155, op. 1, d. 85, l. 1, 3.
