376. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 232–4 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 1, d. 56, l. 185–89). Kirilenko served as the secretary to Petrovsky, head of the central executive committee in Soviet Ukraine.
377. Artizov and Naumov, Vlast’, 223–6 (TsA FSB, f. 3, op. 1, d. 56, l. 125–32), 226 (l. 150), 227–8 (l. 160–3), 229 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 950, l. 40).
378. Khlevniuk et al., Stalin i Kaganovich, 447 (RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 83, l. 122–122ob.). Attendees’ national composition was registered as follows: 201 Russians, 113 Jews, 28 Georgians, 25 Ukrainians, 19 Armenians, 19 Tatars, 17 Belorussians, and 12 Uzbeks (43 other nationalities were represented by fewer than 10 and in some cases just one person). The politburo strongly criticized the party organizations in Bashkiria, Buryat-Mongolia, Yakutia, and the German region in the Volga for sending ill-chosen delegates and not overseeing the speeches. Gatagova et al., TsK RKP (b)—VKP (b) i natsional’nyi vopros, II: 75 (RGASPI, f. 17, op. 3, d. 951, l. 8: Aug. 28, 1934).
379. RGASPI, f. 558, op. 11, d. 83, l. 156–7.
380. Antipina, Pvsednevnaia zhizn’, 43–4; Osokina, Za fasadom, 113.
381. “Many members of our government attended,” recalled Valentina Khodasevich, principal designer of the storied Leningrad (formerly Mariinsky) Theater of Opera and Ballet. “Supper, served in the dining room, was very lively and interesting. People made speeches. Aleksei Maximovich asked that I sit next to Malraux, since I speak French, to entertain him and translate . . . [Louis] Aragon, Elsa Triolet, the Spanish writer Mara-Teresa Léon and many others spoke very well.” Khodasevich, Portrety slovami, 280–1.
382. Pravda, June 19, 1934; Katsman, “Cheliuskin”; Groza and Dubenskii, Slavnym zavoevateliam Artiki.
383. Radio was still mostly live at this time, and arrests followed “accidental” announcements (e.g., mentioning that there had been a famine in 1933), but sometimes the utterances were deliberate: the announcer of the ceremony on Red Square for the Chelyuskin rescuers signed off, “The comedy is over.” (He turned out to have noble descent and a relative arrested by the OGPU.) Goriaeva, Radio Rossii, 158. See also Bollinger, Stalin’s Slave Ships, 65–71; McCannon, Red Arctic, 61–8; The Cheliuskin Odyssey (1934).
384. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 4–5. Pavel Yudin and Alexander Fadeyev authored “On Socialist Realism,” which had been approved by the Central Committee and published in Pravda (May 8), on what was thought to be the eve of the congress. See also Kemp-Welch, Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 177. The literary section of the institute of philosophy, at the Communist Academy, would mount what ended up to be a debate about socialist realism on Dec. 20 and 28, 1934, and Jan. 3, 1935, prompted by a draft encyclopedia article on the novel by a Hungarian-born Germanophone intellectual, György Lukács (b. 1885), a Hegel devotee who had once been expelled from the Hungarian Communist party for the heresy of advocating alliances with non-proletariat forces in democratic settings, and lived in Moscow, for a time editing Marx’s German-language notebooks and manuscripts at the Institute of Marx-Engels-Lenin. Lukács cast the novel as both pure avatar of bourgeois culture and capitalist modernity and as temporary displacement of the grand epic tradition, but the proletariat’s rise forced the creation of a “positive hero,” the “conscious worker,” who overcame the “degradation of man” and forced the novel back into the arms of the epic. Socialist realism—thanks to this class analysis contortion—became an instrument for a supposedly genuine world literature. “Problemy teorii romana: doklad G. Lukacha,” Literaturnyi kritik, 1935, no. 2: 214–49, and “Pravlennaia stenogramma diskusii po dokladu G. Lukacha,” Literaturnyi kritik, 1935, no. 3: 231–54; Clark, Moscow, 163–5; Tikhanov, Master and the Slave, 112–28; Lukach, “Roman kak burzhuaznaia eopopeia,” IX: 795–832; Szikalai, After the Revolution; Gurvich, “Vtoroe rozhdenie,” 347–8.
385. Pervyi vsesoiuznyi s”ezd sovetskikh pisatelei, 464–6 (Aug. 28). Zarkhi (b. 1900) died July 17, 1935.
