Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him

As it is, the lecture won’t do. Above all, its construction: three quarters, if not more, is taken up by general historical philosophical reflections, and those are wrong. His ideal is primitive society. . . . Clearly this position is un-Marxist. . . . Soviet literature is almost unmentioned. . . . In view of the seriousness of our alterations and the danger of the lecture going wrong, we (I, Molotov, and Voroshilov) went to see him and after a fairly long chat he agreed to introduce corrections and changes. His mood seems to be bad. . . . It’s not just that he started talking about difficulties . . . but the taste his objections left.²⁹

Gorky was clearly not completely reliable and the congress had to be carefully orchestrated. In August 1934, Kaganovich and Stalin’s Central Committee satrap for the arts, Andrei Zhdanov, decided which writers should run the union. Of the thirty-three men and one woman nominated for the union presidium, only a handful—Gorky, Aleksei Tolstoi, Mikhail Sholokhov, and the Georgian novelist Mikheil Javakhishvili— had any distinction, the rest were party apparatchiks. Fifty-nine writers of various ethnic affiliations were chosen for the plenum. For Buriat Mongolia, Yakutia, and Karelia, Kaganovich and Zhdanov could not suggest anybody. Overall, there were a few real writers—Boris Pasternak, Ilya Ehrenburg, Samuil Marshak (the children’s writer and translator of Burns), and Paolo Iashvili, the Georgian poet—but the majority were either hacks or thugs. Some, like Demian Bedny or Zazubrin, were both.

The union’s self-government was a sham. Iagoda controlled those writers who were OGPU agents and Andrei Zhdanov oversaw the congress. Zhdanov and others nervously listened to Bukharin’s speech but restrained the Stalinist left from howling it down. Foreign delegates including André Malraux were stopped from circulating freely. As the congress began, OGPU found nine copies of an anonymous leaflet addressed to foreign delegates, apparently composed by a group of Soviet writers:

. . . We Russian writers remind one of prostitutes in a brothel, with just one difference, that they trade their bodies and we trade our souls; just as they have no way out of the brothel, except death by starvation, neither have we. . . . At home you set up various committees to save victims of fascism, you assemble antiwar congresses, you make libraries of books burned by Hitler, all very well. But why do we not see you acting to save victims of our Soviet fascism, run by Stalin? . . . Personally we fear that in a year or two the failed seminary student Iosif Jughashvili (Stalin) will not be satisfied by the title of world-class philosopher and will demand, like Nebuchadnezzar, to be called at the very least the “sacred bull.” Do you understand the game you’re playing? Or are you, just like us, prostituting your feelings, conscience, duty? But then we shall never forgive you for that, never ever. . . .³⁰

The authors of this manifesto were never identified, nor did any foreign delegate speak of it. OGPU informers summarized participants’ private comments for Stalin’s perusal: