Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

RAPP’s importance and influence should not be exaggerated. As John Barber pointed out, it ‘never enjoyed anything like complete control over the literary world. It was never acknowledged by the party as its spokesman on literary affairs, never achieved hegemony over other literary groups, and never even succeeded suppressing dissident voices within its own ranks.’⁸

Certainly, Stalin responded cautiously to the ‘cultural revolution’ he had unleashed. In December 1928 a group of proletarian playwrights wrote warning him of the ‘right-wing’ danger in literature. Their main target was Mikhail Bulgakov (1891–1940) and his plays about the counter-revolutionary White movement of the civil war years, Days of the Turbins and Flight.

Stalin replied on 1 February 1929, writing that he didn’t think it appropriate to talk about a ‘right-wing’ and ‘left-wing’ in literature. Better to use descriptive concepts such as ‘Soviet’, ‘anti-Soviet’, ‘revolutionary’, ‘anti-revolutionary’. While he thought that Flight was anti-Soviet, he wasn’t against staging the play if Bulgakov ‘were to add to his eight dreams, one or two more dreams depicting the internal social springs of the civil war in the USSR’.

Why are Bulgakov’s plays produced so often, asked Stalin?

Probably because we don’t have enough of our own plays good enough for staging. In a land without fish, even Days of the Turbins is a fish. It is easy to ‘criticise’ and demand a ban on non-proletarian literature. But easiest is not always best. It is not a matter of ban but of . . . competition . . . only in a situation of competition can we achieve the formation and crystallization of our proletarian literature. As to Days of the Turbins itself, it’s not all that bad, it yields more good than harm. Don’t forget that the main impression the viewer takes away from this play is an impression favourable for the Bolsheviks.

Stalin sprang to Bulgakov’s defence again a couple of weeks later, this time at a meeting with Ukrainian writers. As Leonid Maximenkov has commented, the document recording this meeting has a unique feature: ‘we witness Stalin engaged in a spontaneous dialogue’.⁹ Stalin spoke a set-piece at the start but most of the meeting consisted of a no-holds-barred discussion in which he was shown little or no deference by his audience.

During the course of this sometimes-raucous exchange, Stalin displayed knowledge of the work of quite a few Russian and Ukrainian writers: Vsevolod Ivanov, Boris Lavrenev, Fedor Panferov, Yakov Korobov, Nikolai Ostrovsky, Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky and Anton Chekhov. But a lot of what he had to say concerned the national question, not literature itself. The way to unite different national cultures, he argued, was to intensify their separate development. This formula – ‘disunite in order to unite’ – he attributed to Lenin, the idea being that once nations stopped being suspicious of one another they would voluntarily coalesce and culturally unify on a socialist basis.

Bulgakov’s work came up because some of those present didn’t like the way Days of the Turbins depicted the civil war in Ukraine. Again, Stalin defended the play (one he was rumoured to have seen fifteen times) on grounds that overall it gave a good impression of the Bolsheviks. He also made some more general points:

I cannot demand of a literary author that he must be a communist and that he must follow the party point of view. For belletristic literature other standards are needed – non-revolutionary and revolutionary, Soviet and non-Soviet, proletarian and non-proletarian. But to demand that literature be Communist – this is impossible. . . . To demand that belletristic literature and the author follow the party line – then all non-party people would have to be driven out.

Stalin also invoked what would later be called reader-reception theory in support of Bulgakov:

Workers go to see that play and they see . . . there’s no power that can beat the Bolsheviks! There you have it – the general impression left by the play, which can in no way be called Soviet. There are negative sides to that play. Those Turbins are, in their own way, honourable people. . . . But Bulgakov . . . doesn’t want to show . . . how these people . . . are sitting on the neck of other people and that’s why they are being driven out. . . . But even from Bulgakov certain useful things can be taken.