Stalin's Library: A Dictator and His Books

In a June 1929 letter to Maxim Gorky, Stalin wrote that a play about the 1918 Baku Commune was ‘generally speaking . . . weak’. The short-lived commune had ended in tragedy when it was overthrown by counter-revolutionaries and its Bolshevik leaders captured and executed. Stalin thought the play sinned against historical truth because it didn’t deal with how and why the Baku Bolsheviks had ‘abandoned power’. Nor did Stalin like the dramatist’s depiction of Caspian sailors as ‘mercenary drunks’ or the absence in the play of Baku’s oil workers ‘as subject’. Stalin, who had been a Bolshevik agitator in Baku before the revolution, concluded that while the play contained a few ‘juicy pages’ that spoke to the author’s talent, its characters were mostly ‘vague and lacklustre’.¹⁰

In 1930 the poet and satirist Demyan Bedny – a Bolshevik favourite – upset the authorities by publishing poems that caricatured Russian people as inherently lazy. Having been publicly censured by the central committee, he protested to Stalin, who rejected his pleas for artistic respect and berated him for slandering the USSR. He reminded Bedny that revolutionaries all over the world now looked to the Russian working class for leadership, something that filled ‘the hearts of Russian workers with a feeling of revolutionary national pride. . . . And you? Instead of grasping the meaning of this process . . . retired to a quiet spot in the country and . . . began to shout from the house-tops that Russia was an abomination of desolation . . . that “laziness” and [lying on the couch] are well-nigh national traits of the Russian. . . . And this you call Bolshevik criticism!’¹¹

Stalin’s strictures were mild by Bolshevik standards of robust debate and rudeness. Not until 1932 was Bedny ejected from his Kremlin apartment, ostensibly because of building works, allegedly because he had complained that ‘he didn’t like to lend books to Stalin because of the dirty marks left on the white pages by his greasy fingers’.¹²

The thrust of the RAPP-led campaign for a strictly proletarian literature was summed up by playwright V. M. Kirshon’s belligerent speech to the 16th party congress:

We must pass over to a decisive offensive, mercilessly liquidating bourgeois ideology. . . . The class enemy on the literary front is becoming active. At a time of sharpened class struggle any liberalism, any respect for aesthetic language . . . is direct aid to the class enemy. . . . The whole purpose of our activity and our work lies in the fight for the building of socialism.¹³

This was too radical for Stalin, especially since the literature produced by the RAPPers was not particularly good. In April 1932 the Politburo resolved to abolish RAPP on the grounds that it had become an impediment to artistic creativity. Together with all the other writer organisations, it would be replaced by a single union of writers that would unite party members with all those who supported Soviet power and the construction of socialism.¹⁴ Further insight into the rationale behind this move may be gleaned from Stalin’s remarks at two informal meetings of writers held in Maxim Gorky’s place in October 1932.

Gorky (1868–1936), a long-time ally of the Bolsheviks, was their most famous and prestigious literary associate. He was critical of the Bolsheviks’ post-revolutionary repressive measures but never an outright opponent. In the 1920s he lived abroad, mostly in Italy, where he had resided before the First World War. In 1928 he returned to Soviet Russia for a countrywide tour and in 1929 published a travelogue, Around the Union of Soviets, that was highly favourable to the regime. Stalin was keen to entice him home permanently and showered him with honours and flattery. He was awarded the Order of Lenin and Moscow’s main street, Tverskaya, was renamed after him, as was his birthplace, Nizhny Novgorod (both street and city reverted to their original names after the collapse of communism). Upon his return to Moscow, Gorky was allocated a grand mansion in the city centre.¹⁵

SOCIALIST REALISM

That first meeting at Gorky’s house, on 20 October, was a gathering of communist writers. Stalin told them there had been too many writers’ groupings and too much internal squabbling, at the forefront of which had been RAPP. Non-party writers had been neglected and the task on the literary front was to unite them with party writers. The shared aim of building socialism did not mean destruction of the diversity of literary forms and creative approaches.

Stalin urged communist writers to write plays because staged drama was a very popular form. Poems, novels and short stories remained important but they weren’t going to be discussed by millions of people. Asked about non-party writers and the mastery of Marxist dialectics, he responded: