Boris Kornilov. In 1959, I was a teenager passionate about poetry, and I tried to get the gray-haired and pompous Tikhonov to talk about the fate of Livshits and Kornilov, who had been posthumously rehabilitated a few years earlier, but he condescendingly evaded an answer.
By this time, Tikhonov was a very big shot. However, his poetry, which even a demanding critic like Tynyanov once considered worthy of Pasternak, became ever blander, until he turned into a purely ceremonial figure. It was said that right until his death at eighty-two in 1979, he kept a portrait of Stalin over his desk.
Zabolotsky survived the camps. His friends from OBERIU were not as lucky. The great absurdist poets Daniil Kharms and Alexander Vvedensky died in prison, and another Dadaist, the handsome Nikolai Oleinikov, who had also been fitted up in the “Tikhonov group” case, was executed.
Present-day neo-Slavophiles are convinced that Stalin, being irrationally hostile toward the Russian peasantry, dealt with the peasant poets and writers with particular cruelty. In fact Stalin, the politician par excellence, always ruthlessly attacked whatever social stratum seemed most dangerous to him at the moment. Along with that group, its cultural leaders were usually repressed as well. At one moment, they could have been the peasant poets Klyuev, Klychkov, and Vasilyev, but at another, the urbanists Mandelstam, Zabolotsky, Vvedensky, and Kharms.
Even though Stalin’s formal education ended when he was expelled from the Tiflis Seminary in 1899 for revolutionary notions, he read a lot (some recall his reading 400 pages a day, both fiction and nonfiction) and had a lively interest in cultural issues. But as with other Bolshevik leaders, this interest was colored strongly by political considerations. And as Stalin’s political views evolved, his cultural positions changed. After Lenin’s death, Stalin (whose Russian was literate but with a marked Georgian accent that increased when he was agitated) addressed cultural matters more frequently, and gradually his soft, muffled voice grew more confident.
Recently declassified documents of the early meetings of the Politburo of the Bolshevik Party show that Stalin apparently did not participate actively in writing the relatively liberal Politburo 1925 resolution “On the Party’s policy in the sphere of literature”—it was Bukharin, Trotsky, and Lunacharsky—but by 1925 Stalin was airing his ideas on cultural affairs at Politburo meetings.
When in 1926 the Politburo discussed the possible return to the Soviet Union of the emigre artist Ilya Repin, the patriarch of the realist movement who had settled in Finland, Kliment Voroshilov, the culture-loving military leader who had recently replaced the outcast Trotsky, felt it necessary to speak with Stalin first before writing a memo. “Knowing your opinion on this matter will make it be resolved more easily and quickly at the Politburo.” The leader approved of loyal Voroshilov’s initiative. “Klim! I think that the Soviet regime must support Repin in every way. Greetings. J. Stalin.”1 Still, the elderly artist was afraid to return to the Soviet Union and died in 1930 in Finland.
Stalin’s role was crucial in a series of extraordinary and often ambivalent decisions made by the Politburo in 1927–1929 about permitting or closing Mikhail Bulgakov’s plays
The short and pockmarked Stalin came out on the stage of cultural life rather cautiously (a quality that was a hallmark of his political style) and weighed every word. In that sense, the turning point came in 1929, when the leader stepped forward as cultural arbiter for the first time, writing two letters that were immediately disseminated in party circles: one was addressed to the leaders of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), the most powerful literary pro-Communist organization of that period, with great state support, and the second was a reply to the complaint of the “proletarian” playwright Vladimir Bill-Belotserkovsky about RAPP.
In both letters, Stalin tries to find a middle way, calling for restraint on the “literary front,” seemingly endorsing the liberal Politburo resolution of 1925, which RAPP wanted disavowed. Stalin expressed his displeasure with the excessively aggressive tactics of RAPP: “Who now needs a ‘polemic’ which resembles an empty squabble: ‘Oh, you bastard!’ ‘Look who’s talking!’…That is no way to unite people of the Soviet camp. That is the way to scatter them and confuse them, pleasing the ‘class enemy.’”2 Tellingly, in sending copies of these letters to Maxim Gorky, Stalin still felt it necessary to say that it was merely “personal correspondence.” When his henchmen obligingly asked Stalin to publish his letter to Bill-Belotserkovsky, “since it, in essence, is the only expression of your thoughts on our policy in art” and therefore “has found rather widespread distribution in party circles,”3 Stalin refused—he was not fully confident of such a move yet. (Stalin published that letter only twenty years later, in the eleventh volume of his collected works.)
But he had already formulated his opinion about the need and wisdom of his personal supervision of Soviet culture in that letter to RAPP quite firmly: “It is necessary. It is beneficial. It is, after all, my duty.” It was no accident that Stalin made Lunacharsky retire as cultural commissar in September 1929.
This move signaled the transition from one era to another, when the strengthened and solidly placed Soviet regime no longer felt it necessary even to pretend to play up to the intelligentsia to attract it to its side. Now, on the contrary, the intelligentsia was expected to prove its loyalty. This new hard line was sarcastically formulated by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov, coauthors of the two funniest Soviet novels,
Lunacharsky was a confirmed Communist, but he spoke out often against the personal tastes of the leaders defining the state’s cultural policies. Stalin was of a different opinion. It did not crystallize immediately, but through trial and error. By 1929, after his fiftieth birthday, Stalin was ready to manage Soviet culture more or less single- handedly (which did not exclude calling in expert opinion from time to time).
His most important expert, who for a time was truly Stalin’s viceroy in culture, was Maxim Gorky, even though neither man publicized it and many of their meetings were private.
The well-informed emigre journal
A friendship like this between ruler and writer is unique in Russian culture, and not only for the twentieth century. Neither before nor after did a cultural figure have such access to Russia’s leader. Both sides had a lot to gain, which is why both Stalin and Gorky were willing to make significant compromises to retain the friendship.
Stalin had “inherited” Gorky from Lenin, who had rated the writer very highly as a “European celebrity.” Gorky certainly was the most major cultural figure whom Lenin knew personally, and one with a marked pro-Bolshevik orientation even before the revolution. Lenin used Gorky’s popularity in the interests of his party, including pumping enormous sums of money out of Gorky himself and with his help from others to support the illegal Bolshevik activities.
