a greater realist and in particular realized that Tolstoy’s practical influence on reforms had been limited by the count’s intentional stance as political outsider. It must have seemed a mistake to Gorky.
So, as soon as the February 1917 revolution that overthrew the tsar gave him the opportunity, Gorky enthusiastically plunged into organizational affairs, becoming for a while the de facto minister of culture. The former Imperial Academy of Sciences, which twenty years earlier under pressure from Nicholas II had rescinded its decision electing Gorky an honorary academician, hurriedly crowned him with the title again. Gorky headed countless commissions and committees, composed appeals and resolutions, signed letters. He was in his element, the man of a thousand and one projects.
Gorky’s life motto could have been his declaration: “Knowledge must be democratized, it must be made accessible to the entire nation.” Gorky’s god was culture: “I know of nothing else that can save our country from disaster.” Unlike Tolstoy, a great cultural skeptic, he worshipped this god his whole life: headlong, without a second thought.
Gorky never tired of saying that “ignorance and lack of culture are characteristic of the entire Russian nation. Out of that multimillion mass of unenlightened people, devoid of the concept of life value, we can distinguish just a few thousand of the so-called intelligentsia…. These people, despite all their flaws, are the greatest achievement of Russia throughout its difficult and ugly history, these people were and are the true brains and heart of our country.”15 (Lenin, as we know, did not share this view.)
Gorky devoted the last twenty years of his life to nurturing the “brains and heart” of Russia and defended it tirelessly from danger from above and from below, from the real possibility of being wiped out by rebel peasants or being thrown onto the dustbin of history by the Communist regime. He perceived this as his historical mission. Gorky was unable to come to terms with Lenin and his anti-intelligentsia attitude. Now he was pinning his hopes on the new strong ruler of Russia—Stalin.
The interests and plans of dictator and writer coincided in many aspects, which cemented their relationship. Tsarist cultural policy had been conservative and protective; Nicholas II had no radical plans to enlighten the Russian people. Lenin had embarked on a grand economic and cultural experiment, which Stalin considered his task to bring to a successful conclusion: the building of a completely new society and the creation of the new Soviet man. For Stalin, a necessary part of that unprecedented plan was a forced modernization of Russian society: collectivization, industrialization, and what was particularly close to Gorky’s heart, a planned “acculturation” of the masses.
In letters to Gorky in Italy, Stalin laid out his ambitious program: “The USSR will be a first-class country with the largest, technologically equipped industrial and agricultural production. Socialism is invincible. There will be no more ‘pathetic’ Russia. It’s over! There will be a mighty and abundant progressive Russia.”16 Replying to the leader, Gorky not only supported Stalin’s plans but gave them a cultural footing: “You destroy the way of life that has existed for millennia, a way of life that created a man who is extremely ugly and capable of horrifying bestial conservatism.”17
Stalin apparently found this interesting. In his youth, he had written poetry, and he was a lifelong avid reader of varied nonfiction (history, economics, and so on) and fiction, including foreign and naturally Russian classics as well as contemporary Soviet literature, which Stalin read in real time, as it appeared in periodicals.
He was a great lover of film and classical music, especially Russian opera (Glinka, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov). He was frequently seen at the theater. Less educated than Lenin, Stalin was more of a consumer and connoisseur of high culture. Therefore his plans for the overall “civilizing” of the Soviet public gave an important role to literature and art.
Stalin revealed his ideas in 1929 during a three-hour meeting at the Central Committee with party-member Ukrainian writers. It was a frank discussion “among friends” when one of the participants published a few fragments of Stalin’s speech, he was severely chastised by his bosses. Stalin’s unedited remarks were only recently declassified. He explains that without making the entire population literate and “cultured” they will not be able to raise the level of agriculture, industry, or defense.
The peasants and workers must learn to use more complex machinery, soldiers must learn to use maps, explained Stalin to the Communist writers, and therefore “culture is the oxygen without which we cannot take a step forward.” Echoing Gorky, Stalin juxtaposed the backward peasant “who lives sloppy and dirty” to the progressive laborer who “has picked up some knowledge, reads books, wants to manage agriculture in a new way.”18
For such readers there should be new quality works of literature and art: “An awful lot depends on the form, without it there can be no content.”19 (Here too Stalin’s position is similar to that of Gorky, who made constant appeals to writers to raise their craftsmanship, to work on language and form.)
There was one more important issue where they were of one mind then: both felt that Soviet culture needed “consolidation,” and that varying and not necessarily strictly orthodox approaches could coexist under a single Communist umbrella. When overly zealous party writers demanded an implacable class approach to literature, Stalin put them in their place: “Then we’d have to get rid of all the non-Party writers.” And Stalin did not want that in the least.
Apparently, this cultural umbrella under which all writers loyal to the Soviet regime could gather was socialist realism, as invented by Stalin, Gorky, and a few others. Socialist realism was proclaimed the official cultural doctrine in late August 1934 in Moscow at the First All-Union Congress of Soviet Writers, a very showy and solemn event, widely covered in the Soviet press, which became the culminating point in Gorky’s work as Stalin’s cultural advisor.
Gorky achieved a number of important goals. During the preparations for the congress, which took several years, the Politburo issued a special resolution on April 23, 1932, liquidating the super-orthodox “proletarian” cultural associations, foremost of them RAPP, which were an obstacle, Gorky felt (and Stalin agreed) to a successful consolidation of the most productive forces in Soviet culture. The chairman of the new literary megastructure, the Union of Soviet Writers, completely formed in 1934, was Gorky.
His dream of state support for cultural workers came to pass, too. A special system was created—first for writers and then for other members of the “creative” intelligentsia—to guarantee members of the unions of writers, artists, architects, cinematographers, composers, and so on, a multitude of privileges that included state commissions for new works, large printings, high fees, more comfortable living conditions, special food parcels, special vacation resorts, and hospitals.
This system of privileges lasted unchanged for almost sixty years, until the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. It was complex, extremely detailed, and strictly hierarchical, which I discovered in 1972 when I became a member of the Union of Soviet Composers (musicologists could be members, just as literary critics could be members of the Writers’ Union). Naively assuming that now I could have a free vacation in one of the tempting resorts that I had heard so much about from my older colleagues, I went to the Moscow Composers’ Union (where I was listed as senior editor of
I had to vacation as I had in years past, visiting my parents in Riga, on the shores of the Baltic Sea. This was my first lesson in how the hidden mechanisms of the Soviet “creative” unions worked. I soon discovered that other privileges written into the bylaws remained empty promises for many of the members: only the nomenklatura elites
