The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin by Carol Any

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin by Carol Any Polly Jones Any, Carol. The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin. Studies in Russian Literature and Theory. Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 2020. xiv + 318 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $120.00; $39.95. The Soviet Writers' Union was the main institution of Soviet literature from the early 1930s to the regime's collapse. Membership granted considerable privileges and imposed heavy obligations; it was one of the main determinants of Soviet-era writers' economic and political status. Despite its central role in twentieth-century literary history, however, the union has received scant scholarly attention in its own right. It is well-known that Writers' Union decision-making had decisive impacts on many authors' lives, and there now exist substantial collections of union archive documents, but analyses of the union's institutional history remain thin on the ground. John and Carol Garrard's classic study, which could draw on only limited Russian sources and focused more on writers' experiences than the union's organizational history, has until recently been the standard work in English. A handful of studies have [End Page 753] also appeared more recently in Russian, including excellent research on the litfond and union-run writers' accommodation. Carol Any's thorough history of the union, based on a huge amount of Soviet archive material, therefore represents a major step forward in our understanding of the institutional and political history of Soviet literature. Firstly, it offers by far the most detailed and nuanced account of the emergence of Stalinist literary culture to date (its final chapter offers a briefer overview of post-Stalinist developments). Much of the first half of the book is devoted to a detailed reconstruction of the union's emergence from the gruppovshchina of the 1920s and its institutionalization and organization in the 1930s. Any proves more conclusively than previous studies that the union was initially and widely preferred to proletarian literary organizations, because writers and leaders considered it more tolerant and less politicized. However, hopes for an inclusive, diverse Soviet literature were soon scuppered by the clear (though not always clearly articulated) desire of the party elite to control writers: aesthetically, politically, and in almost every other aspect of their lives. Particularly interesting is the rich account of Maksim Gor´kii's disillusionment with this direction of travel in the early 1930s, even as he still appeared to wield substantial influence over Soviet literature, Socialist Realism and the union itself. Despite their collaboration on creating the union and the state aesthetic doctrine, Gor´kii and Stalin were at odds almost from the start, and it was Stalin's (and the Politburo's) vision of literary controls that won out early on. This desire for control would continue to shape all key decisions on union personnel and policy, which are shown here as even more top-down than previously thought. Alongside this persuasive recasting of Gor´kii's role, the book also devotes unprecedented attention to other leading figures in the organization who have been strangely (or perhaps not so strangely) overlooked: Ivan Gronskii, Aleksandr Shcherbakov, Vladimir Ermilov and Vladimir Stavskii. Comparing them with the better-known union leader Aleksandr Fadeev, and drawing on a wide range of little-known personal and institutional sources, Any explores their intrigues and in-fighting as they led the union through Stalinist Terror, war and recurrent ideological campaigns. While these stories of union politics are richly fascinating, the conclusions drawn from them seem more familiar. Stalinist literary politics appears as a 'force-field' of top-down political pressures where even (or especially) union heads had 'limited agency'. At the same time, these bosses had to manoeuvre constantly to stay in the good graces of the party leadership and within the 'honour group' of the Soviet literary world. The overwhelming need to profess political loyalty entailed repeated betrayals of previously (and often sincerely) held positions on writers and their works, and literary policy. While these contradictory stances were illogical, the [End Page 754] literary system possessed and reproduced a distinct behavioural logic. As Any contends, such behaviour proved morally and...