In a squat stone tower on the Caspian Sea coast of Azerbaijan in 1908, a young Georgian Bolshevik sat imprisoned for the crime of agitating striking oil workers on behalf of the Bolshevik Party. He requested just one possession to give him solace in his almost eight months of captivity: books.
That man—Joseph Stalin—remained a prolific reader for the rest of his life, including as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Throughout his near-three decades of rule, he set himself a quota of 300-500 pages per day, ranging from government documents to tsarist histories to the latest Soviet literature. Stalin took a surprisingly personal interest—at both the most minute and most expansive levels—in the literature produced by the Soviet intelligentsia under his watch, and he was also a close follower of films and music. Whereas Hitler burned books that threatened to undermine the Nazi project, Stalin—who wrote poems in his youth and nourished a self-image of artistic sophistication—brandished them as proof of his regime’s superiority.
Nevertheless, Stalin would not brandish just any kind of book: he was a Bolshevik before he was a bibliophile. Stalin glorified the works of “socialist realism” which exalted the working-class and the virtues of heavy industrialization. Nevertheless, he tended to recognize hackneyed propaganda when he saw it, and was uncomfortable with the prospect that the Soviet Union would lose imperial Russia’s cultural prestige even as it gained respect for its industrial accomplishments. So when he encountered the prospect of excellent Soviet literature which was not ideologically compatible with Bolshevism, Stalin was faced with a paradox: the Bolshevik on one shoulder told him to censor any such ideologically deleterious work, whereas the bibliophile in him knew that the prestige of Soviet socialism could only be elevated in the cultural realm through literature of great merit.
Stalin encountered this paradox most intimately in the form of Mikhail Bulgakov, a Kiev-born Russian playwright and satirist who explored the trauma of the Civil War (especially the defeat of the Whites) and excoriated the venality and soullessness of life under the NEP and Stalinism. Bulgakov, whose clandestinely written satirical novel The Master and Margarita would come to be recognized as one of the masterpieces of modern literature upon its eventual publication in 1967, was one of the most talented writers in the Soviet Union, but he was firmly a member of the once-favored bourgeois intelligentsia.
The curious relationship between Bulgakov and Stalin that emerged from this paradoxical foundation is best explored through the letters Bulgakov wrote to Stalin and government censors during the tense period from 1929-1931, in which all of Bulgakov’s plays were banned but Stalin still refused to let Bulgakov leave the Soviet Union, convinced that if the writer were forced to stay, he would ultimately acquiesce and write a “communist novel.”
Bulgakov’s rhetorical strategies and historical evocations in his letters petitioning Stalin during this period reflect the writer’s astute understanding of Stalin’s relationship with literature. Bulgakov understood the tension between the Bolshevik and the bibliophile in Stalin (or, in historian Geoffrey Roberts’ formulation, that between the “bloody tyrant” and the “bookworm”), and, because of his own secret affinity for autocracy—rooted in his love of Russia’s tsarist past—he particularly understood the psychology of absolute rule, which he explored in his plays. Even though he was never an ardent Bolshevik, Mikhail Bulgakov was uniquely equipped to force Stalin to reimagine the Soviet Union’s approach to literature, but even he could not succeed in doing so. While Stalin was a great admirer of Bulgakov, his refusal to allow the writer to travel abroad shows that, ultimately, Stalin was more of a Bolshevik than a bibliophile.
Much of the Stalinist disposition toward the censorship of literature was inherited from Lenin and the foundational anxieties of Bolshevism since the Revolution, especially concerns about sabotage, both intellectual and industrial, and the dangers of ideological pluralism. The life of a Soviet writer such as Mikhail Bulgakov was already uncertain under Lenin, when censorship was an established phenomenon, albeit not one that was implemented with a great deal of consistency. Although Lenin also believed that literature could play an important role in garnering international respect for the Soviet Union, at the vanguard of a new and modern culture, there was no prescribed policy towards acceptable or ideal literature during his lifetime (censorship was formally codified under Glavlit in 1922, but in very loose terms). Lenin did utilize the secret police—then known as the OGPU—to monitor the intelligentsia, largely out of concern that this disaffected class of elites was feigning commitment to Bolshevism and therefore constituted an internal threat to the fulfillment of the revolution (of particular concern were “fellow travelers” such as Bulgakov, who had family ties to the monarchist Whites). For this reason, Bulgakov’s apartment was raided by the OGPU in 1926, and his diaries were confiscated. Critics denounced his plays, such as Flight and The White Guard, which dramatized the White defeat in the Civil War, and Madam Zoyka, which satirized the privatization policies of the NEP. One critic even coined the term “Bulgakovism” (bulgakovshchina) to characterize the larger phenomenon of ideologically unsatisfactory art.
A bureaucracy of censors and critics—“middle ranking commissars and chekists,” organized in institutions such as the Association of Proletarian Writers (RAPP), exercised control over the publication of new books and the performance of new plays. Nevertheless, the secret police and censorship apparatus did not act with a specific, coordinated agenda, and writers in the 1920s frequently remarked on the arbitrariness of censorship. “Who? What? Why?” wondered Bulgakov, who could not understand why some of his plays were banned and others were not. The paradigm was clearly proletarianism, but for a time Bulgakov could get away with upper-class subjects. A taste of the future was glimpsed in his testimony to the OGPU in September 1926 (after his diary was confiscated), in which Bulgakov questioned why he should ever be forced to write about proletarian subjects: “I find it difficult to write about working-class life,” he said, “it doesn’t interest me very much … I am keenly interested in the way of life of the Russian intelligentsia … the fates of its members are are close to my own, and their experiences are dear to me. In other words I can only write about the life of the intelligentsia in the Soviet Union.”
Much as Lenin made concessions on the implementation of socialism itself (in his New Economic Policy) so too was there plenty of “wiggle room” for non-proletarian literature under his rule. Indeed, for a precious few years under the NEP, Bulgakov thrived as a popular playwright with the Moscow Arts Theater, a private firm. Naturally, there was a Russian word for this phenomenon: proizvol (which means something like arbitrariness).
Ultimately, however Bulgakov’s seminal play, The White Guard (later called Days of the Turbins), based on his own novel set in Kiev during the Civil War was banned by the censors in 1929. Bulgakov later remarked in a letter to the government that, in his career, there had been 301 reviews of his work by Soviet critics, of which 298 had been “hostile and abusive.” Most critics denounced him as an unacceptably “neo-bourgeois” writer, particularly for his both-sides account of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks’ founding triumph
In the first few years of Stalin’s reign, this confusion continued (1927-1931). This was a period of particular turmoil and consternation for Bulgakov, whose plays went through a carousel of banning and unbanning. During this period—contemporaneous with the first wave of anti- “bourgeois specialist” purges and subsequently the most intensive years of collectivization—Stalin was still in the process of consolidating his grip on power and could not yet focus on high-concept matters more secondary to his political survival, such as the direction of literary policy (Trotsky, who, for the record, said that literature should remain outside the sphere of political control, was not exiled until February 1929). As he started to turn his attention more to literature, however, Stalin did so with characteristic obsessiveness at both macro and micro levels, presenting himself as the “ultimate arbiter of literary taste,” as part of a larger project in developing a cult of personality as a multi-hyphenate dictator. Stalin envisioned an idealized paradigm of Soviet literature which was proletarian in style, subject, and intended audience—censorship was not just defined in the negative sense of impermissible writing but in the positive sense of a very specific kind of permissible, and indeed institutionally encouraged, writing. Proletarian writers enjoyed the “institutional hegemony” of a “state system of awards, honors, distinctions, and prizes,” through entities such as the Writers’ Union and Litfond. Writers such as Demyan Bedny (who wrote poems vilifying kulaks and diminishing Russian history), Nikolai Ostrovsky (the protagonist of whose novel How the Steel Was Tempered was a Komsomol organizer with “unshakeable confidence in the Soviet system”), and Victor Sholokhov (known as “Stalin’s Scribe”), among others, displayed the most fealty to this Bolshevik style, which generally did not yield works of lasting artistic value: critics have since derided their work as “unadventurous” and “hackneyed” in quality. This literature typically exalted ideal Soviet industrial workers and Stakhanovites, reveled in the glory of the Red triumph in the Civil War, and trafficked in party-line critiques of capitalism, “fellow travelers,” and the exploitative class of kulaks. This literature was directed toward the new class of proletarians, particularly the former peasants who were unexposed to the virtues of Chekhov and Russian national high culture. Stalin was particularly interested in literature that hard-working factory men (and women, to a certain extent) had time to read and would enjoy.
The contours of Soviet censorship under Stalinism were shaped by the personalist intervention of Stalin himself, founded in his curious lifelong relationship with the written word. Stalin, who had written poems in his youth studies at Tiflis Seminary and who amassed a prized collection of nearly 25,000 volumes (many replete with extensive annotations in the marginalia) by the end of his life, was hardly an uncouth or unfeeling on cultural matters. In articulating the dogma of socialist realism, however, he famously declared a less ethereally articulated policy: that writers had to be “engineers of the soul,” much as literal engineers were building the hale body of the Soviet state. Although Stalin insisted that literature had to be proletarian and pro-Bolshevik in outlook, he also recognized that it had to be of the highest quality in order for the Soviet Union to be taken seriously intellectually as a great power. In this sense, Stalin held back the most extreme impulses of literary Bolshevization, which only wished for a “useful art” free from deleterious “Chekhovian” influences. In Stalin’s eyes, a respected corpus of modern literature was just as essential a requisite of superpower status, in its own way, as a robust industrial base. After all, imperial Russia may have been scorned by Western Europe for the backwardness of its economy and social institutions, but its literature was (and remains) considered one of the greatest national literatures in the world.
These are the ingredients that formed Stalin’s curious relationship with Mikhail Bulgakov. Stalin, “ultimate arbiter of taste” as he was, recognized Bulgakov’s remarkable literary talents but resented the writer’s ideological discomfort with Bolshevism, his clever use of satire, and his educated bourgeois background. Indeed, it was Bulgakov’s skills as a satirist—the most dangerous kind of writer for an authoritarian regime—which most alarmed Stalin and the censors. While it was generally permissible for writers to “make fun of problems of everyday life, corrupt party officials, the bungling of the lesser bureaucracy,” the more comprehensive form of caustic criticism that Bulgakov experimented with was categorically unacceptable. But if censorship in the Soviet Union had been pure and prescriptive, Bulgakov would have been executed and that would be the end of the story. That is not what happened. Bulgakov’s play, The White Guard (its title was later changed to the less-subversive Days of the Turbins) was revived at the personal request of Stalin, inaugurating a curious “cat-and-mouse” relationship which would last throughout the 1930s, until Bulgakov’s death in 1940. Stalin saw The White Guard—a play in which the martyrized protagonist, a colonel in the White Army, calls the Bolsheviks “more terrible than anything else in the world”—at least a dozen times. Rather than chafing against its complexity and anti-Bolshevik undertones, Stalin seemed to enjoy the fact that the play portrayed sympathy to the Whites. For Stalin, the victory of the Reds was all the more powerful if its opponent—personified by the resilient central family of the play—had been formidable, and the standard literary renditions of Civil War stories portrayed the Whites as weak, corrupt, and scheming. Bulgakov offered Stalin something unique, and Stalin seemed to harbor a particular affinity for his writing.
Indeed, the primary reason Stalin tolerated The White Guard was because he was impressed with the quality of Bulgakov’s writing. Bulgakov himself allowed that the play exhibited a “persistent portrayal of the Russian intelligentsia as the finest stratum in our country.” Stalin was willing to let such heresy slide until a better “proletarian” play emerged, valuing artistic quality above ideological conformity (he admitted that “we have not enough of our own plays that are suitable for staging.”) Acutely concerned with the popularity of socialist art, and recognizing that there was an educated Soviet elite—raised on Chekhov—which could tell if a play was of low quality, Stalin understood he could not promote a lesser-quality work and be taken seriously. The intelligentsia still held cultural sway, and, indeed, “the educated Russian’s love of high culture” was the one aspect of the old way of life to survive the Revolution.” In this sense, Bulgakov, who referred to himself as “intimately part of the intelligentsia” was necessary to keep around, without changing, at least for a little while.
The power imbalance between the two could not have been more stark, but Bulgakov retained influence through the wizardry of his pen. Ultimately, this would not prove to be enough; he could not coax the bibliophile in Stalin to defeat the Bolshevik. Stalin’s toying with Bulgakov led to a near-psychological breakdown for the writer that likely contributed to his illness and premature death, a road which can be traced to the devastating period of 1929-1931.
Most analysis of the relationship between Bulgakov and Stalin does not emphasize Bulgakov’s letters to Stalin in this period. Biographers of Bulgakov, such as Ellendea Proffer, do not give enough attention to the incident of Bulgakov’s petition to leave the country. Nor do these accounts explore how Bulgakov’s approach to argumentation in these letters reflects his keen understanding of Stalin’s psychology as a leader trying to guide his country through a period of painful transformation. Bulgakov’s invocation of Russian history, his curious allusions to the concept of autocratic patronage, and his genuine desire to elevate the prestige of his country led him to try to persuade Stalin that he could only produce great Soviet literature if he was given more latitude. While Bulgakov was not a Bolshevik, he had a keen interest in seeing his country awaken from its somnambulism in the dead-end corridors of unambitious cultural conformity. He longed to work—alongside Stalin, with as much freedom as could be allowed—on contributing to a project of ideologically pluralist Soviet art, intended for all classes. He was denied such a wish. Bulgakov was forced into deep pessimism by his failed petition of Stalin for temporary leave from the USSR in 1931. During the ensuing decade he poured the feelings from this period into his nocturnally-written novel The Master and Margarita. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov built off many of the themes from his letters to Stalin. In the story of Pontius Pilate’s eternal guilt over the persecution of Christ, Bulgakov tried to prove to Stalin that when a dictator persecutes a visionary, that visionary tends to gain a greater immortality than the dictator could imagine (writers such as Moliere and Pushkin being his favorite examples).
In 1931, Bulgakov was at the nadir of his personal and professional life. His plays—Flight, The White Guard, Zoyka’s Apartment, The Crimson Island— had all been banned, and he felt that he was facing what he called his “annihilation” as a writer. The Master and Margarita, the novel he began in 1929 which would eventually become his apocalyptic indictment against the entire period, was rejected repeatedly by publishers. Bulgakov’s letters to friends and family at this time communicate a picture of financial distress, romantic tribulations, and despair about his artistic prospects. He started to hatch plans to leave the country, at least for a little while: in a letter to the famed Soviet writer Maxim Gorky written on September 3, 1929, Mikhail Bulgakov wondered: “why keep a writer in a country where his works cannot exist?”
This was also a time of despair for other writers, including Vladimir Mayakovsky, a once-proudly Bolshevik poet who committed suicide on April 14, 1930, after his works fell out of favor with RAPP and the proletarian literary establishment. The writer Yevgeny Zamyatin (another former Bolshevik) whose anti-utopian novel We would later influence George Orwell’s 1984, was allowed to leave the Soviet Union in 1931, giving hope to Bulgakov. But despite his suffering and despite his petitions, Bulgakov could not convince the Soviet Premier to let him leave the country. Why? His letters give us some insight into this question.
Bulgakov used a number of rhetorical strategies—informed by Russian history—in these letters to appeal to Stalin’s sense of self as an absolute ruler and as a self-regarding member of the literati. In a painstakingly crafted, several-pages-long letter to Stalin sent on May 30, 1931, Bulgakov lays out his case: a writer who is forced to remain “silent,” he argued, cannot exist in the Soviet Union. “My strength has broken,” Bulgakov wrote, “and I am no longer able to exist.” In the format of the written word, Bulgakov felt a sense of persuasiveness and rhetorical power, and he articulates his case with conviction and pathos.
Bulgakov invoked the example of writers in imperial Russia whom he idolized, such as the satirical genius Nikolai Gogol and the quintessentially Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, to suggest to Stalin that the suppression of the creative classes (no matter their social origins) was a bygone feature of tsarist rule that should be unwelcome in the proletarian USSR (the letter begins with a long quotation from Gogol). Intriguingly, Bulgakov suggested that writers like Gogol—who left for Rome after this play The Inspector General, which satirized the corruption of provincial administrative officials, was attacked by censors—were only able to truly appreciate their mother country from abroad (“I would come to know the true value of Russia only when I was beyond its borders,” he quotes Gogol as saying). Maxim Gorky’s sojourn in Sorrento in the 1920s seemed to corroborate this fact in the Soviet period, as well. Bulgakov only planned to leave from July to October 1931, but he feared that without this trip (“the loss of my Rome”), his life was in peril: his crippling neurasthenia would worsen, potentially leading to his death.
Bulgakov understood that Stalin’s appreciation for these literary figures only extended so far, so this was not the only historical reference he made. Bulgakov also realized that Stalin harbored a secret affinity for certain of the tsars (he liked to read biographies of Ivan the Terrible), and just as Bulgakov could find his own historical analogs in early 19th century writers, so too could Stalin appreciate the historical precedent of his own forebears, particularly the powerful reactionary Tsar Nicholas I, “first reader” to Alexander Pushkin. Bulgakov endeavored to flatter the General Secretary by suggesting that, in the long arc of Russian history, there could be no greater honor for a writer than having a close relationship with the national ruler. Indeed, there was some truth to this: despite his critiques of censorship, Pushkin exalted the legacy of Peter the Great (in such works as Poltava and The Bronze Horseman) and remained a devout monarchist even in his own tsar-imposed exile within Russia. Bulgakov seemed to be suggesting that even under the censorship of the reactionary Nicholas I, writers such as Pushkin enjoyed enough latitude to produce great literature, which, without coercion, extolled the virtues of the country. If the state had the right attitude towards its writers, Bulgakov argued, then the government need not worry about dangerous dissident art. Indeed, other countries would admire that the Soviet Union could laugh at itself even if some such writing was critical. Along these lines, Bulgakov finished off his letter with the ace of his rhetorical and historical hand: “I would like to tell you, Yosif Vissarionich, that my dream as a writer is that you yourself invite me to see you in person.”
This desire seems to be genuine—again, Bulgakov wished to have a personal relationship with his ruler, like Pushkin. Nevertheless, Bulgakov made it clear to Stalin that for the Soviet Union to prosper, the bibliophile must defeat the Bolshevik: Stalin must not allow an apparatus of censorship to create a literary orthodoxy. Bulgakov tried to show to Stalin, through the story of his own suffering, that the cultural status quo was untenable in the Soviet Union, and would not yield great art. Bulgakov used fatalistic expressions, articulating his feeling that it had become “inconceivable” to be a writer in the Soviet Union. If the price of staying in his country was to accept the literary orthodoxy—to write a “communist” novel, as his friends had urged him to—Bulgakov was not willing to pay it. Bulgakov declared, perhaps hyperbolically, that he was the lone “literary wolf” in the Soviet Union, and that he was being advised to “dye [his] skin.” Bulgakov stressed that such a forced transmogrification was absurd: “a wolf may have his skin dyed or be shorn, but he’ll never be a poodle.” Stalin would have responded strongly to such language: after all, most countries’ national literatures were built by the kind of the independent-minded wolves to whom Bulgakov referred. To be a poodle—for Bulgakov and Stalin both—was out of the question.
Despite his love for Russia, or, indeed, because of it, Bulgakov—like Gogol and Pushkin—was unwilling to give in. Bulgakov made his most pointed appeal to Stalin on the question of prestige. “How am I to sing my country’s praises?” he mused in the letter; indeed, if the Soviet Union became known as a hostile place for writers, it would be virtually impossible for any good art to emerge, particularly any which exalted the country. Bulgakov recalled Gogol’s assessment of the literary conditions under Nicholas I, in the opening quotation: “the writer’s pen shifts imperceptibly towards the satirical.”He noted that satire—which exposed the flaws of the government, not its glories—is generally a product of infertile conditions for literature (“am I thinkable in the USSR?” he wondered). If Stalin were to embrace a plurality of literary voices, Bulgakov seemed to be saying, then there would be no need for writers such as him, Zamyatin, and Gorky to leave, or for Mayakovsky to take his own life. In such a world, he might not even be a satirist.
But Stalin would not budge. Stalin responded to the letter with a surprising personal phone call to Bulgakov—in his preferred format, the dictator, with his habitually intimidating effect on his interlocutors, had the upper hand, and he forced Bulgakov to acquiesce into staying in the country, giving him a minor post in the theater to placate him. Stalin called Bulgakov four days after Mayakovsky committed suicide, and the fear of losing another writer on Soviet cultural prestige was clearly at the front of his mind.
Bulgakov buckled in the face of this pressure, perhaps because he secretly harbored a latent desire to please Stalin, or perhaps because he realized there were no second opinions in Stalin’s Russia. As with Moliere’s complex relationship with Louis XIV, the subject of one of Bulgakov’s plays, A Cabal of Hypocrites, Bulgakov loved his country and had a difficult time disentangling its problematic leader from that affinity. Bulgakov even toyed with the idea of asking Stalin to be his “first reader,” the personal relationship which Nicholas I had with Pushkin. Bulgakov biographer Ellendea Proffer has argued that it is not surprising that Bulgakov wished to meet Stalin, just as he would any of the “various historical tyrants that peopled his works.” But there was a deeper reason than that, largely explained by the fact that there were so many historical tyrants in Bulgakov’s works: he had a fascination with absolute rulers and the artists they held at arm’s length, from his own personal experience with Stalin. For Bulgakov, there was something deeply personal about the notion of a despot-artist bond; even when he wrote a play about a non-Russian subject (A Cabal of Hypocrites) it was largely informed by his own anxieties about his relationship with Stalin. Bulgakov fancied himself a 20th century Pushkin—an artist who suffered under totalitarianism but who would later become immortal in his country’s history, even more so than the tsar who censored him. In a rumination on Pushkin’s untimely death in a duel, Bulgakov remarked in a letter to his brother that instead of finding a pistol wound in Bulgakov’s body, there would be wounds made by “Finnish knives.” “All in the back,” he added, with a certain melodrama. For Bulgakov, this was an apt metaphor for something immutable he tried to explore in all his works and which kept him perversely drawn to Stalin: “weapons change,” he remarked, but the master’s relationship to his own Master does not.
Practically the only Soviet literature read now is dissident literature. Famous censored novels, unpublished until the post-Stalinist liberalization period, such as The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, and The Gulag Archipelago, have become classics in the West, and the culture of samizdat, Charter 77, and the defiant intelligentsia in the Soviet Union and its satellites has been praised as its greatest cultural legacy.
It was not inevitable—not an inherent feature of authoritarian socialism—that the Stalinist period would become largely a lacuna within the long and rich tradition of Russian literature. If Stalin had prioritized cultural prestige over ideological consistency, great literature might have been yielded during the turbulence of the 1930s. After all, the reign of Tsar Nicholas I (1825-1855) was a period of turbulent economic reform (prior to the emancipation of the serfs) that also “witnessed a flourishing of Russian literature.” The best Russian literature had long emerged from its most turbulent moments—the emancipation of the serfs, defeat in the Crimean War, the aftermath of the Decembrist Revolt—all of which occurred under the established censorship regime of the Romanovs. In the 19th century, Russian literature was “never far removed from political dissent” and corresponding censorship. Luminaries such as Lermontov, Chernyshevsky, and Dostoevsky all spent time in prison or exile in the mid-19th century, and yet they were given enough latitude whereby they could elevate the cultural prestige of their country through their writing, even when it was critical of Russia. (This could well be a truism of all history, not just in Russia: as Harry Lime says in The Third Man, “in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love– they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”)
Bulgakov intimately understood that the darkest times often produce the greatest art, which kept him working at night on The Master and Margarita throughout the 1930s: “I am attracted towards the negative aspects of life in the Soviet Union, because I can instinctively see that they contain much material that I am able to use (I am a satirist),” he said.
What made provocative literature unthinkable—or at least, unpublishable— in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, a time of great social and economic transformation that Russian history tells us should have resulted in a cultural Golden Age, was the ideological orthodoxy imposed by the affirmative action of the working class. Had Stalin, as “ultimate arbiter” of literary matters, placed cultural supremacy—even if it had been “engineered” by a sophisticated bourgeois satirist like Bulgakov—above ideological orthodoxy in his pecking order, perhaps our bookshelves would now be filled with officially sanctioned Soviet classics from the 1930s. But Stalin did not want literature to leave his metalworkers scratching their heads, and his country’s cultural prestige suffered as a result of the denigration of the intelligentsia. Stalin and the Soviet censorship apparatus attempted to reshape the attitude of writers towards the Soviet project, not because they abhorred art but because they appreciated its power, if effectively weaponized: Stalin did not want to silence writers; he wanted to change their voices, as part of his genuine belief that writers would see the light and tell what he saw as the great story of the Soviet transformation of a country and its citizens. Bulgakov’s refusal to write a “communist novel,” and his willingness to say as much in his letters to Stalin, disproved that hypothesis. What the failure of socialist realism reveals is that great literature cannot be feigned: the proletarianization of literature under Stalin did not work because, while one class might have a monopoly on the means of production, it cannot have a monopoly on the means of expression.
By Zachary Partnoy
Image Credit: Behance
