The Cambridge Introduction to Russian Literature

Chapter 8

The Stalin years: socialist realism, anti-fascist fairy tales, wilderness

1921:Victory of Bolsheviks in Civil War; imposition of one-party rule

1921:New Economic Policy (NEP) (some private enterprise restored in

service sector and limited free market)

1921–28:Maksim Gorky in exile in Italy

1924:Death of Lenin

1928:Joseph Stalin becomes General-Secretary of the Party and launches

first Five-Year Plan

1929:Expulsion of Trotsky from the Soviet Union

1930:10 million peasants forcibly collectivized during two winter months

1931:Beginning of terror-famine in Ukraine

1932:Creation of Union of Soviet Writers and doctrine of socialist realism

1934:First Congress of Union of Soviet Writers

1937–38:The Great Terror

1941:Hitler invades the USSR

1945:World War II ends with full victory for USSR

1948:Party crackdown on creative elite

1953:Death of Stalin

It is always difficult to reconstruct the appeal or the relevance of a losing side. All that remains are the products, without the living, electrifying myths or manipulated audiences that sustained them. The Stalinist period of the Russian literary tradition (1928–53) is one such massively discredited enterprise. Politically, economically, militarily, culturally, the Soviet Union was a “command state”: governed by decrees from above and profoundly unliberal in its professed ideals.

This chapter limits itself to the literary side of the Stalinist experiment. Appalling violence, waste, caprice and lies disfigured those years, but boldness and a thrilling enthusiasm illuminated them as well. We tend to forget how very bad Western capitalism looked in the 1930s and 1940s, with its worldwide depression, unchecked military aggression, abominable race relations – and thus how courageous and appealing many found the Soviet insistence on an entirely new basis for literary and political culture, a fresh slate of heroes

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