The Stalin years 195
result (at best) is indifference, a quick default to irony, loss of creative initiative, and at worst, paralyzing fear.
Faced with this reality, some writers (and the editors and publishers who vetted their work) began to practice “the genre of silence” – a phrase coined by Isaak Babel in self-defense at the 1934 Writers’ Congress. During the most dangerous periods, the entire culture-producing apparatus could grind to a halt. In more flexible years, Babel and other great artists (among them Mikhail Bulgakov and Boris Pasternak) worked in literary fields less ideologically regimented than creative writing: translation, adaptations for stage, screenplays, literary scholarship or textology, literature for children. In a bureaucracy this vast, it was easy not to know precisely how one fit in to the “system,” or why one was cast out. Why was Pasternak not arrested in 1938–40? (a miracle). Was some lower-level rival, not the Party or party line, responsible for denouncing Shostakovich’s work in 1936? (he thought so). Some creative artists, of course, were unwaveringly proud to be part of the social command. But artists of the highest talent could not be put repeatedly in a position where they trusted neither the inner rules that governed their own creative imagination, nor the outer rules that governed the society of which they were a part.
Massive literacy campaigns, begun in the early 1920s, created millions of new readers, both among the rural population of European Russia and (in newly devised alphabets) among those peoples or tribes in Siberia that previously had no written language. Approved authors and books had unimaginably large print runs. Newly re-canonized and cleansed, classic Russian writers flooded the country in millions of copies, especially during their centennials (Tolstoy in 1928, Pushkin in 1937). Thus cultural expansion and cultural contraction occurred together. Alongside the gradual curtailment of foreign travel for ordinary citizens came the disappearance of foreign (European) language instruction in the schools. Only specialists received this training; the ordinary Russian reader encountered the outside world through carefully controlled translations. Russian high culture – which for two hundred years, through all degrees and severities of censorship, had been among the most polyglot in Europe – became officially monolingual. This narrowing, in conjunction with the closing down of churches and religious education, resulted in the new Soviet reader’s unprecedented reliance on the state and Party for intellectual and spiritual guidance.
Throughout the 1920s, a profusion of literary groups competed for readers. For most of them, the devastated economy and paper shortage ruled out anything like the “thick journal” of nineteenth-century fame, but relations between these groups were nevertheless articulate, shrill, and saturated with ideology. Proletkult (“Proletarian Culture”) was founded during the Civil War, on the