PARTISAN REVIEW
should have been aware of their social position. For the bureaucracy,
literature does not exist for the development of "new" and "liberal"
ideas, but simply for the bolstering up of morale. This, of course,
is nothing new, but a few writers had apparently forgotten it. They
were reminded of the fact by an editorial in
Pravda
(4.9.46) which
said, in connection with the literary purge:
"The struggle for the realization of Stalin's new five-year plan is
intensifying. In this struggle, no one must stand aside. Every Soviet
citizen-peasant, worker, official, intellectual, artist-must be an
active fighter for the accomplishment of this plan, and a real fighter
is only good if he is courageous and believes in his case, fearless of
difficulties. The teaching of these valuable qualities is the most im–
portant task of the party organizations, the PRIMARY TASK
OF
SoVIET
LITERATURE
AND
ART.... "
Vasilii Grossman who, during the war years, had been praised to
the skies, has now published a play,
Shall We Believe the Pythago–
reans?
(written in 1940-41), in which he supports the theory that
nothing changes essentially, that everything returns-and applies it
to modem Russia, showing that today's bureaucrat very much resem–
bles the bureaucrat of Czarist times. Anyone can imagine what official
criticism had to say to this, after overcoming the first stunned speech–
lessness in the face of so much impertinence....
Panferov's case is similar. He fought at the front from the first
days of the war, and saw with his own eyes that the Russian victory
was not solely due to the glorious leadership of Stalin and the party.
In the periodical
Oktiabr
(No. 5, 1946), he wrote that it was still
not clear what forces had won victory. He said that such doubts do
not exist for the official ideologists; for them everything is clear. For
them, there has never been any retreat except a planned one; the
fate of the country was never threatened; it would be the best thing
to forget that there was ever any fighting around Stalingrad and
Moscow. No, he said, one cannot write a book about the real war
if
one describes nothing but the victorious advance of the Red Army,
with the official hurrahs, songs, and Cossack dances.
This liberal deviation was, of course, dealt with appropriately.
(6 ) The Nationalists. It is noteworthy that dozens of Ukrainians,
Uzbeks, Tatars, etc., have been attacked for nationalist tendencies–
but only
one
book by a Great-Russian writer.
328
