MAX HAYWARD
for
art
and he always seemed to
be
tuned in to those elusive
waves to which many others are deaf. On the rare occasions
when we met we would argue. His views were alien to me. But
he was very far from any desire to
impose
them on other people.
The October Revolution put
him
in command of the People's
Commissariat of Enlightenment and there
is
no denying that he
was a good shepherd. 'I have said dozens of times'-[wrote Lun·
acharsky]-'that the Commissariat of Enlightenment must
be
impartial in its attitude towards the various trends of artistic life.
As
regards questions of artistic form, the tastes of the People's
Commissar and other persons in authority should not be taken
into account. All individual artists and all groups of artists should
be allowed to develop freely. No one trend, by virtue of its tradi·
tional renown or its fashionable success, should be allowed to
oust another.' It
is
a pity that various people who have been
in
charge of art, or who have been interested in it, have rarely re–
membered these wise words."
The end of Lunacharsky's relatively mild stewardship spelled
the end of freedom for literature in Russia and the beginning
of an enforced state of "entropy" which went on for the next
twenty-two years. 1929 was in general the "year of the great
turning point," as Stalin aptly described it, and with the final
defeat of all political opposition, whose fate was
sealed
by the
capitulation of Bukharin at the 16th Party conference, the stage
was set for the "revolution from above" which meant the violent
transformation of all social and cultural life. In retrospect the
N.E.P. period now seemed a golden age of liberalism and laissez·
faire. Side by side with the collectivization of the peasants went
the so-called "bolshevization" of literature and the arts.
This
was
done by encouraging RAPP to assert the hegemony of the "pro–
letariat" in literature, that is, to allow them to do what Luna·
charsky had so far managed to prevent. The leadership of
RAPP,
under its chairman, Leopold Averbakh, consisted of genuine
fanatics who no doubt sincerely believed that only the "proletari–
at" could create an
art
that was in harmony with the new way
