H2
MAX HAYWARD
the international copyright laws to which the Soviet Union was
not a party. By arranging for the s4nultaneous publication of the
original
in
Moscow and Berlin, it was possible for the author to
retain control over translation and other rights abroad. Gorky,
Sholokhov, Fedin and other Soviet writers regularly used
this
procedure. The Berlin firm Petropolis which published Pilnyak's
Mahogany
existed only to perform this service for Soviet writers.
Such transactions went through Soviet lawyers and the official
society for relations with foreign countries, VOKS. What
hap~
pened in Pilnyak's case, however, was that Petropolis jumped
the gun and published his manuscript prematurely, without wait·
ing for
it
to be passed for publication in Moscow. When both
~uthors
were able to show that they were not guilty of deliberate-
ly evading Soviet censorship controls, the RAPP instigators of
the campaign against them changed their tack, and concentrated
on the alleged anti-Soviet nature of the works in question. They
were said to be symptomatic of the work of many "fellow travel–
ers," who were now bluntly told that they must either make
tnanifest their solidarity with the "proletariat" and their com–
plete loyalty to the Party, or forfeit the right to tall themselves
Soviet
writers. The word
Soviet
in
this context was henceforth
to
be
interpreted not as a mere territorial designation, but as a
definition of the writer's political allegiance. After a series of
rigged meetings in the various writers' organizations, resolutions
were adopted in accordance with which Pilnyak and Zamyatin, \
together with the whole of the old leadership of the All-Russian
Union of Writers, were removed. At the same time the rank-and–
file membership was "re-registered" and as many as one half
were "purged." To mark the radical change in the literary situa–
tion the All-Russian Union of Writers now renamed itself the
"All-Russian Union of
Soviet
Writers." All this happened in a •
society that was not yet entirely cowed-the Stalinist terror
was
only just begjnning-and there were individual protests against
the way
in
which the back of the "fellow traveler'" writers'
or-
