INTRODUCTION
3043
ganization had been broken. The most powerful came from
Gorky who wrote the following
in
Izvestia:
The punishment meted out to
Pilnyak
is far too severe.... All my
life I have waged a struggle for care
in
dealing with people and I
think
that
in
our present conditions this struggle should be carried
on
even more intensively.... We have gotten into the stupid habit
of
raising people up into high positions, only to throw them down
into the mud and the dust. I need not quote examples of this absurd
and
cruel practice, because such examples are known to everybody.
I
am
reminded of the way in which thieves were lynched in 1917-
1918.
These dramas were generally the work of petty bourgeois ele–
ments, and one is reminded of them every time one sees with what
delight people throw themselves on a man who has made a mistake
in order
to
take his place.
This
was perhaps the last publicly voiced protest
in
the
Soviet Union against a literary frameup. Later victims enjoyed
neither the benefit of such support, however muted, from their
colleagues, nor the luxury of being able to reply to their accusers.
One cannot help wondering whether history might not have
taken a somewhat different tum if more had been as courageous
md uncompromising as Evgeny Zamyatin, who wrote in a letter
to
Literary Ga;;ette
on September 16, 1929:
When I returned to Moscow after a summer journey the whole
affair
of my book
We
was already over. It had
been
established
that the appearance of fragments from
We
in
V olia Rossii
in Prague
was
a deliberate act on my part, and in regard to this 'act' all the
necessary resolutions had been adopted. But facts are stubborn. They
are
more stubborn than resolutions. Every one of them may
be
con–
flIll1ed by documents or by people and I wish to make them known
to my readers. . . . [He goes on to give conclusive proof that the
publication of parts of
We
in the
emigre
V olia Rosii
was none of
his
doing.] ... Thus fIrst there was a condemnation and only then
an
investigation. I imagine that no
court
in the world
has
ever
heard
of such a procedure. ... A meeting of the Moscow branch of
