INTRODUCTION
345
necessarily suffer from purely negative limitations on the right
of publication (nineteenth-century Russian literature and early
Soviet literature flourished under censorship) or from the
volun–
tary
acceptance of a particular set of doctrinal terms of reference
(as
in
the case of Catholic writers), but when matters of form
and content are strictly regulated in accordance with extra–
literary criteria, the result
is
very serious for creative effort. The
way
in
which "socialist realism" was made binding on Soviet
writers, the reasons for it and the consequences of this imposition
must be outlined.
In April, 1932, the Central Committee of the CPSU un–
expectedly issued a decree ordering the disbandment of RAPP,
the now cowed and emasculated All-Russian Union of Soviet
Writers and other residual groups, and setting up in their place
the Union of Soviet Writers which exists in the same form today.
It was made clear that membership in this new unitary organi–
zation would be essential for anyone who wished to make writing
his
livelihood. One of Stalin's reasons for discarding the "prole–
tarians" of RAPP (many of whom, including Averbakh, were
later denounced and liquidated as "Trotskyists") was no doubt
that, once they had performed their task of bringing to heel the
"fellow travelers," their excessive zeal, which had been an
ad–
vantage for this purpose, was now only an embarrassment to him.
Stalin much preferred compliant "fellow travelers" to fanatical
Marxist idealists, many of whom, like Akim and his uncle in
Pilnyak's tale, were indeed temperamentally more in tune with
the fervent intellectualism of Trotsky than with the humdrum
empiricism of Stalin. In general the 'thirties are remarkable for
the fact that genuine Marxists were gradually replaced in many
fields by people with a "bourgeois" and even "counter-revolu–
tionary" past who were willing to pay lip service to anything as
the price of survival. Thus the bourgeois historians Tarle and
Wipper were called in to glorify Kutuzov and Ivan the Terrible
while the veteran Marxist Pokrovsky was denounced for "vulgar
sociologism," i.e., for writing history as Marx and Engels had
