"ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE": Poetry and Politics in the Time of Stalin

Morse, David, Social Education

   Into the distance go the mounds of
   people's heads.
   I am growing smaller here--no one
   notices me any more,
   but in caressing books and children's
   games
   I will rise from the dead to say the
   sun is shining.
   --Osip Mandelshtam, 1937(1)

IN 1946, a ruling of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of the Soviet Union attacked the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova by stating,

   Such is Akhmatova with her petty, narrow personal life, trivial emotions
   and religious-mystical eroticism.... What has this poetry in common with
   the interests of our people and our state? Exactly nothing.(2)

Excluded from the all-important Union of Soviet Writers, Akhmatova (1889-1966) was forced to live on a meager pension, finding some work translating. Authorities were under constant pains to intimidate her, if not into compliance at least into silence, through an intentionally conspicuous surveillance. As her friend Nadezhda Mandelshtam later described it:

   [T]hey stood there without the least pretense at disguise ... By their
   whole behavior they seemed to be saying: `You have nowhere to hide.(3)

Finally-with her first husband, poet Nikolai Gumilev, having long since been put to death for "counter-revolutionary activities," and their son Lev Gumilev (a noted historian) and her third husband (art critic Nikolai Punin) imprisoned--Akhmatova acquiesced. After having published only a handful of poems in the previous twenty-five years, she ended her silence in 1952 with several poems in praise of Stalin, including a tribute to him on his birthday:

   Let the world remember this day
   forever,
   Let this hour be bequeathed to
   eternity.

   Where Stalin is, there is
   freedom,
   Peace, and grandeur of the
   earth.(14)

Akhmatova was only one of many writers the Party attacked. At stake was the role of literature in Soviet society--whether writers should be servants of the political ideology of the State. The 1946 ruling gave a clear answer: "Any preaching of ideological emptiness, of an apolitical attitude, of `art for art's sake,' is foreign to Soviet literature, (and) harmful to the interests of the Soviet people and State."(5) This sentiment was not new; the Party had long been increasing its control over writers--especially during the Purges of the late 1930s--and this effort took on renewed energy during the beginning years

of the Cold War.

Taking a longer view, the role of the intelligentsia (intellectual class) in relation to the state was a central issue for writers in tsarist Russia. Debate over the question dates from the mid-nineteenth century, when literary critic Vissarion Belinsky propounded the view that writers--and other members of the intelligentsia--held a moral imperative to question authority and transform society.

Of course, questions about the purpose and function (if any) of art do not arise only in totalitarian societies--although there the consequences that flow from them are likely to be more harsh. The United States acted to suppress dissent after both great wars of the twentieth century--and especially during the era of McCarthyism that followed World War II. Moreover, in our current debates over banned books in schools, rap lyrics in the music industry, and Hollywood "values," what is ultimately at stake if not how much freedom a society allows to the artist? For this reason, examining the role--and the control--of writers in Stalinist Russia may help to illuminate the issues that revolve around intellectual freedom in societies seemingly far removed in place or time.

Literary Precedents in Tsarist Russia

Far more than the literary canon of the West, Russian literature has traditionally been intertwined with politics, and often marked by a hostility toward authority and strong sympathy for the common people. A century before the Bolshevik Revolution, Russian intellectuals were already establishing themselves as activists, believing that "literature and art ... had a primary responsibility to society."(6) A minority of intellectuals led Russia's revolutionary revolt on December 14, 1825. These Decembrists, former officers influenced by Western European ideas during their service in the Napoleonic Wars, demanded the abolition of the monarchy and the establishment of a representative democracy. While the insurrection itself was poorly organized and short-lived, its effects were profound, for the "Russian intelligentsia finally crystallized," and with it, the "movement of political and social dissent associated with it."(7) The revolt also established a fear among the rulers of what the intellectuals might do, a fear that persisted into the twentieth century, even when the radicals themselves became the ruling party.

Subsequent radical endeavors were galvanized by men of letters, most notably Belinsky (1811-1848), who believed that literature should reflect reality while transforming society:

   Socialism, socialism--or death!
   That is my motto. What do I care
   if genius on earth live in heaven
   when the crowd is wallowing in
   the dirt?(8)

Belinsky's famous "Letter to Gogol" (1847) criticized the popular novelist Nikolai Gogol for defending the ruling authorities and betraying the common good. Although the letter was banned from print, it was widely distributed and became the manifesto of many intellectuals. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), a member of the liberal Petrashevsky circle, was arrested in 1848 during a reading of the letter. Fearing another insurrection like that of the Decembrists, Tsar Nicholas I sentenced Dostoyevsky and other leading Petrashevists to penal servitude in Siberia.

But despite official repression, the role of the Russian …

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Publication information: Article title: "ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE": Poetry and Politics in the Time of Stalin. Contributors: Morse, David - Author. Journal title: Social Education. Volume: 65. Issue: 4 Publication date: May 2001. Page number: 198. © 2008 National Council for the Social Studies. COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group.

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