The
First Congress of Soviet Writers
was an all-Union meeting of writers, held in Moscow from August 17 to September 1, 1934, which led to the founding of the
Union of Soviet Writers
.
It was staged soon after
Comintern
had switched its popular in favour of forming a
popular front
with socialist parties and western intellectuals, against the threat from Nazi Germany. The congress has been described as "a high point of a comparatively interlude in the
Stalin
years."
[1]
It took place before the
Great Purge
in the Soviet Union, and after the start of the
Nazi book burnings
in Germany.
Venue and procedure
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The Congress began with an open air event on 8 August 1934, held by moonlight in the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest, attended by a crowd numbering tens of thousands,
[2]
and continued for fifteen days in Moscow's Hall of Columns, which was decorated for the occasion by huge portraits of
Shakespeare
,
Balzac
,
Cervantes
,
Tolstoy
,
Gogol
,
Pushkin
and others.
[1]
There were nearly 600 delegates, plus visiting parties of teachers, actors, factory workers, farm workers, and soldiers.
At the start, delegates were required to elect a Praesidium, a Secretariat, a Credentials Committee and an Editing Committee to manage the congress. In each case, the poet
Nikolai Tikhonov
moved the motions that created the bodies, and the number and the names of who should be members of each. All his proposals were accepted without dissent. The Praesidium had 52 members, the secretariat had 15.
[3]
Speakers
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There were about 200 speeches delivered during the congress, the verbatim record of which filled 700 printed pages. The main speakers were
Andrei Zhdanov
, who delivered the address on behalf of the
Central Committee
,
Maxim Gorky
, who gave the report on literature,
Nikolai Bukharin
, who reported on poetry,
Karl Radek
, on world literature, and
Aleksei Stetsky
, who summed up on behalf of the Central Committee.
Most of the writers then living in the Soviet Union whose reputations have outlived the Stalin era, such as
Anna Akhmatova
,
Mikhail Bulgakov
and
Andrei Platonov
were not delegates to the Congress. The poets
Osip Mandelstam
and
Nikolai Klyuev
were under arrest. But
Boris Pasternak
was a visible presence, on the congress platform, and was singled out for praise by Bukharin, but attacked by the next speaker,
Alexey Surkov
. The writers
Isaac Babel
and
Yuri Olesha
spoke from the floor. The oldest speaker was
Gustave Isnard
, an 86-year survivor of the
Paris Commune
of 1871.
According to Ilya Ehrenburg:
All the delegations 'presented claims': the women textile-workers wanted a novel about weavers, the railwaymen said that writers neglected transport problems, the miners asked for a description of the
Donbas
, inventors insisted on inventor-heroes ... The old
ashug
(poet-singer)
Suleyman Stalsky
instead of making a speech decided to recite, or rather sing a poem about the Congress.
[4]
The main business of the Congress, conducted at the end, was to agree to create the
Union of Soviet Writers
, and the composition of its governing bodies.
Aftermath
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Out of nearly 600 delegates to the Congress, just 123 were still alive at the time of the second writers' congress in 1954. Some, including Gorky and Zhdanov, died of natural causes, or were killed during the war with Germany, but a very large proportion are likely to have been victims of the Great Purge, during which Bukharin, Stetsky and Babel were executed, and Radek was sent to the
Gulag
, where he was murdered.
[5]
References
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]
- ^
a
b
McSmith, Andy (2015).
Fear and the Muse Kept Watch, The Russian Masters - from Akhmatova and Pasternak to Shostakovich and Eisenstein - Under Stalin
. New York: The New Press. pp. 116?17.
ISBN
978-1-59558-056-6
.
- ^
Soviet Writers Congress 1934, The Debate on Socialist Realism and Modernism
. Lawrence and Wishart. 1977. pp. 265?66
. Retrieved
2 March
2022
.
- ^
Garrard, John and Carol (1990).
Inside the Soviet Writers' Union
. New York: The Free Press. pp. 33?34.
ISBN
0-02-911320-2
.
- ^
Ehrenburg, Ilya (1964).
Memoirs: 1921-941
. Cleveland: The World Publishing Company. p. 271.
- ^
Garrard.
Inside the Soviet Writers' Union
. p. 49.