Dewhirst M. Soviet socialist realizm and the soviet censorship system

It is customary to link the attempts to conceptualize and provide an official definition of socialist realism to the efforts to set up a single Union of Soviet Writers, membership of which was virtually essential for any full-time author who lived in the USSR and wanted to publish. If, in retrospect, it seems odd to some observers that these parallel developments apparently aroused so little anxiety in Soviet intellectual circles at the time, one has only to recall the dramatic years of the so-called Cultural Revolution (1928-1931) to realise that the period from the spring of 1932 to the autumn of 1934, when the theory and method of what became known as Socialist realism were being elaborated and the First Congress of the Soviet Writers” Union was being prepared, did indeed look like a “thaw” or perestroika[1] The future for writers other than the supporters of the RAPP[2] could hardly be worse than the recent past, or so it seemed.

After all, what the “Cultural Revolution” had meant for writers was the arrogant and self-righteous dictatorship of the narrow-minded RAPP faction over all other literary groupings. Moreover, this policy had had the backing of the Communist Party until the “line” rather abruptly changed in 1931, leading to the liquidation of RAPP in April 1932. As Sheila Fitzpatrick put it, “The aim of the Cultural Revolution was to create a new “proletarian intelligentsia”. Its method was class war”.[3] The Party now had a different aim, or so it seemed.”

By this time, of course, Evgenii Zamiatin, who had used the term “socialist realism” as early as in 1923 in his famous essay “On Literature, Revolution and Entropy”, was living in emigration in France. He had airily dismissed both socialist and bourgeois realism as terms that should not be taken too seriously.[4] After all, he intimated, the Euclidean reality that so many socialists and philistines (he is probably not using the term “bourgeois” only in a class sense) take to be the only reality is not the only reality, as all sensitive and perceptive people (including non-dogmatic socialists) well realise. Neither in the 1920s nor in the 1930s were a special literary theory and method really necessary to enable authors who wrote in a “realistic” way and who wished to further the cause of socialism (as a better -ism than, say, feudalism, capitalism, fascism or national socialism) to do so. Perhaps, partly for this reason, the term “socialist realism” seemed to be quite innocuous in the early 1930s.

It should also be noted that “socialist realism’ as a concept is both broader and narrower than a term like “Soviet literature”. It is broader, because works of socialist realism can be (and indeed were) produced in many different languages in very different parts of the world. In fact, to take just Russian literature, numerous works of socialist realism had already been written and published (Chernyshevskii”s What Is To Be Done? [Chto delat” ?] (1863), Gorky”s Mother [Mat”} (1906), innumerable works of the 1920s, for example). At the same time, “socialist realism” is a narrower term than “Soviet literature” because it is nowhere stated in the classic definition that Socialist realism is the only method by which “Soviet literature” can be created. As officially explained in 1934, Socialist realism is the basic [osnovnoi, but not the only, edinstvennyi] method of Soviet belles-lettres and literary criticism. It was never explicitly stated that Socialist realism should enjoy the son of monopoly position that the C.P.S.U. held in the one-party state. Interestingly, this proved to be the case in practice as well as in theory, with Stalin Prizes, no less, going to works that can hardly be described as socialist realist, such as Sergeev-Tsenskii”s The Martyrdom of Sebastopol [Sevastopolskaia strada], Bazhov”s The Malachite Box [Malakhitovaia shkatulka] and Lozinskii”s new Russian translation of Dante”s Divine Comedy[5]

The term “socialist realism” is, then, remarkably vague and ambiguous — which is a paradox, inasmuch as most of the officials in charge of Soviet censoring and publishing particularly disliked ambiguity.[6] This is one reason why many of the staple works of Soviet socialist realism had to be periodically re-edited, if not rewritten.[7]

The main reason why relatively few first-rate works of Soviet literature were written and published in the period between 1932 and 1956 derives from a perverse misinterpretation of the bland and in itself unobjectionable term “socialist realism”. The 1934 official definition insists that this method “demands of the artist a truthful [pravdivyi}, historically concrete representation of reality in its revolutionary develop­ment. At the same time, truthfulness [pravdivost”] and historical concreteness of artistic representation of reality must (or should) be combined with the task of ideologically remaking and training the labouring people in the spirit of socialism”.[8]

What this definition makes clear is that pravda in the sense of justice [spravedlivost’], of what ought to be true, has to take precedence over pravda in the sense of what is actually the case [istina], the empirical reality so beloved by so many people who do not think in Russian. To make this point clearer I must quote at length from the rather neglected memoirs of a Polish communist, Joseph Berger. Two years after the first Soviet Writers” Congress he was sharing a prison cell in Moscow with two Soviet (or rather ex-Soviet, as they were now enemies of the people) authors whom he refers to as Nicholas and Peter. They had both been arrested for not thinking and writing the “right” way, and, being Russian intellectuals, they loved to discuss the truth almost interminably:

     After many hours of discussion, back they were again at the question: “Are we talking about the same truth? Or are there several truths?” And here Nicholas stood firmly on ground which Peter had

willy-nilly to share: he defined what he called “Party” truth. He asserted that in the Soviet Union, especially for a writer carrying the torch of enlightenment among the masses, “Party” truth was the only truth that could exist. Peter would counter by asking why truth needed the adjective: was there not such a thing as truth in general? But Nicholas would quote from resolutions and indeed from Peter”s own works to show how “narrow” and “inadequate” was the concept of absolute truth — of truth in itself — a concept often used by “our enemies” to undermine the very foundations of the Party.

Yet when Peter was forced to agree that Party truth was indeed the only truth, the highest truth, the sum of all existing truth, neither he nor Nicholas found it at all easy to define what this truth was and how it differed from truth in general. Nicholas believed that in any conflict between the great and grandiose Party truth and the petty truth-as-such the one was bound either to evade or crush the other. Though Peter admitted that Party truth was the ground to be defended above all, he tried desperately in practice to preserve at least the remnants of the humble truth-as-such.

[…] The equivalent of “truth”, “virite “or “Wahrheit”, is istina, which denotes the correspondence between the notion and the objective reality. Pravda is a unique and specifically Russian concept: it means the highest concept of truth, a truth elevated to the rank of an idea. It is etymologically linked with pravo [“right” or “law”] and with pravosudiye [“process of justice”]. A Russian who “stands for pravda” or who “struggles for pravda”, does not stand or struggle for the sum of all kinds of truth, big and small, but for the truth which needs to be attained, truth in action, the ideal of conduct, the correspondence between acts and the demands of ethics. Perhaps in English one would have to say “the right truth”, or “knowledge plus righteousness”, but this splits the concept — and in the thirties this split created an abyss.

In the rooms of the NKVD[9] and at Party meetings, istina was nothing — it was relative and it could easily be changed: only pravda was absolute. It seemed to me, as it must do to millions of others who have not been through this school, hard to understand how a philological distinction could have such an effect on the lives of so many. But, in fact, this small difference — this tyranny of pravda over istina — was the lever by which white was turned into black; no such dialectic had existed since the Inquisition. The notion of pravda was the basis of power.

      In 1936, I eventually succeeded in persuading one of my most intelligent interrogators to answer my question: “Are you not in the least interested in what actually happened? Do you really only want the pre-selected truth which is the “Party” truth?” He gave this trenchant reply:

     “Pravda is what appeared in today”s leading article in Pravda [the newspaper]. Anything that doesn”t fit into this framework is, for us, objectively, not true. What have we to do with your petty istinas?’ And here followed the misquotation from Pushkin which one so often heard in the prisons and camps: “The pravda that uplifts us is dearer to me than the mass of petty istinas”. Pushkin”s verse in The Hero [Geroi], about Napoleon, runs of course, “The deception [obman] that uplifts us is dearer to me than the mass of petty istinas”. The epigraph to this poem is “What is truth [istina]?’

For the interrogators the main thing was not to know the mass of islinas but to turn the lie they needed into pravda. A scholastic trick? But when such an abstraction has behind it the colossal power of the State and immense psychological pressure it becomes very concrete and hard to resist. […]

Nicholas and Peter repeatedly arrived at deadlock, trying to define the relationship of istina to pravda. Yet Nicholas had certain advantages. It seemed at first as if Peter had both feet on the ground, while Nicholas relied on Party principles. Nicholas made pseudo-scientific analyses while Peter insisted that day is day and night is night. But in the course of their discussion it became clear that things were not so simple. Peter had to recognize that when, fifteen or so years previously, he had become a Party man, he had in fact gone over to the position held by Nicholas. So, although he insisted that he was a realist, that he started from istina — from what he actually saw and heard — he had in fact lost the right to say this. And Nicholas drove him to admit that in many instances he had acted in accordance not with istina but with pravda, with his duty as a member of the Party. He could no longer cling to istina because as a writer he had often followed and expressed the “Party” truth. It was easy for Nicholas to prove this by quoting from Peter”s work or from that of other writers whose whole task had been to leave aside the petty istinas and to make the reader conscious of pravda, by which was meant the “Party” truth.

However, even when Peter had been forced to agree that istina, the factual and, as it might seem to foreigners, objective truth, was of little moment as compared with pravda, they still found it difficult to define what exactly pravda was in a given case, and they still differed on the exact relationship between the two. As Nicholas saw it, pravda was not only to be preferred but, where the two clashed, it should obliterate istina. Peter was always anxious to preserve a semblance of istina; he wanted either to avoid a head-on collision with pravda or to bring some istina in through the back door. […]

     I should add that neither the istina nor the pravda of what they were accused of was made public, and I am sure that when, twenty years later, their cases were re-examined (at a time when “Party truth” required something different), the charges proved to be as empty as all the others. But at the time, they were put down in the archives and the decision was regarded as final, and every such decision was a brick in the edifice of Soviet justice. The existence of such bricks has a great bearing on the whole of Soviet literature and thought, even now that the bricks have been shown to be hollow and to weigh so little.[10]

I would therefore suggest that pravdivyi and pravdivost“ as used in the official definition of Socialist realism mean not so much “truthful” and “truthfulness” (when Russians want to insist that some pravda really does correspond to the Western concept of truth they talk about istinnaia pravda) as pravednyi and pravednost” (“righteous” and “righteousness”) and pravil’nyi and pravil” nost” (“correct” and “correctness”), in other words “morally and ideologically right” or, as we might say these days, “politically correct”. [11]

What Berger says about the clash between pravda and istina seems to find support in Katerina Clark”s discussion of the “modal schizophrenia” of socialist realism. Referring to the “fatal split” in most Soviet novels, she writes that they depict “what is” (i.e., they use the realist mode) as well as “what ought to be” (i.e., they idealize reality and use the Utopian or mythic mode). Many critics find the “sudden, unmotivated transitions” from the one mode to the other (Berger”s Peter would have called this the switch from pravda to istina and back again) disconcerting, to say the least. There are often “two different text types, the epic and the novel”, representing “two irreconcilable stages of cultural development”, embodied within one and the same Soviet work. Perhaps, however, these stages are not as irreconcilable as they might seem — wishful thinking is probably a world-wide phenomenon. After mentioning Bakhtin and Lukacs in the context of the clash between “what is” and “what ought to be”, dark paraphrases Eliade on the “traditional” person”s perception both of a mythic Great Time and of the present as a form of profane time (which acquires real currency only in its relationship with Great Time). Although this pattern of the two times is particularly characteristic of traditional societies, Eliade admits that it can be found elsewhere, “and especially in messianic movements, which usually locate their Great Time in both the past and the future. In Stalinist rhetoric of the thirties one finds an ontological hierarchy very like the temporal hierarchy Eliade describes”.[12]

Even though the mentality that generated the concept of Socialist realism was far from alien to many Soviet writers — the term itself, while only one of several suggestions, seems not to have caused any great dissatisfaction — it was obvious that the new Union of Writers would not be able to control the so-called literary process without the help of other bodies. One of these bodies was the official Soviet censorship system known as Glavli”t.[13] The first statute [polozhenie] of the Chief Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs (this was Glavlit”s full original designation), dated 6 June 1922,[14] was quite explicit about its functions, not hesitating to use the words tsenzura and tsenzor. Just as the “cultural revolution” was coming to an end, and a few months before discussions on socialist realism and preparations for the establishment of the Union of Soviet Writers got under way, on 6 June 1931, a new Statute [polozhenie] for Glavlit replaced the original one.[15] What are the main differen­ces between the two Statutes?

On the one hand, the blunt word tsenzura is replaced by the euphemistic term kontrol”, but on the other hand this control is not only pre-publication [predvaritel”nyi, preliminary), as in 1922, but also postpublication [posleduiushchii, subsequent], which meant (although this does not seem to have been widely realised at the time) that works already in the public domain could be “legally”, if retroactively, declared to be anti-Soviet. Moreover, Glavlit”s concerns now cover additional areas of creative activity — paintings, radio broadcasts, lectures and exhibitions. Its plenipotentiaries work not only at publishing houses, printing establishments, editorial offices and radio stations but also at “telegraph agencies, customs offices, main post offices and similar establishments”. (The open-endedness of the new Statute is indicated by the phrase “and similar”.) Rather cunningly, although these plenipotentiaries are appointed and removed by Glavlit, their salaries are to be paid by the institutions within which they work. Two other organizations have a say in the appointment of the two chief assistants of the head of Glavlit, but these organizations are now discreetly referred to as “interested departments” [zainteresovannye vedomstva] instead of coming clean and spelling it out as in 1922: the military and the secret police. Whereas in 1922 Glavlit was instructed to list the titles of works which were not to be published, sold or kept in libraries, it now has additionally to make lists [perechni] of information which is not to be divulged to the public. Whereas in the 1920s publications of the State Publishing House were not subject to Glavlit’s censorship, provisos are now introduced. At least some of the executives [zaveduiushchie] of the Association of State Publishing Houses [OGIZ] are simultaneously Glavlit plenipotentiaries, and OGIZ publications are now subject to preliminary control “as and when necessary” [v neobkhodimykh sluchaiakh]. In 1931 publications of the Comintern, the Central Committee and lower-ranking committees of the Party, the Communist Academy and the Academy of Sciences, and also the Izvestiia of the All-Union and All-Russian Central Executive Committees are still “freed” [osvobozhdaiutsia] from Glavli”t”s “political-ideological control”, but all these publications are now nonetheless subject to obligatory “preliminary review” [predvaritel”nyi prosmotr} to ensure the “complete security of state secrets”.

This Statute was supplemented over the years by numerous additional instructions, which often went into the most minute details in extremely bureaucratic language. On 29 November 1932, Glavlit Circular No. 9004 directed that “all printed works, after corrections to them have been carried out by the publishing house, no matter on whose instructions they were carried out, are to be sent for a second time to Glavlit, the Book Chamber and Political Control [apparently of the secret police] […] and submitted to the plenipotentiary [of Glavlit] all over again for permission to publish [na vypusk v svet zanovo]”.[16] Glavlit”s companion body Glavrepertkom (which “controlled” all public performances) also had its workload increased in the 1930s. An enactment [postanovlenie] of the RSFSR Council of People”s Commissars of 26 February 1934, for example, instructed Glavrepertkom additionally to cover “artistic radio­broadcasting” and ballets and to prevent the performance in public of mystical and anti-artistic plays, shows, concerts, films and gramophone records.[17] On November 1st that year an “Instruction” set out the ways in which items were to be sent to Glavrepertkom for checking. Organizations importing gramophone records, for instance, had to submit a copy of each record with a translation into Russian of the label and of any foreign text on the sleeve. The Glavrepertkom official”s permission number had to be printed on the record label itself.[18]

It should be stated clearly that Glavlit and Glavrepertkom, as state, not Party, institutions, were not the major cause of the problems facing the practitioners of socialist realism in the 1930s. In an article first published in Paris in 1938,[19] Roman Gul” ascribes more importance to the Propaganda (or Culture and Propaganda) Department of the Central Committee of the Party, to the Literary Control Section of the secret police, and to Stalin himself. This general assessment is borne out by Denis Babichenko”s two books documenting the political control over Soviet writers (nearly all of them trying to apply the Socialist Realist method) in the 1930s and 1940s.[20] On the other hand Kornei Chukovskii, writing in his diary in December 1934 about the difficulties he faced in republishing his famous children”s poem “The Crocodile” [“Krokodil”], refers specifically to a censor [tsenzor], to Glavlit and to the head of Glavlit, B.M. Volin, as though they were the source of his problems.[21] And there is no doubt that the size of Glavlit increased dramatically during the 1930s.[22] Alia Gorcheva states that, in 1940, the “central apparatus” of Glavlit consisted of 174 people, with about 5,000 censors in the RSFSR as a whole, of whom 506 had had a higher education. She quotes from the annual report for 1939 of the then head of Glavlit, N.Sadchikov, who wrote that his organization at that time had 6,027 employees. During the year under review they had “controlled” 7,194 newspapers, 1,762 periodicals, 41,000 books, all the materials of TASS, 92 radio stations, 1400 “radio points” [radiouzlov], 2,357,803 wrappers containing foreign literature, 70,000 libraries and 4,681 printing presses. They had also made 66,126 excisions [vycherkov] of information “not subject to publication in the open press and over the air”. During 1938 and 1939 Glavlit and its local organs issued 199 orders to withdraw [iz”iat”] 7,809 titles by 1,860 writers, 4,512 other titles by individual authors, and 2,833 miscellanies [sborniki] from libraries and bookshops. Another 1,299 titles had been recycled or written off for salvage [spisano v makulaturu]. In sum, 24,138,799 copies of these 16,453 book titles had been withdrawn from public libraries and the book trade network.[23] Employees of Glavlit may well have been working harder than members of the Union of Soviet Writers. The number of professional censors was certainly much greater than the number of professional writers.

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems indicative that the two most famous and infamous socialist realist books written during the lull after the “cultural revolution” and before the murder of Kirov are Nikolai Ostrovskii”s monomanic How the Steel Was Tempered [Kak zakalialas” stal”] and the collective work in praise of forced labour camps (thirty-four writers headed by Gorky and including Vsevolod Ivanov, Valentin Kataev, D.S. Mirskii, Viktor Shklovskii, Aleksei Tolstoi and Mikhail Zoshchenko), The White Sea Canal [Belomorsko-Baltuskii kanal imeni Stalina. Istoriia stroitel”stva].

Ostrovskii”s novel was certainly written with the best of intentions by an idealistic, fanatical, narrow-minded and brave young man. He was also mortally ill, dying in 1936 at the age of 32. His novel was serialized from 1932 to 1934. Largely autobiographical, it tells of the life and noble deeds of Pavel Korchagin, a poor Ukrainian lad who devotes himself wholeheartedly to the Bolshevik cause, which alone gives his life meaning and purpose. Influenced by the two greatest works of socialist realism avant la lettre, Chernyshevskii”s What Is To Be Done? (1863) and Gorky”s Mother (1906), Ostrovskii created the model “positive hero” who provided inspiration for, and perverted the personalities of, numerous other Soviet writers and innumerable Soviet readers. There were several film and stage adaptations, and the novel was a compulsory text in Soviet schools for decades. Sophisticated readers, unless they are masochists, have found it impossible to read this long novel to the end. Even the most sympathetic emigre specialist on Soviet literature wrote: “Here again, however, the heroic individual, the positive type, is portrayed with inadequate artistic means, and the novel never attained in aesthetic terms what it achieved in psychological and social ones”.[24]

The English edition of The White Sea Canal is of interest in pan as an example of how gullible and well-meaning foreigners could be taken in by what they perceived to be a very worthwhile social experiment: the GULag. In her introduction, Annabel Williams-Ellis writes: “This tale of the accomplishment of a ticklish engineering job, in the middle of primeval forests, by tens of thousands of enemies of the State, helped — or should it be guarded — by only thirty-seven G.P.U. [security police] officers, is one of the most exciting stories that has ever appeared in print. The book, moreover, enshrines some of the best pieces of comic writing that even Russian literature can afford”.[25] This volume, written in 1933 and published in Russian in January 1934, contains, in the English edition, 35 chapters (with titles like “Make the soup first-class and feed up the horses”) and twenty-nine photographs (the camera, presumably, cannot lie), beginning with Gorky and ending with Stalin.[26]

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provided a compelling riposte to such tomes, nearly thirty years later, in his work of genuine socialist realism, the novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [Odin den” Ivana Denisovicha], published in 1962. The description of the labour camp is realistic, and the life-style and organization of work are based on socialist (however perverted) rather than capitalist principles. Four years later he went to see the White Sea Canal:

     In 1966, I spent eight hours by the canal. During this time there was one self-propelled barge which passed from Povenets to Soroka, and one, identical in type, which passed from Soroka to Povenets. Their numbers were different, and it was only by their numbers that I could tell them apart and be sure that it was not the same one as before on its way back. Because they were loaded altogether identically: with the very same pine logs which had been lying exposed for a long time and were useless for anything except firewood.

     And cancelling the one load against the other we get zero.

     And a quarter of a million corpses to be remembered.[27]

     One does not have to be wise after the event, however, to note that precisely in this period, 1933, the Nobel Prize for Literature was, for the first time, awarded to a Russian — an impoverished emigre living in France called Ivan Bunin. Like any gifted writer, he found it possible to create great works without the support of a Union of Writers, without the interference of an intricate system of censorship, and without the assistance of a method known as “socialist realism”.