When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, had trouble getting the third part of The Quiet Don approved for publication, he appealed to Maxim Gorky, then the supreme authority in Soviet literary affairs. Gorky invited him to his mansion, which had been a gift from Stalin to lure Gorky home from self-imposed exile. When Sholokhov arrived, he discovered that Gorky had company: Stalin himself.
Stalin interrogated Sholokhov about ideologically problematic passages but agreed to the book’s publication on condition that Sholokhov also write a novel glorifying the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. Still more important, he gave Sholokhov a piece of paper explaining how to contact Stalin’s personal secretary, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, and providing the number of his direct phone line.
Sholokhov’s collectivization novel also ran into trouble with officials too scared of its descriptions of Soviet ruthlessness. Dialing the sacred phone number, the novelist reached Poskrebyshev, who summoned him to a meeting with the vozhd’ (meaning “leader,” a term reserved for Stalin alone). Stalin spent three nights reading the manuscript. When Sholokhov arrived, he found, in addition to Stalin, Lev Mekhilis, the editor of the Communist Party newspaper Pravda; Sergo Ordzhonokidze, who was in charge of the economy; and Kliment Voroshilov, People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs. Stalin approved the novel’s publication but “suggested” a new title.
Sholokhov’s collectivization novel also ran into trouble with officials too scared of its descriptions of Soviet ruthlessness.
Could one imagine a president of the United States deeming a novel so important that he would spend three days reading it and give his verdict in the presence of officials in charge of the economy and the army? But in Russia literature is more important than anywhere else. The poet Osip Mandelstam famously remarked that only in Russia are poems important enough for people to be shot for them.
When the Soviet archives were opened after the fall of the ussr, it turned out that Stalin had accumulated a personal library of twenty-five thousand volumes. He had selected the books himself and even devised his own classification system for his personal librarian to follow. In over four hundred volumes he left extensive pometki, marginal notes. What was in that library? What did those notes say?
https://newcriterion.com/issues/2022/6/stalin-his-own-avatar
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