The Second Congress of the Soviet Writers’ Union in December 1954 and the belated publication of its six-hundred-page transcript in May 1956, three months after Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech, makes for an extraordinary textological challenge. Those seventeen months generated six versions of the Congress’s nine official reports as well as the remarks made by delegates (writers) during the discussion periods. (Missing, however, are the authors’ original texts, since their typescripts were “corrected” before the Congress.) This painstakingly researched and absorbing book increases our understanding of the strategic maneuvering that shaped literary policy during the Thaw. Valerii Vʹiugin shows the variants of the most important statements on both sides of the debate, displaying all insertions and deletions through a system of parentheses, brackets, differing fonts, and the like. In reconstructing not only changes made by editors, but also how speakers changed their own texts, he is interested in exposing their mental process in preparing for this signal event.
Vʹiugin details the literary controversies in the press over the roughly two years between Stalin’s death and the Congress. Liberals—notably Olʹga Berggolʹts, Ilʹia Erenburg, Vasilii Grossman, Emmanuil Kazakevich, Viktor Nekrasov, Vera Panova, Vladimir Pomerantsev, Aleksandr Tvardovskii, and Leonid Zorin—argued for “self-expression” (42) and confessional genres as legitimate elements of socialist realist aesthetics. The unfolding debate allowed Writers’ Union leaders to prepare a strategy ensuring no reformist rebellion could take hold during the Congress’s twelve days.
As with the Writers’ Union’s First Congress and plenums, each day opened with an official report devoted to a particular literary genre (prose, poetry, drama). An initial list of eleven speakers to deliver these reports included liberals Erenburg and Samuil Marshak, but Erenburg was bumped after publishing Ottepelʹ (The Thaw, May 1954), and Marshak after signing an open letter proposing to narrow the Writers’ Union’s authority (Literaturnaia Gazeta, October 26, 1954). In the end, all the reports were given by party stalwarts. They composed their addresses in coordination with one another, the better to beat down opposition. The reports were prolix (the new head of the Writers’ Union, Aleksei Surkov, held forth for three hours and forty-five minutes), while writers approved to speak during the discussion period got twenty minutes. There was too little time to accommodate everyone who wanted to speak, and only a few were brave enough to cross taboos. Vʹiugin’s point is that the sheer imbalance in the amounts of time during which conservatives and liberals spoke meant that most of the Congress was spent in reaffirming Stalinist literary policy.
At its conclusion, the Congress produced guidelines reflecting this seemingly overwhelming consensus. No vivid portrayals of negative characters (readers might think Soviet society was full of bad people). No experimenting with style. Even the odious August 1946 Central Committee resolution on literature was cited as authority. Hence the book’s title. The Congress did generate ameliorations to Stalinist literary practice, but these were disappointingly meager. Plots concerning sabotage and hunts for enemies were disavowed in favor of what had preceded them, namely, the role of labor in building communism. The aesthetics of “no-conflict” were dropped; but self-expression was granted only a limited foothold as a minor ripple in a hearty collectivism.
These results were something of a Pyrrhic victory for the party, one that was foreseen by the Stalinist writer and sometime hatchet man Mikhail Bubennov. Before the Congress, Bubennov warned Georgii Malenkov that the main speakers (Surkov and Konstantin Simonov) would be received with irony by the assembly. To avert this outcome, Bubennov urged replacing them and giving one of their spots to Mikhail Sholokhov. But the insufficiently docile Sholokhov was not asked. In the discussion period he attacked the churning out of shoddy literary works, the Stalin prizes that rewarded them, and a famously abusive literary criticism. As Vʹiugin points out, these were the very institutions of Soviet literature. He emphasizes that Sholokhov was in no way a liberal. But party leaders would not entrust him with an official role.
Part Two of the book contains Vʹiugin’s reconstructed master texts of Berggolʹts’s, Erenburg’s, and Sholokhov’s remarks, showing all changes. He provides a detailed explanatory apparatus, and for Sholokhov, a stemma for establishing the chronology of the variants. Also included is the speech of Culture Minister Georgii Aleksandrov, absent from the 1956 published stenogram. All in all, Vʹiugin’s is first-class textological analysis.
