“The printing press is our strongest weapon”
– Vladimir Lenin
As the presence of Vladimir Lenin’s words may suggest, I am about to enter a more academic sphere. I will share three installments from my own research, A Soviet Grip On The Arts: Censorship Through The Russian Revolution and War. At first this seems like such a large bite to chew, but truly, I am wanting to boil it down and focus on three artists whose work is of great importance, and worthy of attention as it pertains to the time and climate in which they were living and creating. As the title of my research indicates, this investigation means diving into the depths of Soviet Russia and the experience of censorship. As far back and potentially like “old news” as it may seem, I believe that the histories are just as vibrant (if not more than) the relaying of what your friend had for lunch today, though I’m sure it was delicious. So let’s go! Let’s give it a try and see what the world looked like and what it meant to be an artist under a dictator, which was such a different experience than that which myself and the artists around me are encountering today.
Vastly differing from the modern day U.S., in the Soviet Union, censorship was a means of controlling the ways that people thought, acted, and believed in their leader and party. Art was particularly dangerous given its natural tendency to promote freedom of expression, foster individual thought, and stir the inclination to question authority. The climate that artists were working in was actively being manipulated to make it difficult for them to express their artistic messages and reflections on the era. At the forefront of all censorship in the Soviet Union was the leader in control and between Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the tactics employed developed and grew into a way of life that was all encompassing of the minds of the Soviet people. Formally, the acts of censorship were initiated and supported by the Soviet Foreign Ministry. In literature, the Chief Administration of Literary and Publishing Affairs (Glavlit) replaced the Tribunal of the Press and took control of censoring the published word by writers of prose and poetry. Artists throughout the Soviet Union felt pressure both from of these organizations and from the very tops of Soviet governmental ranks. The relationships and connections that existed between authors, musicians, painters, broadcasters, etc. and the communist ideology and leaders varied vastly and all brought about different experiences of censorship. Yevgeny Zamyatin, Boris Pasternak, and Dmitri Shostakovich all survived the era without falling victim to arrest or Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge. Additionally, all three of these artists were active around the time of the Russian Revolution and reflected this experience through their art. All three individuals had unique interactions with Stalin in the era of artistic censorship and they each had a different way of reflecting their impressions of Soviet manipulation. These introductory remarks on the background of the politics are helpful for starters, and now you may delve into the meat of my first installment: Yevgeny Zamyatin and his novel, We.
Yevgeny Zamyatin
Though Stalin is vastly known for his political repression through the Great Purge, not all the intellectuals were forcibly removed from the Russian state. Yevgeny Zamyatin, notable for his anti-utopian novel We, was one such writer who was victim to the pressures of both Lenin and Stalin and ultimately chose to formally request from Stalin in writing the right to leave the Soviet Union rather than continue to live in his homeland where his writing was no longer able to be published. This self-inflicted exile was surprisingly granted in 1931 with the encouragement and influence of Maxim Gorky, where imprisonment may have been a more widely expected response. Zamyatin found himself moved to request this action after experiencing first hand the artistic repercussions of the Bolshevik revolution.
It behooves an argument for the arts to take account of Zamyatin because in support of his artistic expression he underwent an ideological change. As a student, Zamyatin was in support of the Bolshevik portion of the Social Democratic Labor Party and he played an active role in protest, being arrested twice (once during the 1905 Revolution), sent into exile, and finally, abused and sentenced to solitary confinement (Simkin 2013). His writing is characteristically satirical in nature, and in 1914 he published At The World’s End, which commented on military life and deeply upset censors, causing all copies of the book to be destroyed though he was acquitted after being brought to trial (Simkin 2013). These walls on expression that were being thrust upon Zamyatin and his writing, caused him to begin to question the Bolshevik intention and their active censorship of the arts.
Committed to defending his freedom to write satirical commentary on society and the Soviet government, Yevgeny Zamyatin shifted his political orientation to the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (Simkin 2013). In his 1920 essay “I Fear,” he states, “Real literature can be created only by madmen, hermits, heretics, dreamers, rebels, and skeptics, not by diligent and trustworthy functionaries.” Here, he makes an argument in support of the artistic community, asserting that a literature dictated by the government is not honest, nor worthwhile; it does not serve the purpose of “real literature.” His words reflected the opinion that the government’s hand of authority was stifling creativity. And though he knew that he was risking further danger by voicing these notions, he further articulated in “I Fear,” “the only weapon worthy of man is the word.” He knew the risks and he would continue to use his words to combat the ever-imposing hand of censorship that was pressing upon the Russian artistic community. Zamyatin’s message was clear, he “warned against the insidious pressures for conformity: the new Russia would have no real literature until it cured itself of this illness; and if the illness proved incurable, then there would be only one future for Russian literature-its past” (Rudy 1959, vi). This was a belief that he investigated in his 1921 novel We.
We satirically depicted a futuristic utopian society in which freedom and happiness are mutually exclusive. The protagonist, D-503 is met with the internal conflict between rationality and irrationality and his individual existence versus the success of the One State government, lead by The Benefactor. One of Zamyatin’s literary goals was to try and look forward, “refusing to accept reality at its face value and always posing the two…questions: Why? And what lies ahead?” (Rudy 1959, x). Part of the threatening genius of We was the way that he nearly succeeded in doing just that. Parallels can easily be drawn between the future of the Soviet State (One State) and the role that Joseph Stalin would take on, similar to that of The Benefactor. Zamyatin’s novel, not optimistic in nature, concludes with the protagonist receiving The Great Operation, a series of electrical shocks to the brain to remove imagination and the desire for freedom. After the operation, D-503 reveals to the reader,
“No more delirium, no absurd metaphors, no feelings—only facts. For I am healthy—perfectly, absolutely healthy. I am smiling; I cannot help smiling; a splinter has been taken out of my head, and I feel so light, so empty! To be more exact, not empty, but there is nothing foreign, nothing that prevents me from smiling. (Smiling is the normal state for a normal human being.). “(Zamyatin 1952, 217)
As the Soviet government continued to develop their methods of censorship and Stalin progressed into his era of purges, the state that Zamyatin leaves D-503 in is symbolic of what was being imposed upon intellectuals of the era through disappearing tactics such as imprisonment and execution. The cautionary tale reveals that this desire within the soul is in fact “a worm…a fever…the last barricade on [the] road to happiness” (Zamyatin 1952, 166-67), much as the Russians were guided to believe that their ideas were “foreign” and would “prevent [them] from smiling.” Those of the government were the right ones, or the ones that would make them “feel so light” and be able to exist in a “normal state” of “smiling” without any such “barricade.” The “splinter” in We is the desire for freedom and happiness, similar to Russian artist’s desire for freedom of expression through art and Zamyatin’s act in writing the novel.
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s experience of censorship is not one that ends in the tragedy of imprisonment or execution under Stalin as so many others do, however, it exists in the direct infringement on his ability to publish his work that would have been so closely relatable for Russians at the time. We was not officially published to the public, but shared among Zamyatin’s inner circle and he was clearly warned that it would not be safe for him to try and publish it at the time in Russia. He succeeded in smuggling a manuscript to the United States where it was first published in 1924 and by 1927 a small circulation of a Russian translation became available in Eastern Europe (Simkin 2013). By 1929, Zamyatin saw a complete block by the Communist press of the U.S.S.R. on his ability to publish his writing or produce his plays in theaters, and they indicted him for publishing his novel, which had been banned in Russia (Slonim 1959, xxi-xxii).
Zamyatin’s final retaliation against Soviet censorship manifested itself in its own unique, unprecedented way. Among all his fellow intellectuals and artists who were being exiled or disappeared, Zamyatin wrote directly to Joseph Stalin requesting permission for him and his wife to leave Russia. In his letter, he wrote, “no creative activity is possible in an atmosphere of systematic persecution that increases in intensity from year to year” and cited these experiences of censorship as a “writer’s death sentence.” Such language would have not surprising elicited a response of persecution or disappearing from Stalin, though he was influenced by Maxin Gorky and responded in 1931, granting passports to both Zamyatin and his wife to travel in Europe. The couple would go to France and settle in Paris until Zamyatin’s death of a heart attack in 1937 (Simkin 2013).
Yevgeny Zamyatin’s unique interaction with the Soviet government as a Russian novelist under the rule of censorship highlights both the fearless audacity of an artist fighting for his right to freedom of expression as well as the relentless power of Stalin’s regime to shut down the ability for that expression to be spread throughout the Russian people. Marc Slonim remembers Zamyatin in his Preface to We: “His whole personality represented a threat to conformity and a challenge to accepted platitudes. Here was a man, a gentleman, an independent artist, and a fearless thinker” (1959). Though Zamyatin’s work was silenced throughout Soviet Russia, today he can be recognized as a man who appealed to Stalin himself, survived, and never succumbed to the belief that happiness would exist under restricted freedoms. He countered not only the Soviet censorship, but also anyone who obliged with their control.
Rudy, Peter. Introduction to We.
Simkin, John. “Yevgeni Zamyatin.” 2013
Slonim, Marc. Preface to We.
stay tuned for parts II and III — two more fab. Russian artistic intellectuals.
chloë.
at the threshold 