Pathway to Japanese Literature

Preface

――Visible Changes――

The atmosphere of the Soviet literary world changed drastically over the past year or two.

The remarkable nature of this transformation lies in what is plainly visible.
To see this transformation, one need only visit Herzen House—once the home of revolutionaries, now called the "Writers' House" where various Soviet literary organizations maintain their offices.

We arrived in Moscow at the close of 1927, pressed for time.
I think it was probably the New Year that followed.

An Evening of Japanese Literature was held at Herzen House.

In a modest auditorium, beyond a stage lined with circular pillars, stood a broad podium.
A statue of Lenin stood erect.
Red placards hung on the walls.
There, alongside guests from Japan attending the Revolution's tenth anniversary celebration—Yonekawa Masao and Akita Ujaku among them—I too took my place in line, each of us delivering brief remarks in turn.
A Korean professor from the Oriental Languages School named Kim, fluent in Japanese, interpreted.
The speakers addressed their audience from chairs arranged atop the podium facing a table.
Off to one side, the burly Pilnyak exhaled cigarette smoke while choosing sections from his essay "Impressions of Japan" to recite.

The opening was delayed, and it concluded around midnight.
They decided to take a break and filed down to the cafeteria—it was in the basement.

Pilnyak opened the door and said, “Come on in.”
I was wearing a Japanese kimono that evening.
So everyone looked.
However, sitting at the table with various people and looking around at the scene, I felt something profound and completely forgot that I was being watched.

Since it was a basement, there were no windows.
Electric lights blazed in the stifling air.
There were tables covered with white cloths here and there, and large benches.
The piano boomed.
The one playing was an emaciated woman in red.
Exposing her shoulder bones and shaking her hair, she played recklessly.

On the benches, youths who had barely reached adulthood—destined to become budding Soviet writers, given their presence in Herzen House’s basement—were grabbing women one by one and contorting their faces.
Before them lay liquor, liquor.
Plates of half-eaten food.
The old waiter, wearing white gloves and swinging the tails of his tailcoat, worked among them.
Sweat glistened on the old man’s forehead.
The sound of the piano.
The popping of champagne corks.
Pilnyak asked us.
“What shall we eat?”

Since this was my first time seeing the inside of the "Writers' House," I was shocked. Then I grew furious. Was this what Soviet writers were doing? How did it differ from bourgeois cafés?—It was merely more provincial. Moreover, everyone remained unperturbed—particularly the group that had brought us there, which seemed to carry an air of authority as they settled into that environment.

What filled the stifling basement air was "the past"—there was nothing but the past. That was what I felt. I became intensely uneasy. I hadn't come to the Soviet Union to see such things, I thought. In the end, Yuasa and I left that basement ahead of the others, just the two of us.

Moscow’s fine, powdery January snow was falling on the frozen, pure white tree-lined avenue illuminated by arc lamps.
We returned to the hotel through the late-night streets by sled.

――

Two years had passed.
It was 1930.
Upon passing through Herzen House's gate, an outdoor cafeteria stood built in the right-hand garden.
On rainy days, chairs sat inverted with legs upright atop tables beneath eaves.
But now the former auditorium became the writers' regular cafeteria.
The offices of each writers' organization remained unchanged while the basement stayed closed.

At two spots by the cafeteria entrance sat women behind small desks.
At one desk they would have their affiliated organization's name and full name registered.
At the next desk writers bought meal tickets.
The listed price read five rubles.
Yet one needed only pay two and a half.
Half price it was.

A young, energetic woman wearing a white headscarf and wrapping her hair in white and red cloths briskly served the meals.
Every plate was half price.
They handed over their meal tickets and ate.

The people here now were also different from those of the basement era.
Several men and women who seemed to have finished their work and come to catch their breath were drinking beer and chatting animatedly.
They burst out laughing.
They begin discussing again.
There is a man in a rubakha who eats while reading with a print set aside, both his reading and eating being equally vigorous.――

Let us go see the Writers’ Club on Varlovsky Street.

This was formerly the residence of the Symbolist poet Sologub.
In February 1930, the Writers’ Club came to be established here.

It was a spacious front garden.

From the entrance between the thick pillars, ascending the splendid stone front staircase revealed a sign reading "Café" on the left-hand pillar.
There were simple small tables and chairs.
Passing through revealed a common discussion room at the rear.

Exiting the narrowed corridor, there was a grand door with carvings on the left.
Consultation for Sologub—the Guidance Department.
“Writers in Collective Farms”
There was also an Exhibition Committee Room.

In the hall, throughout January in sequential order, events such as film study groups, drama study groups, work study groups, and critique study groups were held.
And there we saw.
A red placard.

Transform art as a class weapon into ＊××××××!
For socialist construction, advance according to the Party’s line!

This was the room that had been Sologub’s study.
"But gentlemen, this door must be opened very quietly."
"This is the club reading room after all."

Bookshelves painted aristocratic brown filled the walls.
Complete Works of Lenin.
Complete Works of Marx-Engels.
Capital.
Various academic economics journals had been neatly arranged, leaving the shelves tightly packed.
There were no vacant seats around the large table.
In hushed silence, everyone was reading something.
Foreign magazines lay interspersed with new publications across the table surface.

The door opposite the reading room did not open.
What a difference between the scene at Herzen House a year ago and this one!
Did this not mark the bold emergence of the Soviet Union’s irreversible historical leap!

But how did the atmosphere of the Soviet literary world undergo such a major purge in just two years?

The objective situation of Soviet society had truly changed over the past two years.
In response to this, the leadership of the Soviet literary world completely shifted from the traditional "fellow traveler" writer organizations to "RAPP"—the Russian Proletarian Writers' Alliance.
This was the major cause.

Then where did this change in objective circumstances itself originate?

It stemmed from the Five-Year Plan for production expansion that had by then entered its third year of implementation.
No small social tragedy or comedy occurring within today’s Soviet Union can be explained apart from this monumental undertaking spanning from 1928-29 through 1933.

＊ The missing characters on this placard cannot be filled in even today in 1948.
“Five-Year Plan”

Hitherto, production in the Soviet Union had been carried out systematically.

Since the memorable year of 1917, each year, led by the State Planning Department and Supreme Economic Council, they would investigate production capacity, labor power, consumption, and other factors within every enterprise across the Soviet Union and set annual production targets.
Production targets were allocated to each production association.
The associations distributed them to the trusts under their management.
The trusts assigned them to individual factories.
At factory level, through general meetings, management allocated these production targets to every workshop.

Simultaneously, while formulating projected plans for production expansion in five-year increments ever further ahead, the Soviet Union was steadily increasing its production capacity that had declined due to the European War and Civil War.

In the Soviet Union, October marked the turning point of the fiscal year.
The previous year’s financial reports were published in Pravda (the Party organ) and Izvestia.
Next, the coming year’s plan was announced.—

In October 1928, the entire world was shocked.
It was none other than this:
The Soviet Union had not only boldly declared its Five-Year Plan for production expansion—previously kept back as a draft proposal—but the scale of that expansion plan was remarkable.

According to this plan, the production sectors were divided into A and B.
A was the development plan for the heavy industry sector that manufactured means of production.
B was the expansion plan for the light industry sector that produced consumables.

First, looking at A, it was generally structured as follows.

1913                                1933

Coal                                28.9 (million tons)                            75 (million tons)

Petroleum                                 9.3 (million tons)                            22 (million tons)

Peat                                 1.6 (million tons)                            16 (million tons)

Iron                                 9.2 (million tons)                            19 (million tons)

Pig Iron                                 4.2 (million tons)                            10 (million tons)

[...]

Cement                                 12.3 (million barrels)                            41 (million barrels)

Superphosphate                                 55.0 (thousand tons)                            3400 (thousand tons)

Agricultural machinery                         67.0 (million rubles)                        498 (million rubles)

B: As for Light Industry

1913                                1933

Cotton cloth 271 (million meters) 620 (million meters)
Woolen fabrics 95 (million meters) 270 (million meters)
Linen fabric 500 (million kilometers)
Sugar 1,290 (thousand tons) 2,600 (thousand tons)
Salt 1,978 (thousand tons) 3,250 (thousand tons)

Rubber-soled shoes (rubber winter boots)         28 (million pairs)                        75 (million pairs)

Whether looking at A or B, the rate of production expansion was no small matter.
When compared to 1913 production—that is, when the Russian masses had been suffering under the Tsar and capitalism—even the lowest projected increase rate stood at 170%, while higher ones reached 1000% or even 6000%; in other words, they were planning a colossal production increase of tenfold to sixtyfold.

Moreover, the Soviet Union was the only society in the world organized through socialism.
There was no one siphoning off the national wealth expanded through production expansion.
Directly, it would return to the daily lives of the Soviet workers and peasants themselves who strove for production expansion.
The Five-Year Plan allocated a massive fund for the cultural advancement of the working class—funds for eradicating illiteracy， housing expansion，the establishment of schools， hospitals， daycare centers，and cafeterias，as well as expanding radio and cinema distribution networks.

Through the electrification and mechanization of the means of production, Soviet laborers' working hours would be reduced to an average of 6.86 hours per day by 1933. Through rising wages and falling prices, Soviet laborers' real income would increase by 71% by the end of the Five-Year Plan compared to 1928.

Electric power would reach 22 billion kilowatts, and collective farms' cultivated land would reach 2 million hectares.—92% of Soviet industrial production would be socialized, and agricultural production would be 65% socialized.

The government-employed experts from capitalist countries around the world took one look at this Soviet Five-Year Plan and first sneered. "There they go again! The Bolsheviks’ delusions of grandeur have begun!" Then, wielding the logic of bourgeois economics as their weapon, they proceeded to denigrate it. "Even America—with its superior production technology—couldn’t easily double output across all industries. Soviet industry is backward. If this were called a hundred-year plan, we might have been able to trust it somewhat."

The Soviet Union’s leading party, the All-Union Communist Party, along with the revolutionary workers, peasants, and general laborers who supported it, certainly knew full well that this Five-Year Plan was no easy task.
But at the same time, they also knew that this had to be decisively carried out between 1928 and 1933—that once begun, it had to be completed.

The true victory of the Proletarian Revolution lay in surpassing capitalist countries in productive capacity.
This was what Lenin had declared in strong, clear words.

The Soviet Party and the proletariat had expended all efforts toward improving production and culture in a socialist society.
This naturally included the technical skills held by the pre-revolutionary intelligentsia.
In 1921, they had even utilized private capital with a boldness that frightened party members themselves.
Yet in the revolution's tenth year—what had become of the notorious Soviet "scissors"?

These "scissors" worked as follows.
The Soviet Union had always operated as an agricultural nation.
By 1928, cultivated land area had recovered to 95% of prewar levels, yet wheat yields remained at just a quarter of foreign outputs. Why?
Peasants maintained their village soviets but still lacked American-style agricultural machinery.
There they were—plodding across vast fields with wooden plows and horses as if frozen forty years in the past.

However, up to 47 percent of light industry in cities relied on raw materials from rural areas.
In the villages, approximately one million kulaks had emerged since the 1921 New Economic Policy.
The kulaks always yearned for a reversal to the private property system.

In the Soviet Union, to develop industry, they would purchase machinery from foreign countries.
The gold currency to be paid had to be covered by exports of wheat, timber, hemp, and other goods from within the country.
The villages had yet to be collectivized, lacked sufficient socialist consciousness, and were all too often swayed by the pernicious influence of the kulaks.
Urban light industry, due to raw material shortages, could not vigorously carry out production of consumables for peasants.
Then the peasants began to mutter.
“Even though we’re the ones feeding the cities, hah! The factories can’t even make clothes or shoes for us to wear.”
“We’ll hold back on working too.”
When this happened, the economic conditions of cities and rural areas fell into a vicious cycle of mutual passivity, only continuing to deteriorate.

The socialist production organization of the Soviet Union had not yet developed sufficiently to successfully firmly bind the two blades of these scissors.

Meanwhile, what was the state of things outside the Soviet Union?

The capitalist countries occupying five-sixths of the globe found the Soviet a hindrance.
This had been known since 1917.
The fact that stagnant capitalist countries harbored aggressive ambitions toward the sole Socialist Republic of Soviet Russia became increasingly clear with each passing year.

First and foremost, Russia’s natural resources were truly abundant.
What was it that capitalist countries suffered and struggled against each other over? Was it not the shortage of raw materials and the narrowness of markets?
First, through an economic blockade, they would provoke various political deviations within Soviet society, and if even a slight commotion occurred, they would seize the opportunity to send the Imperialist Allied Forces rushing in.
The imperialist aggressors’ typical ploy.
They could carve up that vast Russian land and furthermore expel from this earth the existence of a socialist society undesirable to capitalism!

But what about the unemployed masses that kept overflowing year after year in capitalist countries worldwide?
Overproduction of goods.
Consequently came declining labor wages and intensified workloads.
The class consciousness of the international proletariat—honed razor-sharp through bourgeois industrial rationalization—could no longer be restrained.

The Five-Year Plan for production expansion had not merely been decided by the Soviet working class to increase their own happiness. It was the concrete manifestation of the Soviet Union’s resolve—as the vanguard of the global labor liberation movement—to fully utilize its abundant domestic natural resources and solidify the feasibility of a socialist society’s existence.
It was the most practical historical assertion against imperialist countries’ societies.

The plan was grand.
Serious effort was required.

From the new economic year of 1928-29, a large-scale overhaul of daily life programs began in the Soviet Union.
To increase efficiency, a five-day "uninterrupted workweek" system was implemented.

For the sake of labor discipline, drunkards and idlers within factories were severely criticized by their peers, and those loitering about with vodka bottles protruding from their trouser pockets became an exceedingly rare sight.

On the cinema’s projection screen appeared the state of large collective farms being organized along the Volga River. Behold! The grand construction work of the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station!

They chuckled. During lunch break, Mitya—reading the Worker’s Newspaper while listening to the radio in a sunlit spot of the factory—poked a comrade in the side with his elbow.

Hmm!
Look.
This is how it has to be said.

“When was it?”
“What about our place?”

In the Worker’s Newspaper that Mitya was reading appeared a photograph of a bureaucratic factory committee member—criticized at a general assembly for eradicating bureaucratism—scowling with evident discomfort.

The eradication of bureaucratism was pursued to its fullest extent, everywhere.
Even within the Moscow Soviet.
Even within the People’s Commissariats.
The same held true within the Party.

Volunteer labor brigades called “Udarnik” for efficiency improvement were organized across all production sites.
Udarnik encompassed both Party members and non-Party revolutionary workers of all genders.

The "Light Cavalry," together with specially organized commissioners from the Party, commenced a purge of internal staff across all production structures.
On a main thoroughfare in Moscow stood a beautiful seven-story building.
It was the Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications.
At the service gate, Red Army soldiers with fixed bayonets stood peacefully on guard.
Postal collectors on motorcycles and small cars energetically came and went.
On the large glass door to the side, a red placard fluttered today as it did yesterday.
Was this some kind of celebration?
It was not.
It was written on the placard.
“A functional purge is being carried out here in our midst!”

“At the time of the victory in ‘October,’ the technical skills of the proletariat were low.”
All sorts of officials, engineers, and professors had come from the old camp.
In this critical period of socialist reconstruction, were there harmful saboteurs lurking within?
And that was what this purge was for.

In spring, Komsomol members and experts dispatched from the Central Collective Farm and the Party’s Propaganda Department fought an intense class struggle against kulaks and their cohorts, all while covered in mud from fields worked by poor and middle peasants who supported them.
That was an uncompromising "October in the countryside."
A Komsomol member was shot through a window by village kulaks and instantly killed.

In a certain village, a village soviet official who had been an active collective farm organizer went out one day with a Party member from the central committee on an inspection tour of their jurisdiction.
They entered the forest.
Suddenly, a towering cedar tree several stories high by the roadside came crashing down onto the horse-drawn cart they were riding.
The two activists loyal to the Soviet were crushed to death.
It wasn’t that the cedar had fallen.
The tree had been felled by the three kulaks who had been hiding in its shadow.
In addition, acts of arson targeting wheat granaries, and so forth.

The kulaks had their property confiscated, and some were expelled from their villages.
Some used the guns that had killed Komsomol members to commit suicide.

“Aren’t you going to Sarafki?”
“Not yet…”

Even jokes had changed by 1929.
Sarafki was the name of a labor colony where engineers and others who had engaged in misconduct were frequently sent.

Easter and Christmas became anti-religious propaganda days, and wayside shrines such as those along the Kremlin’s outer walls were removed.

Bookstore fronts were flooded with pamphlets about the Five-Year Plan.

Amidst the sparks of class struggle flying in all directions, the Party and government of the proletariat made their declarations with Bolshevik-like frankness.

The state needed money.
Your extra kopecks!
For socialist construction‼

A summons to savings and Five-Year Plan bonds.

The workplace shock workers called out to the masses through sweat-drenched brows.

Improve the technical skills of the proletariat!
Forge a corps of technicians and skilled workers from within the proletariat!

In 1929, Lunacharsky, who had served as People's Commissar for Education since the October Revolution, ceded his historic position to Zubnov.
The Academy of Arts was reorganized, and Professors Piksanov, Sakulin, and others stepped down.

In these scorching objective circumstances, the various writers' groups within the Soviet literary world finally had their class-based positions subjected to mass criticism.

"RAPP’s Socialist March"

(1) - "Fellow Travelers" in Decline -

Soviet Russia is a country of working people.

It was currently in the process of building a socialist society.

Moreover, as the world’s sole socialist society to have achieved victory in the proletarian revolution, it stood upon a social foundation entirely distinct from that of other capitalist societies.

That the core of the Soviet literary movement lay in proletarian literature was an inevitable outcome of Soviet social life; moreover, that it was the Proletarian Writers' Organization which guided the various schools coexisting in the Soviet literary world—as expressions of class-based realities in art and as products/weapons of class culture—while indicating their developmental direction stood as a self-evident truth.

In 1925, the current Russian Proletarian Writers' Union (RAPP) held its first conference under the name All-Soviet Proletarian Writers' Union (VAPP). Lunacharsky and Bukharin attended and gave speeches explaining the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks)'s theses on literature.

At this time, it had already been clearly stated: proletarian writers alone belonged to the liberated and glorious worker-peasant class. Even if the accomplishments of "fellow traveler" writers stood out more prominently at present, they would inevitably transform alongside socialist society's development. Though still immature now, proletarian writers possessed a great future. As proletarian class culture advanced, they would increasingly gain the ability to produce better works. Lunacharsky concluded his lengthy speech with a resounding cry: "Long live proletarian writers!"

At the same time, it was clearly stated that the tempering toward the development and perfection of proletarian literature must be achieved entirely through the self-reliant efforts of proletarian writers themselves.
Lenin said:
"Literature must become the Party’s literature."
That meant literature must be class-based and aligned with the Party’s direction.
The Party’s theses declared:
"The Party accurately identifies the socio-class content present in various literary schools but will never bind itself to any single tendency among them.
Even while guiding literature as a whole, the Party cannot support any particular literary faction.
The Party must declare free competition among all different groups and trends.
All other solutions will become bureaucratic and official false solutions."

In other words, just because it was a proletarian writers’ organization didn’t mean the Party would grant it special favors.
The revolutionary proletariat and the Party within the Soviet Union advanced along the path of constructing a socialist society by combating all alien elements within transitional Soviet society—at times developing them through Bolshevik leadership and practical implementation.
The path of proletarian literature’s development was the same.
Amidst being jostled, tested, and struggling among many schools, it had to carve out its own path through its literary practice.
That was what it meant.

What this meant was that proletarian literature would neither develop nor grow unless it took root in and grew from the realities of class society; instead adopting a literary standpoint reliant on being regulated by power or wielding privilege to maintain authority would lead nowhere.
That such an attitude by the Party toward literature was just would be acknowledged by anyone.

In the Soviet Union, the years from 1917 to 1921 were a time of revolution ablaze at every moment.

Simultaneously with “October,” writers who scattered into various positions and joined different literary camps each made meaningful contributions to Soviet literary history in their respective places.

To put it succinctly, the six-year span from the New Economic Policy to the implementation of the Five-Year Plan had been a period of exploration for Soviet proletarian literature.
Of course, they had been studying.
They had been primarily engaged in studying for technical improvement.
Because they could no longer write works like those from the revolutionary era that burned with life’s fire in their pens; “October” now had to be treated historically, while “today” had grown complex.
Even when depicting “October,” it had to be written with meticulous analysis and synthesis—carefully, through an artistic technique possessing prospectively higher permanence, three-dimensionally and realistically—for the time had come to overcome the stereotypes inherent in revolutionary-era proletarian literary works.
During those several years when proletarian writers had been studying classical and foreign literature, the “fellow traveler” writers had been remarkably productive.
Among leftist fellow traveler groups—the futurist-led “Left Front” or “Constructivist” writers centered around Mayakovsky, as well as historically left-leaning factions within proletarian organizations like the long-established “Smithy” group—works were generally published in greater numbers and read more widely.
The reason for this was clear.
The writers of these groups possessed a literary cultivation from the past that proletarian writers lacked.
They had mastered language, could vividly express diverse subjects through sharp delineation, and possessed the skill to sustain readers’ engagement.

The Soviet proletariat were ceasing, year by year, to be mere "readers"—mere consumers of literature.
In the approximately 57,000 worker clubs, there existed literary study groups and drama study groups.
Leaders from the Russian Proletarian Writers' Union went out and conducted research there.
The 15-kopek *Shōsetsu Shinbun* was published weekly.
Factory newspapers and wall newspapers—these were all written by the workplace proletariat.
What the 300,000 worker and rural correspondents wrote directly was class-based criticism of political and production matters.
However, this training of recording and critiquing such fundamental facts of Soviet social life provided a more proactive standard of appreciation for artistic works.
Some began writing short stories and essays themselves.
――With a steady and increasing rate, the Soviet proletariat were becoming producers of literature themselves.

The Five-Year Plan began.
Catch up to America!
And overtake!

Production, Culture.
Forward to socialist competition across all fronts of Soviet social life!
The mobilization of RAPP.

The Russian Proletarian Writers’ Union (RAPP), alongside the Five-Year Plan, expanded its domain beyond the literary study group supervision it had previously undertaken into broader social activities closely linked to construction projects.

RAPP organized literary shock workers.
Sovkino’s film crew took their cameras and set out for the Torkushib Railway construction site, the collective farms of the Volga region, and Baku’s oil fields.
The tools of literary shock workers were pencil and notebook.
They departed for the newly built agricultural machinery factory, Selmashstroy.
They went to the collective farms in Siberia, the coal mines of the Don, and the Soviet Ford automobile manufacturing plant built in Nizhny Novgorod, Gorky’s hometown.

The literary shock workers witnessed firsthand the great expansion of new Soviet production initiated there by the Five-Year Plan.
With what resolve and effort did the revolutionary proletariat and peasants organize shock workers in their villages and workplaces?
What changes did the collectivization of rural areas and the socialization of factories bring to the daily lives of the Soviet masses?
What psychology had been generated by the intensified domestic class antagonisms?
In fact, two RAPP writers were killed by kulaks and their faction of peasants through acts of terror.
It was imperative that concrete methods be discovered and implemented for how RAPP writers—who, along with “all material and ideological wealth,” belonged to the working class—should participate in cultural construction through artistic activities during this moment of historical leap forward.

The literary shock workers first advanced through their foundational studies.
“Engage in straightforward production! To the masses!”
The notes and records of these literary shock workers began appearing in RAPP’s journal *October*, as well as in *Literary Gazette*, *Growth*, *Izvestia*, and other publications.

Those notes and records had not been given what might be called artistic polish.
However, for example, deep in remote Siberia, villages were collectivized, and the sown area was expanded by five percent beyond the plan.
The class-based efforts of Soviet peasant collectives expended in the shadow of socialist transformation across several square versts were being soberly and swiftly reported through precise figures and eyewitness accounts.

Soviet workers and peasants had indeed waged an all-out class struggle eleven years earlier.
That was that unforgettable "October."
Now, once again through the Five-Year Plan, the Soviet working class mobilized itself across all fronts and rose up.
However, the heroism of the October era and the heroism of proletarian peasants now accumulating hidden achievements for socialist construction differed entirely in both psychology and expression.

The Soviet heroes of 1928-29 were not crouching in the forest with guns and bloodshot eyes.
With hammers, or manning power switches, they were engaged in the tenacious labor of factories.
They were among the youths covered in tractor oil and field mud, or those smoking makhorka (low-grade tobacco) by the village bridge, talking with poor peasants about tonight’s village soviet meeting.
The RAPP writers learned that empty formal novelty was of no use in recording them.
Exaggerated adjectives, exclamation marks, and arbitrary line breaks—

They were
working
at the factory!!

They came to realize that writing such things—with fragmented lines and emphatic punctuation—was utterly unnecessary.
The relationships between human collectives as classes.
The relationship between humans and machines.
These were brightly illuminated by the light of various activities for concrete socialist society construction, and the path of proletarian realism—long debated as a literary creative method—emerged from reality.

＊ This form of proletarian literature that emerged alongside the Soviet Five-Year Plan’s implementation is today called reportage literature in various countries.
However, the originator of that name was a German with a penchant for categorization.
In its homeland of the Soviet Union, they refrained from assigning it any specific designation.

RAPP, having thus dispatched writers to production sites and drawn closer to the masses while internalizing its mission as proletarian literature during the reconstruction period, simultaneously launched theoretical battles with other literary factions.

For with the advent of the Five-Year Plan, various factions within Soviet literature had begun to reveal their true natures.

First, there was the problem of the fellow traveler writers’ group.

The Party’s 1925 Theses on Literature carefully addressed this issue.
The fact that there were many experts in the cultural and literary techniques possessed by the “fellow traveler” writers, and that inevitable turmoil existed within the “fellow traveler” organizations.
Considering these points, it was determined they must guide them to join the revolutionary proletariat’s camp as swiftly as possible while combating the bourgeois social and literary views held by a segment of these writers.
To the Proletarian Writers’ Group, Lunacharsky specifically gave a warning at that year’s congress: they must not fall into left-wing infantilism toward the “fellow travelers.”

What self-criticism and development had the "fellow traveler" writers themselves achieved since then? With what attitude had they contributed to the advancing Soviet proletarian culture? Many of them, as their books began to sell, unwittingly started retreating into bourgeois complacency within their studies. Vsevolod Ivanov, who had written *The Armored Train* during the revolutionary period, still wore his old Lloyd glasses but now listless and devoid of class consciousness—had begun dwelling on past memories and personal psychological portrayals.

In their real lives, having grown increasingly distant from Soviet workers' daily existence, they lost both the opportunity and zeal to recognize and evaluate how young laborers and peasants were conducting inquiries and construction amidst unremarkable daily trivialities—preparing for future struggles while maturing as new Soviet people.
As actual life reverted to individualism, their literature's freshness too was lost.
Through regressive naturalism and lingering psychologism, the "fellow travelers" began straying from the path they were meant to accompany.

Then the Five-Year Plan began.
And with the "Red Wood" incident, the "fellow travelers" came up against their final limit.

*Red Wood* is the novel by Boris Pilnyak, the standard-bearer of the “fellow travelers.”
In 1929, after writing it, Pilnyak showed the manuscript to Raskolnikov, the then editor-in-chief of *Red Virgin Soil*.
Raskolnikov was a party member who had worked alongside Lenin as one of the military revolutionary committee members during the October Revolution.
He read the manuscript and pointed out that the political sections needed to be completely rewritten.
In *Red Wood*, Pilnyak addressed the socialist transformation of rural areas—the fundamental grand undertaking that defined the significance of the Soviet Five-Year Plan.
He approached it entirely from a reactionary standpoint.
“In Soviet economic policy, as for urban areas, it forces us to gradually consume what existed from the pre-revolutionary era, while in rural areas, it directs itself toward turning meticulous heads of prosperous households into poor peasants—into owners of but a single drafty shack.”

Moreover, Pilnyak asserted:
"There are no socialist organizations whatsoever in our country."
The issue of rural collectivization was a challenging endeavor.
Even among Soviet writers, there were not a few who failed to grasp the necessity of eliminating the kulaks.
After the 1921 New Economic Policy, peasants had been permitted freedoms such as wage labor, land leasing, and unrestricted sale of harvests—measures that gradually led to a regression toward capitalism in rural areas.
Consequently, in autumn 1927–28, the government—facing kulak obstruction—encountered severe difficulties in wheat procurement and implemented compulsory purchases.

“But kulaks didn’t become kulaks by idling around and living off others.”
“They were simply more industrious than other peasants.”
“They were needed in the Soviet Union.”
“Why must we suddenly eradicate them now?”
Many said this.
But weren’t those very people themselves providing the answer?
“Aren’t those who question already stating, ‘They were needed in the Soviet Union’?”
In other words, they were stating that their necessity had already become a thing of the past.
The situation shifted.
It was shifting toward socialist construction.
In the past, the nouveau riche had been useful by diverting personal capital into Soviet production.
Yet who today would acknowledge the necessity of NEPmen?
That the NEPmen were the dregs of bourgeois entrepreneurs fixated solely on profit, and that what socialist construction required was not their class, stood evident.
The kulaks too had been a transitional manifestation in socialist construction.
If, as a class, they had developed transitionally to the point of hindering the socialization of Soviet production striving to advance forward, then they had to be sublated.

Pilnyak did not understand this fact.
Furthermore, he committed an even greater class betrayal.
When Raskolnikov advised him, Pilnyak had stated that this manuscript was a draft he intended to revise before incorporating it into a longer work—yet despite this declaration, he sent the unaltered manuscript to Berlin through the Leningrad Foreign Cultural Relations Association.
The White émigré bookstore Petropolis gladly published it immediately.

In 1925, the Party acknowledged that the “fellow travelers” contained “now only the slightest remnants of anti-proletarian and counterrevolutionary elements,” thereby issuing the aforementioned patient theses.
Did the attitude Pilnyak took in the case of *Red Wood* truly demonstrate his “slightest remnants of counterrevolutionary, anti-proletarian elements”?

It was not only RAPP that directed strong criticism at the fellow travelers’ treacherous attitudes.
A general condemnation arose from among the working masses.

Pilnyak was bold by nature and had long overestimated the status permitted to fellow travelers within Soviet literature. This time, even he panicked. He tried to explain by lining up reasons that were no reasons at all. No amount of excuses would erase the now-exposed counterrevolutionary practices of this fellow traveler writer. The enraged Soviet proletariat sensed a class enemy in Pilnyak.

Pilnyak resigned from his position as chairman of the Russian Writers Association. The Russian Writers Association was reorganized and changed its name to the Soviet Writers Association. This was not merely Pilnyak alone stepping down from a prominent position in the Soviet literary world. This was not merely a vague Russian Writers Association, but one that clarified its essence as a literary organization within a Soviet—socialist society.

Until then, some young writers who had belonged to the "fellow travelers" realized for the first time the true nature of the camp they had been part of due to the "Red Wood" incident and joined RAPP.

(2) ――The Cleansing of Pseudo-Marxists――

There exists an organization called the All-Russia Peasant Writers' Association.

This was an organization of peasant writers that had existed based on the objective reality in the Soviet Union where the conditions of the urban proletariat and rural areas still differed in every aspect.
The Party’s 1925 Theses stated as follows:

“Peasant writers must be welcomed with a cordial reception and receive our unconditional support.
Our task lies in guiding their growing group into the orbit of proletarian ideology.
However, under no circumstances should we eradicate the peasant-like literary images from their creative works—images that serve as a necessary prerequisite for influencing the peasants.”

However, among peasant writers, strong remnants of old-fashioned muzhik-like nationalist tendencies persisted.
They did not view the slow tempo of thought, skepticism, gradualism (which was thoroughly bound up with conservatism), and various other psychological traits and habits that contemporary Soviet peasants possessed as legacies of past social systems as elements capable of transforming into advancing socialist production organizations; instead, they held the view that these characteristics themselves constituted intrinsically valuable Russian qualities that would save Russia.

The peasant writers themselves did not fully grasp that Soviet peasants had to, through the expansion and strengthening of socialist production in rural areas, as soon as possible comprehend the ideology of the proletariat engaged in agricultural production and develop into class-conscious individuals with clear rationality.
The task of peasant writers was to stimulate spontaneous momentum toward a singular "union" of cooperation with the urban proletariat on shared class interests, while employing transitional forms and techniques of peasant literature.

Peasant writers must view farmers as the driving force across the entire front of people’s liberation and should treat them in terms of their developmental potential.

The instance where peasant writers，overly fixated on the particularities of Soviet peasants，have committed errors in judgment reveals itself in an interesting manner.
The fact remains that，to date，it was not peasant writers but rather proletarian writers who had published quality works based on Soviet rural areas.
This fact spoke volumes.
In those days，the special characteristics of Soviet peasants did not lie in their unconventional wedding rituals，folk songs，clothing，speech patterns，or even in what was called the Russian peasant mentality—skeptical yet bold and persistent，and at times cunning.
It was rather in the various realities of this historical transition—as these coalesced and peasants transformed into agricultural workers—that literature ought to have reproduced their unique characteristics.

――

The Five-Year Plan emerged as an epoch-making experience for peasant writers.

However, regrettably, just as a certain writer among the “fellow travelers” had emerged as a class enemy, no small number of enemies also arose from this peasant literature camp.
The term “enemies” refers to a faction within the All-Russia Peasant Writers’ Association called the “Industrialists’ Workshop.”

The foundation of the Five-Year Plan in rural areas was the industrialization of means of production.
The goal was to replace human labor, horses, and wooden plows in the fields with tractors for plowing, sowing, and reaping.
Collectivization of farms could not take root without this industrial foundation.
At first glance, this faction's name seemed thoroughly class-conscious and responsive to the Five-Year Plan's objectives.

RAPP uncovered this stratagem.
Writers from this "Workshop," brandishing revolutionary leftist slogans, gradually sought to infiltrate both RAPP and the Party's literary organizations.
Their plan involved penetrating these groups to disrupt frontlines, sabotage collectivization efforts through literary campaigns, and guide peasants toward anti-Soviet alliances.
Investigations revealed that a counter-revolutionary faction led by Bukharin—which had been obstructing rural collectivization on the political front—had infiltrated the peasant literary movement with a scheme to divert tractors and other rural industrialization resources to kulak elements.

There existed an organization called "Pereval" that gathered proletarian writers who had not joined RAPP and left-wing "fellow travelers." The organizer was Voronsky, renowned as a Soviet literary theorist.

Voronsky was a Party member.
And he was a Marxist.
As a literary theorist, he had meritorious achievements that deserved recognition.
Voronsky directed the Party’s attention to the Komsomol, worker and rural correspondents, and youths at workers’ universities as the stratum that would produce good proletarian writers in the future.
It was also he who had called for making censorship reforms more lenient to some extent.
He spoke about improving the material conditions of proletarian writers and the need to resolve the housing issue for writers as a distinctive aspect of literary work.
As editor of *Red Virgin Soil*, he introduced many young writers.
And in the 1920s, Voronsky was not mistaken in his criticism that proletarian writers should not have remained entrenched in “factory-like abstract romanticism,” content to produce so-called “wooden red icons” (hollow propaganda literature) through an unnatural optimism divorced from reality, nor in his critique of their liquidationist stance toward past literary traditions.

However, even from that time, Voronsky had a weakness of kneading elements of humanism into proletarian literary theory. He stated that it was unreasonable to demand communist ideology from the newly emerging "fellow travelers". Although he was a Marxist and Party member, Voronsky’s passion for literature tended toward art for art’s sake, resulting in a dual split within his literary theory. Pure literature and propaganda literature were recognized by Voronsky as two separate entities. In the creation of pure literature, the notion that an author’s political consciousness need not be questioned has become the theoretical pillar of "Pereval". Voronsky’s dual classification was clearly mistaken.

How could Soviet writers, living within a society actively building socialism and drawing their subjects from that very society, possibly achieve an accurate class-based grasp of their material without political awareness?
In his report speech at the 1930 Party Congress, Kirshon of RAPP addressed this tendency of Pereval.
“No—we must state.”
“Now, more than ever before, is the time when we must demand that all strata of Soviet writers determine their political stances.”
This statement articulates the inevitability of the advancing Soviet society.

The Soviet proletariat lived through a whirlwind of over a decade since the revolution.
Foundation work for the new society began in all directions, and every bit of useful knowledge was harnessed and utilized for this purpose.
Even a group of self-proclaimed Marxists who did not understand Leninism were given work as "Marxist Alliance members."

The Five-Year Plan stood as one of the most concrete examples of Leninist transformative reality in the history of Soviet construction policies.
During this historical period of development, it was not only Voronsky's case that made clear the errors in the Marxist Alliance members' previous modes of thinking.
Similarly, Professor Pereverzev—a Soviet Marxist literary theorist lecturing at Moscow University—was subjected to severe criticism based on real-world developments.

Pereverzev’s error lay in mechanistic materialism.
According to his way of thinking, the subjective was seen as entirely a mechanical reflection of objective conditions.
When applied to literary theory, this meant society’s objective circumstances merely shaped the writer’s subjectivity, while the fact that the writer’s subjectivity actively influenced objective circumstances went unaccounted for.
Concretely speaking, only writers of purely proletarian origin could understand the proletarian revolution, grasp the significance of the Communist Party as the party of the proletariat, and truly internalize socialist construction as their own.
The result was an unprincipled, opportunistic proletarian literary theory that posited writers of petit-bourgeois intelligentsia origin drifting rightward or becoming reactionary as an unavoidable fact—so long as objective conditions for counterrevolutionary movements existed within Soviet reality.

RAPP engaged in a fervent theoretical struggle with Pereverzev, who was active as a theorist across all fronts of modern Soviet literature.
It was not only RAPP.
Within the Literature and Language Department of the Communist Academy, a discussion on Pereverzev’s literary theory was held from the winter of 1929 to January 1930.
The pages of publications like *Literary Gazette*, *Print and Revolution*, and *Literary Outpost* resounded with clear cries or muddied echoes in the theoretical struggle to advance proletarian literature.

What is most noteworthy is that as criticism of these Marxist Alliance members’ literary theories intensified, an equally vigorous self-criticism began within the RAPP camp.

(3) —Rigorous Self-Criticism—

In February 1930, a MAP (Moscow Proletarian Writers’ Union; RAPP’s regional branch) congress was convened.

This was one of the landmark congresses for the Soviet proletarian literary movement.
At this congress, the question of Mayakovsky’s "Revolutionary Front" and the Constructivist faction—to which Vera Inber, Selvinsky, and others belonged—joining RAPP was raised.
Mayakovsky, who had contributed since 1917, and a few young proletarian writers belonging to the Constructivist faction were accepted into RAPP.

Through the implementation of the Five-Year Plan, the Soviet working people—whose class consciousness had been further heightened—were no longer satisfied with Mayakovsky’s faction’s verbal heroism.
They had begun to clearly criticize the Constructivist faction’s overestimation of the intelligentsia’s role in the revolution, their misplaced glorification of mechanical force, and their exoticization of productive labor.
The criticism from the developed masses stimulated self-criticism within these groups and became the motive for joining RAPP.

RAPP welcomed their membership on the condition that the new members would strive to further grasp proletarian ideology in their united front with them and prove themselves in practice as better class literary fighters—not simply entering as they were and remaining unchanged.

The Kajiya faction also submitted a merger proposal.
However, while RAPP had approved the participation of only a certain number of members from among them, the Kajiya faction hoped to merge the entire group as it was, and thus no decision was reached at the congress.
(Later, RAPP’s screening committee was organized and began working toward resolving this issue practically.)

Now, to the problem of self-criticism within the RAPP camp.
Libedinsky, the author of *One Week*, was globally recognized as a Soviet proletarian writer.
He began serializing a full-length novel titled *The Birth of a Hero* in a magazine.
At precisely the time when proletarian realism was developing through the implementation of the Five-Year Plan, this monumental work was met with intense attention from all literary camps.

Among the poets belonging to the same RAPP was one named Bezymensky.
He was a pillar among the poets.
The literary theory he espoused had long been a frequent target of criticism within RAPP.
For example, he had a verse drama titled *The Shot*.
With the launch of the Soviet Five-Year Plan, Shock Workers aimed at boosting production efficiency were organized at a tram manufacturing plant—a work that chronicled what class struggles were experienced in the workplace through spontaneous initiatives centered on young Komsomol men and women.

"The theme of *The Shot* was drawn from Soviet reality during the reconstruction period."
That was all well and good.
The issue within RAPP lay in how Bezymensky had interpreted its vivid social theme.

Bezymensky simplistically pitted the factory’s Shock Workers against saboteurs as red heroes and villains.
Class villains remained villains from beginning to end.
As for the good characters, they were depicted in *The Shot* as programmatic entities that never committed even the smallest error.
RAPP pointed out Bezymensky’s unrealistic mechanical partisanship evident in this aspect.

The depiction in *The Shot*—where Shock Workers make no effort to draw the wavering elements (who must inevitably be mixed among the saboteurs) into the construction front and remold them—was unrealistic. The Party had not instructed Shock Workers to adopt such sectarian tactics.
Moreover, in this play, the counterrevolutionary workers as a collective were consistently portrayed as beasts of uniform temperament, showing none of the contradictions, wavering, or splits that naturally arose from shifts in social circumstances.
This, too, differed from the reality of social life.

――

Libedinsky vigorously criticized this mechanical Marxism of Bezymensky’s even within RAPP.

In response to this mass criticism, Bezymensky formed a united front with Bespalov, a former Pereverzev faction theorist.
Bespalov had theoretically repudiated mechanist Marxism but still retained its shortcomings as a mechanist Marxist.
He declared: “In reality, there are only two poles—affirmation and negation. Good and evil.
In the Soviet present, these are clearly divided.”
Bespalov defined the artist’s task as “mastering the depiction of this intensified struggle between two poles.” And Bezymensky believed that through *The Shot*’s revolutionary leap into heroes and villains, he had fulfilled the “sole” duty of a class-conscious artist.

But as anyone could see, this was an erroneous ultra-left mechanistic doctrine.
The true path of proletarian realism that RAPP had wrested from reality did not lie in such things.
At this juncture, Libedinsky appeared with *The Birth of a Hero*, written from a position diametrically opposed to *The Shot*.
It was only natural that both Soviet society and literary circles paid attention.

The protagonist of *The Birth of a Hero* was an old Bolshevik party member who had been a stalwart of the revolution.
Libedinsky took this party member’s private family life as his subject.
After the death of his wife—a devoted comrade—the protagonist had remained single for years out of loyalty to her memory and love for their only son.
His wife’s sister lived with him as a housekeeper.
Though the protagonist had spent years feeling no attraction toward her as a woman, one day he chanced to see her with half-washed hair and exposed breasts.

The party member was suddenly captivated.
Even when sitting at the Party work desk, the image of his sister-in-law’s breasts flickered before his eyes.
He couldn't sleep.
He was tormented.
He felt guilty toward his dead wife.
Tormented by all this, he eventually entered into a sexual relationship with his sister-in-law.
However, his sister-in-law was not a comrade.
She was just a domestic woman.
The party member became dissatisfied.
His son, a Pioneer, criticized his father’s domestic life.
The party member was finally sent on a business trip to some distant region.
Thereby, the serialization was discontinued.
This was because ferocious public criticism had erupted against this work.

When Libedinsky told the author of *The Shot* that psychological depiction was also an indispensable element for proletarian realism, he was not wrong.
In *The Birth of a Hero*, what kind of class-based or socially conscious psychology does Libedinsky depict?

Certain elements within the Party and the Komsomol openly criticized Libedinsky.
"Experienced Bolsheviks do not hold interpretations or attitudes toward sexual desire like those of the protagonist in *The Birth of a Hero*," they said.
They declared: "He isn't making the mistake of dragging around the agony of his individual sexual desire before the Party's work desk—chewing it over and savoring it—as if deluding himself that this constitutes intellectual labor touching upon the core of significant socialist construction."

Libedinsky had not only fallen into individualistic psychological probing through his advocacy of psychological depiction but had also approached a form of biologism akin to what Voronsky described in his essay *The Art of Seeing World* when addressing human sexual desire. Even Bolsheviks are human—being human means they may suffer sexual urges—yet he succumbed to this quasi-biological perspective on humanity. Worse still was his narration of such personal psychological excavations through tedious naturalism devoid of ambition or vitality.

Libedinsky, in *The Birth of a Hero*, demonstrated an attitude lacking even rudimentary understanding or sympathy for how in the historical present of the Soviet Union—where humans as biological beings had matured into social class beings—elements such as human instincts (sexual desire, appetite, thirst for knowledge) were being managed through autonomy and social foresight.

Libedinsky said in his defense of *The Birth of a Hero*:
“In this work, I tried to write about the meaning of the Soviet family as an entirely new social union.
“In the Soviet Union, issues regarding the family system and gender equality within the home have already been resolved.
“Commencing from the union of men and women as equal entities, I tried to capture the entirely new meaning that Soviet families hold in raising children.”

However, this excuse did nothing to correct the errors exposed by the very novel Libedinsky had serialized. For in Libedinsky’s conception of men and women uniting as equals, this very equality’s focus was concentrated solely on sexuality. Without yielding to Bezymensky’s ultra-left mechanist doctrine, he distorted the very essence of proletarian realism.

In April—when the Soviet masses were fervently debating *The Birth of a Hero*, and Bezymensky, who had been criticized over *The Shot*, was now counterattacking Libedinsky and his non-progressive psychological probing—Mayakovsky, the poet of the Revolutionary Front who had just joined RAPP, committed suicide.

Mayakovsky was an energetic, passionate poet of the revolution.
As the bard of advancing Soviet socialist construction, he always desired to stand at the forefront.
Therefore, he renamed the "Left Front," which he had primarily organized, to the "Revolutionary Front."
He also joined RAPP, which naturally assumed a leading role in the Soviet literary movement during reconstruction.
That Mayakovsky—endowed with a poet’s innate linguistic sensitivity and technical audacity—chose suicide fundamentally signified how the Soviet Union’s robust constructive realism had sublated his poetic heroism.
Mayakovsky’s death did not occur through straying from the revolutionary proletariat’s advancing path, as Esenin’s had.
He had always stood on the front lines for the proletariat and revolution, walking ever onward until his strength failed and he collapsed.
The tireless proletarian masses advanced forward over his corpse!
Forward!
They continued advancing toward socialist construction.

With the sincere and respectful farewell of the masses, Mayakovsky’s death—an event in the history of proletarian literature—was mourned.

The self-criticism within RAPP was not interrupted even by this event.

Bezymensky stood at the forefront of the Soviet masses’ loud and unrestrained criticism and advanced to the RAPP conference held in Leningrad in June.
RAPP seemed on the verge of splitting.
However, Libedinsky acknowledged his own errors and the validity of the masses’ criticism, discontinuing the serialization of *The Birth of a Hero*.

RAPP courageously embraced this intense internal self-criticism as a phase in proletarian literature’s development and approached the 16th Russian Communist Party Congress in July.

Stalin proposed in his speech that Soviet proletarian literature should increasingly align itself with the masses and production during the reconstruction period, becoming Bolshevized.

From RAPP, Kirshon, Bezymensky, and Serafimovich attended the conference as representatives.
Kirshon reported on the struggles RAPP had undergone over the past two years as a proletarian class-based writers' organization.
With unfeigned sincerity, he cited proletarian writers' still-unresolved shortcoming—their insufficient grasp of dialectical materialist methods in literary production—as he spoke.
However, "Now is the time when proletarian writers are advancing to fulfill the tasks assigned in the Party Central Committee's theses on literature—to fight for and secure the hegemony of proletarian literature. That is a fact."

Applause.

“Comrades! We proletarian writers have not merely written. We have acknowledged—and continue to acknowledge—that to write requires direct participation in the actual revolution. In accordance with the Party’s mandates and those of Party publications, we have fulfilled many tasks. We fought class enemies not only with our works as weapons but face to face. That two local RAPP leaders were killed by kulaks in rural areas this year is no coincidence. We have never before shut ourselves away in studies. Nor will we do so henceforth. We want to become direct participants in socialist construction. We desire that our creative works become weapons against our enemies through the Party’s guidance.”

Kirshon demanded that Soviet regional Party organs become even more attentive in their support of branch RAPP groups than before. He comically depicted the prejudices of Party members who persisted in viewing efforts for the class-based literary movement as peripheral or even inferior work compared to activities within the Party and Red Army, drawing laughter from the representatives.

And when Kirshon enumerated and read aloud sixty works as recent representative examples of proletarian literature, the Party representatives packed into the Great Hall shouted energetically from every corner.

“That’s not enough!”
“Not enough!”
“We were expecting far more!”

Was this not heartening encouragement!
The entire Soviet masses were truly waiting for their proletarian writers to demonstrate their excellent literary production a hundredfold, a thousandfold.

Reported works and authors.

Afanogenov: *Lovers*, *Marina’s Jam*

Bednyi: Many masterpieces well-known to readers.
(centered on poetic works published daily in *Pravda*)

Bezymensky: *The Shot*

Bogdanov: *The First Daughter*

Busygin: *The Chatterbox*

Vishnevsky: *The First Cavalry*

Gerasimov: *Poems*

Gorbatov: *The Cell*, *Our City*

Gorbunov: *Ice Fragments*

Gromov: *For the Sake of the Cross*
*Horse Pasture*

Zharov: *The First Candidate*, *Poems*

Zabyarov: *The Embankment*

Zarka: *The Brave Seamstress*

Ilyenkov: *Anokha*

Ilyoshi: *Tissa Burns*

Iezbakh: *With Gun and Book*
*Ruin*

Karavaeva: *Sawmill*
*Gate*

Kirshon: *The Rails Roar*, *Wheat*, *Town of Wind*

Kryazhiminsky: *Guitar*, *Youth*

Kochin: *Village Girl*
*Notes of a Rural Correspondent*

Lavrukhin: *In the Hero’s Footsteps*

Libedinsky: *The Bend*, *Hillocks*, *The Birth of a Hero*

Ovarov: *Loquacity*, *Red and Black*

Panfyorov: *Brusky* (Poor Peasants’ Union)

Platoshkin: *On the Road*

Poretaev: *Poems*

Svyatlov: *Poems*

Serafimovich: *Struggle*

Stavsky: *Cossack Village*

Surkov: *Poems*

Fadeyev: *The Last of the Udege*

Chumandorin: *Rabure Factory*

Churkin: *Ice Fragments* (dramatized)

Sholokhov: *And Quiet Flows the Don*

Shvedov: *Yul Bazaar*

Yurin: *Poems*

Erdberg: *Chinese Novel*

Yasensky: *Burn Paris*

What was noteworthy was how many authors from Komsomol ranks had emerged in this list.
They were Komsomol members who had come from the Donbass coal mines, the Volga riverside region, and even the most remote rural villages.

For example, they would go to the RAPP office and ask questions. A cheerful young man wearing a rubashka embroidered with red thread on black fabric would kindly but briskly attend to them. He was not a clerk. He was a writer. This was Churkin, whose name also appears in this list—the young Soviet proletarian writers had, by their very appearance, cast off the morbid traits of bourgeois writers.

Towards the victory of socialism!

The 16th Party Congress had concluded.
The new economic year of the Five-Year Plan’s third year drew near.
Between Soviet proletarian writers' organizations and the general labor masses arose an unprecedented sense of affinity, and more vigorous exchanges were initiated.

At the Party Congress, Bezymensky, one of the representatives from RAPP, read from a report delivered in the form of a long poem.

"We do not have
an outstanding plan."
"Hmm.
Another plan—
there isn't one."

In other words, the production-economic plan of the Soviet Five-Year Plan was, for RAPP writers, the most fundamental class-based plan.

RAPP conducted self-criticism regarding how this production-economic plan was been handled in literature and, from the autumn of 1930, completely overhauled the guiding principles for literary study groups in workers' clubs.
Until then, literary study groups had been poisoned by narrow, immature literary tastes.
When a young worker engaged in factory production finished his seven-hour workday and sat down in a study group chair, both the workplace and the production-economic plan's numbers vanished from his head.
When laboring, their very gaze transformed them into different people; they observed their own constructive labor from the outside and wrote what they considered to be highly elaborate poems about it.
And they enthusiastically engaged in criticism from their peers that only held sway around the desks of literary study groups.
Moreover, fundamental literary studies were not being conducted systematically, and there were actual instances where certain study groups knew nothing about the profound theoretical literary discussions grounded in social reality that had taken place between writers' groups and within RAPP prior to the Party Congress.
RAPP was surprised by this.
The dissemination of proletarian literature must not be conducted in such a manner divorced from labor—that would be heresy. Under such conditions, it became impossible to draw forth good writers from among the truly progressive working masses.
The guidance of literary study groups had to be conducted strictly in line with production.
"Eradicate the literary study group mentality!"

Before the literary study group members, all factory wall newspapers and factory newspapers were presented by RAPP as materials to be re-examined as their field of activity. Literary study group members, do not act high and mighty and err. Your literary training in this period of reconstruction begins with concrete practice in how literary techniques can be utilized for the fulfillment of the production-economic plan. With vivid class-based literary language and expressions that seize people’s hearts, to inspire the proletariat’s initiative for the fulfillment of the production-economic plan. This had become the primary task of Soviet literary study group members.

Literary work must become part of the entire proletariat’s tasks.

Lenin

RAPP, with Fadeyev as chairman, convened approximately a thousand worker-literary shock workers in Moscow.
They were elite proletarian vanguards who had abruptly come from the factories.

The realization of a unified front between socialist Soviet production and literature was also propelled by appeals from workplace proletarians to writers' groups.

The revolutionary workers and peasants resolved to actively support their writers and creative works as part of implementing literature's Bolshevization.
They would not merely criticize as working-class readers.
Even wholly non-literary proletarians aimed to collaborate by providing specialized explanations about production required for their writers' activities or offering guidance on depicting workplace life.
This marked the first such occurrence in the Soviet Union.

The resolution on "The Mentor-Like Role of Workers Toward Literature" saw participation from Moscow’s AMO automobile plant, Dinamo and Red Proletarian electric plants, Kharkiv’s Sickle and Hammer Factory, Leningrad’s Krasny Putilovets, and others.

The resolution text from the "Factory in the Name of Vladimir Ilyich" appeared on the front page of *Literary Newspaper*.
Within that resolution document, written from the class perspective of the working people, there were clauses such as these.

(1) Proletarian writers must produce works in literary language that is easily understandable to the broad masses.

(2) Proletarian writers may use completed or unfinished manuscripts—even mere outlines.
In study groups, clubs, and such settings, they must read their works aloud to worker audiences and take into account their direct criticism and feedback.

(3) Literary debates taking place among proletarian writers must be conducted in factories under the criticism of the labor masses.

And finally, they concluded as follows:

“We stand fully prepared to assume the mentor role for the All-Soviet Writers’ Council—RAPP being one constituent organization within it.”
“We expect that the writers’ organizations and Red Army-Navy Writers’ League will demonstrate the organizational form of this mentorship.”

Among RAPP’s rising cadre of writers, organized literary production emerged as a subject of debate.
In the Soviet Union, all production followed planned models.
Therein shone the brilliance of socialist production.

Even if it was said that proletarian literature had closely combined with the Soviet production-economic plan, this manifested primarily in the works' themes and content alone.
Literary production still remained an individualistic endeavor—written at each writer's convenience using self-discovered materials, without coordination or oversight.
Trade unions were organized by industry.
Writers lacked any such industry-based organizational structure.
Could this truly be the proper form of literary production for a socialist state?
This proposal contained complex issues.
After study, while affirming the importance of integrating with production environments, it was concluded that grouping writers by industry risked rigidifying literary activities and thus proved unsuitable.
During this period, Soviet writers achieved another meaningful advancement:
the expansion of the proletarian literary front to encompass the Red Army and Red Fleet.

A research committee led primarily by Serafimovich, Surkov, and others was held at the "Red Army Central House."
It was early autumn of 1930.

Given the Soviet Union's international position of being encircled by imperialism, this should naturally have become an urgent matter for writers far sooner.
For the socialist achievement of global people's liberation and national self-determination, the elite vanguard engaged in Soviet production labor and progressive workers within every nation stood as one body.
Moreover, the widening gap between the Soviet Five-Year Plan's progress and capitalist countries' economic crises was increasingly intensifying anti-Soviet activities worldwide against Earth's sole proletarian state.

For example, in 1929, when the Eastern Railway Incident occurred, the Far Eastern Special Assignment Red Army was dispatched to the border between China and the Soviet Union.

The Red Army fought.
At the same time, they immediately transplanted socialist discipline and culture to the occupied Chinese villages.
They protected the houses the villagers had abandoned from looting and, when the farmers returned, guided the organization of rural soviets.
The Red Army film unit showed the first light of culture—cinema—to the Chinese rural proletariat wearing long queues.
They provided medical assistance.
The Chinese rural proletariat gradually came to love them; when they left their villages, placards were raised proclaiming, “Long live the Red Army!”
They wrote “Please come again” and saw them off with a demonstration to the station.

Which writer has documented the Red Army’s notable international achievements?
Not a single one has written about it.
There are only films.
There were only fragmentary notes from factory support teams that had visited the front lines.
Just as Soviet writers were unfamiliar with the military activities of the Red Army and Red Fleet, they also failed to comprehend their capacity and achievements in peacebuilding, which held even deeper significance.

The research committee resolved to establish systematic contact between writers and the Red Army and Navy, as well as to guide literary study groups within the Red Army and Navy.
And then Gorky, Demyan Bedny, Serafimovich, Fadeyev, Batrak, Gladkov, Selvinsky, Meyerhold, Bezymensky, Izbakh, Olihvy, and others organized the Central Council of the Red Army and Navy Writers’ Literary Union together with Baltic Fleet literary research members, Red Army institutional magazine editors, Red Guards theater administrators, and other personnel.
And then, in just a matter of months,
The great conspiracy of the Industrial Party in the Soviet Union was uncovered—one that even bourgeois journalism could not help but express astonishment at due to its vast scale and international planning.

Even before now, the Soviet proletariat had several times suffered production sabotage through international conspiracies and repelled them.
In fact, in the summer of 1930, one of the Soviet fishery counter-revolutionary movements financed with British funds was exposed.
Subsequently came this grand conspiracy of the Industrial Party.
The lies of former French Prime Minister Poincaré, Foreign Minister Briand, British Labour Party Foreign Secretary Henderson, and others were completely laid bare.

The All-Soviet Writers’ Council promptly convened a critical assembly regarding the serious industrial sabotage conspiracy.
Every Soviet printed material commented on the uncovering of this conspiracy.
They burned with class hatred toward imperialism’s viciousness that sought to destroy both the Soviet socialist state and the lives of the working people building it.

Defend the Soviet Union!
Protect the proletariat's production and culture!

The summons was issued from the International Bureau of Revolutionary Writers in Moscow to proletarian writers and revolutionary writers around the world.
It was announced that the Second International Congress of Revolutionary Writers would be held in Kharkiv on the occasion of the thirteenth anniversary celebration of the Soviet Revolution.

November 1, 1930, at 11:00 a.m.

The platform of Moscow’s Bairost Baltic Line Station was filled with red placards and welcoming crowds from factories, collective farms, and various literary organizations.
Before long, the train slowly entered the platform.
The first to emerge was Johannes Becher, the German revolutionary writer.
Next came Kisch, Billy Hultsheim, and Ernst Glaeser.
Kányádi, the Hungarian proletarian poet.
A female writer also arrived.
It was Anna Seghers of Germany, whose works had been introduced in the Soviet Union.

With an address by Averbakh, secretary-general of RAPP, a brief yet earnest welcoming ceremony commenced on the platform.

Bella Illés from the International Bureau of Revolutionary Writers spoke.
From the Red Army and Navy Writers’ Union, Podsortsky delivered remarks.

In response, Hans Marchwitza and Kisch expressed their delight, and soon the music began to play.
It was The Internationale.
The writers from Germany raised their fists to head height at that moment and sang while giving a revolutionary vanguard salute.
They sang in German.
The Soviet contingent sang in Russian.
German, Hungarian, English, Russian.
There were as many languages as the nationalities of the revolutionary writers gathered there.
But in one moment, those linguistic differences suddenly melted away, swelling into a flame-like chorus of voices.
It was when these people—

—With The Internationale!

It was when they sang.

At this International Congress of Revolutionary Writers in Kharkiv, Matsuyama—a proletarian writer representative from Japan—also attended.
(The resolution concerning Japan was published in the February issue of *NAPP*.)

RAPP began directing earnest attention to the state of proletarian literary movements in each republic within the Soviet Union to strengthen the domestic proletarian literature front.
In 1931, plans were announced for a Literary Olympiad that would encompass proletarian literature from all republics.

The All-Soviet Writers' Association had plans to publish a grand anthology encompassing all Soviet arts that would serve to introduce new writers and their socialist construction projects.
It would be published simultaneously in English, French, and German.
The committee members were Averbakh, Asseyev, Zozulya, and others.

With the aim of training new forces for proletarian literature, RAPP was planning to launch a new literary journal from the start of 1931.

By the way, the recent *Literary Newspaper* reported that Soviet proletarian writers, together with the Party, had developed a genuine interest in children as the next generation's ideological successors.
The Five-Year Plan was attempting to implement nationwide enrollment of school-age children as its foremost cultural initiative.
All children across the Soviet Union would receive four years of education at state expense.

Before the revolution, when most of Russia's populace had been illiterate, what literature had the proletariat possessed beyond their chains and sweat? There had been only vodka, churches, and mournful folk songs. It was when the proletariat—liberated by the revolution—had broadly elevated their cultural level that they finally came to possess genuine class literature. Those who would protect Soviet proletarian culture in the future, those who would produce it, and those who would drive it ever more powerfully toward international people's liberation—these were today's small Soviet children. Soviet proletarian writers knew: when not one village remained without an elementary school across the vast USSR's farthest reaches, literature would secure its true, unshakable class foundation. Shock workers from RAPP were being mobilized to advance this critical foundational work of socialist culture.

[May 1931]