Letter to Demyan Bedny, December 12, 1930

Letter to Demyan Bedny, December 12, 1930
Source: Tom 17

Comrade Demyan Bedny,

I received your letter of 8.XII. You apparently need my reply. Very well then, here it is.

First, about some of your petty and petulant phrases and insinuations. If these unsightly "trifles" were an incidental element, one could pass over them. But there are so many of them, and they "gush forth" so vividly, that they set the tone of your entire letter. And tone, as is well known, makes the music.

You characterize the Secretariat of the CC's decision as a "noose," as a sign that "the hour of my (i.e., your) catastrophe has come." Why, on what grounds? What shall we call a communist who, instead of reflecting on the substance of a decision by the executive organ of the CC and correcting his mistakes, treats this decision as a "noose"?

The CC has praised you dozens of times, when praise was due. The CC has shielded you dozens of times (not without some stretching of the point!) from the attacks of individual groups and comrades in our party. The CC has reprimanded dozens of poets and writers when they committed individual errors. You considered all this normal and understandable. But now, when the CC found itself compelled to criticize your mistakes, you suddenly bristled and began shouting about a "noose." Why, on what grounds? Perhaps the CC does not have the right to criticize your mistakes? Perhaps CC decisions are not binding on you? Perhaps your poems are above all criticism? Do you not find that you have been infected with a certain unpleasant disease called conceit? More modesty, Comrade Demyan.

You counterpose Comrade Yaroslavsky to me (for some reason to me, and not to the Secretariat of the CC), although it is clear from your letter that Comrade Yaroslavsky had doubts about the necessity of printing the first part of the feuilleton "Without Mercy," and only yielded to the pressure of your "aggrieved face" and gave his consent to publication. But that is not all. You then counterpose Comrade Molotov to me, asserting that he found nothing erroneous in your feuilleton "Get Off the Stove" and even "praised it to the skies." First of all, permit me to doubt the truthfulness of your account regarding Comrade Molotov. I have every reason to trust Comrade Molotov more than you. Second, is it not strange that you say nothing in your letter about Comrade Molotov's attitude toward your feuilleton "Without Mercy"? And besides, what sense can your attempt to counterpose Comrade Molotov to me have? Only one: to hint that the Secretariat of the CC's decision is in reality not a decision of the latter but a personal opinion of Stalin, who is evidently passing off his personal opinion as a decision of the Secretariat of the CC. But this is really too much, Comrade Demyan. This is simply unscrupulous. Is it really necessary to specify additionally that the resolution of the Secretariat of the CC "On the Errors in the Feuilletons of D. Bedny 'Get Off the Stove' and 'Without Mercy'" was adopted by all the votes of the Secretariat members present (Stalin, Molotov, Kaganovich), i.e., unanimously? And could it have been otherwise? I now recall how several months ago you told me over the telephone: "It turns out there are disagreements between Stalin and Molotov. Molotov is undermining Stalin," and so on. You should remember that I cut you off rudely at the time and asked you not to deal in gossip. I perceived that "trick" of yours then as an unpleasant episode. Now I see that you had a little calculation -- to play on supposed disagreements and extract some profit from it. More scrupulousness, Comrade Demyan...

"Now I too have sat down to write a reply," you write, "but while writing I came to the firm conviction that it will not be printed, or, having been printed, they will continue that policy toward me which will only bend my curve further and bring my fatefully catastrophic end point closer. Perhaps indeed a great Russian poet cannot help but end his path in catastrophe."

So there exists, it seems, some special policy toward Demyan Bedny. What is this policy, what does it consist of? It consists, it turns out, in forcing "great Russian poets" to "end their path in catastrophe." There exists, as is well known, a "new" (quite "new"!) Trotskyist "theory" which asserts that in Soviet Russia the only reality is filth, the only reality is "Pererva." Apparently this is the "theory" you are now trying to apply to the CC's policy toward "great Russian poets." Such is the measure of your "trust" in the CC. I do not think that you are capable, even in a state of hysteria, of stooping to such anti-party vileness. Not for nothing, while reading your letter, was I reminded of Sosnovsky...

But enough about "trifles" and petty "escapades." There is such a heap of these "trifles" in your letter (the "fastidious reader," the "well-informed Averbakh," and similar delights), and they are so similar to one another, that it is not worth dwelling on them further. Let us turn to the substance of the matter.

What is the substance of your errors? It consists in the fact that the criticism -- necessary and proper -- which you developed at first quite aptly and skillfully, carried you away beyond measure, and having carried you away, began to overgrow in your works into slander against the USSR, against its past, against its present. Such are your "Get Off the Stove" and "Without Mercy." Such is your "Pererva," which I read today on the advice of Comrade Molotov.

You say that Comrade Molotov praised the feuilleton "Get Off the Stove." Very possibly. I praised that feuilleton perhaps no less than Comrade Molotov, since there (as in other feuilletons) are a number of magnificent passages that hit the mark directly. But there is also a spoonful of such tar that spoils the whole picture and transforms it into one continuous "Pererva." That is the crux of the matter, and that is what makes the music in these feuilletons.

Judge for yourself.

The whole world now recognizes that the center of the revolutionary movement has shifted from Western Europe to Russia. Revolutionaries of all countries look with hope upon the USSR as the hearth of the liberation struggle of the working people of the entire world, recognizing in it their only fatherland. The revolutionary workers of all countries unanimously applaud the Soviet working class and, above all, the Russian working class, the vanguard of Soviet workers, as their acknowledged leader, which is pursuing the most revolutionary and most active policy that the proletarians of other countries ever dreamed of pursuing. The leaders of the revolutionary workers of all countries avidly study the most instructive history of the working class of Russia, its past, the past of Russia, knowing that besides a reactionary Russia there also existed a revolutionary Russia, the Russia of the Radishchevs and the Chernyshevskys, the Zhelyabovs and the Ulyanovs, the Khalturins and the Alekseyevs. All this instills (cannot help but instill) in the hearts of Russian workers a sense of revolutionary national pride, capable of moving mountains, capable of working miracles.

And you? Instead of comprehending this greatest process in the history of revolution and rising to the level of the tasks of a singer of the advanced proletariat, you went off somewhere into a hollow, and having become entangled among the dreariest quotations from the works of Karamzin and no less dreary sayings from the "Domostroi," you began proclaiming to the whole world that Russia in the past was a vessel of abomination and desolation, that present-day Russia is one continuous "Pererva," that "laziness" and the desire "to sit on the stove" are all but the national characteristic of Russians in general, and hence also of Russian workers, who, having carried out the October Revolution, did not, of course, cease to be Russian. And this you call Bolshevik criticism! No, most esteemed Comrade Demyan, this is not Bolshevik criticism but slander against our people, the debunking of the USSR, the debunking of the proletariat of the USSR, the debunking of the Russian proletariat.

And after this you want the CC to keep silent! For whom do you take our CC?

And you want me to keep silent because you, it turns out, harbor a "biographical tenderness" toward me! How naive you are, and how little you know the Bolsheviks.

Perhaps you, as a "literate" person, would not refuse to hear the following words of Lenin:

"Is a sense of national pride alien to us, the Great-Russian class-conscious proletarians? Certainly not! We love our language and our homeland, we are working above all to raise its laboring masses (i.e., nine-tenths of its population) to the level of conscious life of democrats and socialists. It pains us most to see and feel what violence, oppression, and mockery our beautiful homeland is subjected to by the tsarist executioners, the nobles, and the capitalists. We are proud that these acts of violence provoked resistance from our midst, from the midst of the Great Russians, that this midst produced Radishchev, the Decembrists, the revolutionary raznochintsy of the 1870s, that the Great-Russian working class created in 1905 a mighty revolutionary party of the masses, that the Great-Russian peasant at the same time began to become a democrat, began to overthrow the priest and the landlord. We remember how half a century ago the Great-Russian democrat Chernyshevsky, who gave his life to the cause of revolution, said: 'A wretched nation, a nation of slaves, from top to bottom -- all slaves.' The frank and covert slaves -- the Great Russians (slaves in relation to the tsarist monarchy) -- do not like to recall these words. But in our opinion, these were words of genuine love for the homeland, love that yearns because of the absence of a revolutionary spirit among the masses of the Great-Russian population. Then there was none. Now there is little, but it already exists. We are full of a sense of national pride, for the Great-Russian nation too has created a revolutionary class, it too has proved that it is capable of giving humanity great examples of the struggle for freedom and for socialism, and not only great pogroms, rows of gallows, dungeons, great famines, and great servility before priests, tsars, landlords, and capitalists.' (See Lenin, 'On the National Pride of the Great Russians.')

That is how Lenin, the greatest internationalist in the world, knew how to speak about the national pride of the Great Russians. And he spoke that way because he knew that: 'The interest (not in a lackey's sense understood) of the national pride of the Great Russians coincides with the socialist interest of the Great-Russian (and all other) proletarians' (see ibid.).

There it is -- the clear and bold 'program' of Lenin. This 'program' is entirely comprehensible and natural for revolutionaries who are bound by blood to the working class, to the popular masses.

It is incomprehensible and unnatural for degenerates of the Lelevich type, who are not connected and cannot be connected with the working class, with the popular masses.

Is it possible to reconcile this revolutionary 'program' of Lenin with the unhealthy tendency that is promoted in your recent feuilletons?

It is clear that it is impossible. Impossible, since there is nothing in common between them.

That is the crux of the matter, and that is what you refuse to understand. This means you must turn back to the old, Leninist road, regardless of anything. There are no other paths.

That is the substance of the matter, and not the empty lamentations of a panicked intellectual who in his fright babbles that Demyan is allegedly being 'isolated,' that Demyan 'will not be published any more,' and similar things. Is that clear?

You demanded clarity from me. I hope I have given you a sufficiently clear answer.

I. Stalin

Source: Power and the Artistic Intelligentsia. Documents 1917-1953. Moscow, 1999. Pp. 134-137.
RGASPI. F. 558. Op. 1. D. 2939. L. 1-6.

NOTE

This letter was published with significant cuts in 1951 in volume 13 of the Collected Works of I.V. Stalin. Here it is reproduced in full; the previously excised passages are marked with underlining.

Lelevich G. (L.G. Kalmanson), Sosnovsky L.S. were literary critics, figures of the so-called "Na Postu" ("On Guard") movement. Under the editorship of Lelevich and Sosnovsky, a 13-volume collected works of D. Bedny was published in the second half of the 1920s.