Editing Maxim Gorky (section)

=== 1930s ===
[[File:Maxim Gorky 1930s.jpg|thumb|1930s photo portrait]]
During the 1930s, the relationship of Gorky with Stalin's regime became rather ambiguous: while Gorky publicly supported it, this period was marked by certain conflicts with the official policies. 

Gorky was a strong and sincere supporter of such Stalinist policies as usage of forced labour, collectivization and "[[dekulakization]]" and the show trials against the saboteurs of the Plan, but being a propagandist for such policies wasn't his main role; he was regarded as an "ideological asset" to personify the myth of the "proletarian culture" and bring literature, as Tovah Yedlin writes, under the control of the party,<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=q2dl-pAlVzAC | isbn=978-1-61149-352-8 | title=Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913-1939 | date=2011 | publisher=Lexington Books }}</ref> becoming officially praised as "the founder of [[Socialist Realism]] in literature".{{citation needed|date=April 2025}} More to it, Gorky strongly supported efforts in getting a law passed in 1934, [[Criminalization of homosexuality|making homosexuality a criminal offense]], his attitude coloured by the fact that some members of the Nazi ''[[Sturmabteilung]]'' were homosexuals. The phrase "exterminate all homosexuals and fascism will vanish" is often attributed to him.{{sfn |McSmith |2015 |p=160}}<ref name="Lingiardi 2002 p. 89">{{cite book |last=Lingiardi |first=Vittorio |author-link= Vittorio Lingiardi |translator-last1=Hopcke |translator-first1=Robert H. |translator-last2=Schwartz |translator-first2=Paul |title=Men in Love: Male Homosexualities from Ganymede to Batman |year=2002 |publisher=Open Court |publication-place=Chicago, US |isbn=9780812695151 |oclc=49421786 |page=89 |chapter=6. The Führer's Eagle |chapter-url={{Google books |id=xBLpFqlrczwC |pg=PA89 |plainurl=yes}}}}</ref> In ''[[Pravda]]'', he wrote: "There is already a sarcastic saying: Destroy homosexuality and fascism will disappear."<ref>{{Cite book|last=Steakley|first=James|title=Gay Men and the Sexual History of the Political Left, Volume 29|pages=170}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book|last1=Ginsberg|first1=Terri|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GPUWPW3BRAUC&q=gorky+sarcastic&pg=PA60|title=A Companion to German Cinema|last2=Mensch|first2=Andrea|date=13 February 2012|publisher=John Wiley & Sons|isbn=978-1-4051-9436-5}}</ref>

However, in her political biography of Gorky, Yedlin also describes his various conflicts with the official cultural policies and the increasing pressure on him towards the end of his life;<ref name="yedlin"/> during his last years, he supported friendly relations with [[Lev Kamenev]] and [[Nikolai Bukharin]], the leaders of the opposition which were executed after Gorky's death, and he could be sympathetic to the centrist and [[Right Opposition]] in general; both Bukharin and Kamenev had been friends with Gorky since 1920s.<ref name="gla"/><ref name="imli"/><ref name="cioni"/> Paola Cioni noted that although there are traits of a conflict in the relations between Stalin and the state and Gorky, it is uncertain when this conflict was provoked by psychological motives, and when it was provoked by his political position.<ref name="cioni">{{Cite book|author=Паола Чони|title=Горький-политик|date=2019|publisher=Litres |isbn=9785041745813}}</ref> It is certain, however, that Gorky intervened on behalf of such politically persecuted individuals as the historian [[Yevgeny Tarle]] and the literary critic, [[Mikhail Bakhtin]], succeeded in making possible for the writers [[Yevgeny Zamyatin]] and [[Victor Serge]] to leave the country, tried to intercede on behalf of [[Karl Radek]] and Bukharin, and made Kamenev appointed as director of the publishing house ''[[Academia (Soviet publishing house)|Academia]]''; Gorky also made efforts to support the literary "[[fellow traveller]]s" and writers who had troubles with their works being published for ideological or artistic reasons or were disapproved by the official critic.

For example, in letters to Stalin he defended [[Mikhail Bulgakov]], and partly because of Gorky, Bulgakov's plays ''[[The Cabal of Hypocrites]]'' and ''[[The Days of the Turbins]]'' were allowed for staging;<ref>{{cite book|title=Полное собрание сочинений. Письма в 24 томах|publisher=[[Nauka (publisher)|Nauka]]|year=2012–2018|volume=Т. 15–20|location=Moscow|language=ru}}</ref> Gorky took [[Andrei Platonov]] to the "writers' brigades" after he was made unable to be published because of his work critical of the collectivization, although Gorky rejected his "pessimistic" texts;<ref>{{Cite journal|date=2011|title=Introduction to Platonov|url=https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii69/articles/andrei-platonov-on-the-first-socialist-tragedy|journal=[[New Left Review]]|volume=69|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20190627185811/https://newleftreview.org/issues/II69/articles/andrei-platonov-on-the-first-socialist-tragedy|archive-date=27 June 2019}}</ref> with Gorky's intervention, Bukharin became one of the keynote speakers on the Writers' Congress and proclaimed [[Boris Pasternak]], who was denounced by the Stalinist party critics as "decadent",  to be "first poet" of the USSR.<ref name="gla"/><ref name="imli"/> Gorky was not a supporter of artistic pluralism and diversity among writers and agreed that some censorship had to be inevitable, often being dismissive and rigid of creative experiments; however, Gorky was concerned with the bureaucratization of the Union of Writers and tried to oppose the increasing pressure on writers and attacked the party-sanctioned authors and them achieving the highest ranks in the literary bureaucracy.<ref>https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/10822/1057307/Kondoyanidi_georgetown_0076D_14453.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y {{Bare URL inline|date=August 2024}}</ref> Such Stalin's closest associates as [[Lazar Kaganovich]] opposed Gorky and Bukharin in their efforts against the increasing party control of literature, and Kaganovich in his letters to Stalin wrote about Gorky's ideological faults and the ostensible influence of the Opposition on him. For example, Kaganovich and several Politburo members visited Gorky and demanded his keynote speech for the Congress of Writers to be rewritten, and in his account of the visit, Kaganovich reported that Gorky's "mood [was] apparently not very good", and that the "aftertaste" with which Gorky was critical about some life aspects in the USSR "reminded [him] of [[Nadezhda Krupskaya|Comrade Krupskaya]]", Lenin's wife who supported the [[Right Opposition]], and that Kamenev seemingly had "an important role in shaping" Gorky's "moods"; Kaganovich also proposed to heavily edit Gorky's attack on the members of the Organising Committee and publish it so it wouldn't circulate illegally. Another act which concerned the Politburo was Gorky's support of the members of the [[Russian Association of Proletarian Writers|RAPP]], the former party institution to control literature the members of which fell out of favour after its disbandment; Kaganovich wrote about Gorky supporting the RAPP-led campaign
against Stalin's hand-picked leadership of the Organising Committee of the Union and demands to let [[Leopold Averbakh]], the leader of RAPP who was executed in 1937, speak at the congress.<ref name="gla">https://theses.gla.ac.uk/83675/5/2023allanphd%20final.pdf {{Bare URL PDF|date=August 2024}}</ref>

After his arrest in the beginning of 1935, Kamenev wrote a letter to Gorky: "We didn't talk with you about politics, and when I told you about the feeling of love and respect for Stalin..., about my readiness to sincerely work with him, that all feelings of resentment and anger burned out in me — I told the truth... I loved you from the bottom of my heart"; Gorky's secretary Kryuchkov didn't register the letter in Gorky's correspondence receipt book, but the hand-written copy in the Gorky archives contains the writer's characteristic annotations in red pencil; meanwhile, as Gorky's relationship with Stalin worsened, the latter stopped visiting him and replying to his phone calls, and their formal correspondence was almost entirely maintained by Gorky, with Stalin replying occasionally.<ref name="gla"/> Later Gorky tried to defend an issue of Dostoevsky's ''[[Demons (Dostoevsky novel)|Demons]]'' which was prepared by Kamenev and came out after his arrest; the novel had a reputation of a "counter-revolutionary" work. As the conflict was becoming more visible, Gorky's political and literary positions became weaker. [[Fyodor Panfyorov|Fyodor Panferov]], one of the party-sanctioned leaders of the Socialist Realism writers earlier attacked by Gorky, published an answer to him, in which he dismissed his line of criticizing the officially acclaimed Socialist Realism writers while supporting such ostensible enemies of Communism as [[D. S. Mirsky]]. David Zaslavsky published an ironic response to Gorky's article defending ''Demons'', in which he accused Gorky in connivance in the formation of the "counter-revolutionary ''intelligentsia''" and directly compared his "liberal position" with the ideological enemies, namely Kamenev and [[Grigory Zinoviev|Zinoviev]]: "Next thing you know you'll be calling for publication of White Guard writers", as [[Korney Chukovsky]] summarized in his diary; Gorky's second answer to Zaslavsky was not published.<ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b5KsAtIjeNQC | isbn=978-0-300-13797-2 | title=Diary, 1901-1969 | date=October 2008 | publisher=Yale University Press }}</ref><ref>{{cite book | url=https://books.google.com/books?id=P-y-DAAAQBAJ | isbn=978-1-349-21447-1 | title=Stalin and the Literary Intelligentsia, 1928-39 | date=27 July 2016 | publisher=Springer }}</ref> During the officially organized [[Muddle Instead of Music|campaign]] against the composer [[Dmitry Shostakovich]], Gorky wrote a letter to Stalin in defense of the composer, demanding a "careful" treatment of him and calling his critics "a bunch of mediocre people, hack-workers" "attack[ing] Shostakovich in every possible way."<ref>{{Cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NdWfAAAAMAAJ&q=%D0%B2%D1%8B%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B6%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%B5|title=Дмитрий Шостакович: путешествие|first=Оксана|last=Дворниченко|date=13 August 2006|publisher=Текст|isbn=9785751605919|via=Google Books}}</ref>

Such sources as [[Romain Rolland]]'s diary demonstrate that because of Gorky's refusal to blindly obey the policies of Stalinism, he had lost the Party's goodwill and spent his last days under unannounced house arrest.<ref name="yedlin">{{Cite book|last=Yedlin|first=Tovah|url=https://archive.org/details/MaximGorkyAPoliticalBiography/|title=Maxim Gorky: A Political Biography|publisher=Praeger Publishers|year=1999|isbn=0-275-96605-4|location=[[Westport, Connecticut]], United States}}</ref>