PRESERVATION PHOTOCOPY: ORIGINAL MATERIAL RESTRICTED

# Writers Held in Bondage

By Victor Serge

No matter how familiar one may be with the humiliating status of writers and artists controlled by a dictatorship, he is always astonished and humiliated by each new evidence of their subjection. I have just read in the Moscow *Novy Mir* (No. 6, 1946) the end of a novel by Vsevolod Ivanov, *The Capture of Berlin*. It gives one a devastating picture of the extent to which an able writer can be debased.

Here the reader is given a picture of the Russian soldiers playing Santa Claus to the inhabitants of the ruined German capital. To anyone who knows the facts about the organized pillage carried on by the Russians, this is more than enough. You learn from these pages that each Soviet fighter who died in the conflict carried in the pockets of his uniform, in addition to the simple and pathetic letters from home, at least one cherished picture of Stalin. And then the whole scene is climaxed with a picture of the capitulation which reveals in one stroke its deceptive propaganda character. The ceremony is minutely described without a single mention of the presence of any allied officers except the Russians. In general, the idea that is conveyed is that Zhukov won the war single-handed. If "the allies" are mentioned once or twice in the whole account, it is so incidentally that it may easily escape the reader's notice. The volume as a whole is an impudent falsification of history.

The final chapter is devoted to an aptheosis of Stalin as he appeared on Red Square. The Soviet dictator slowly mounts the stairs of Lenin's tomb "with steps slow and pensive, the steps of the thinker and the sage and—above all—of the warrior." He views the serried troops as they march past, and "each one sees in his face the love, the inexhaustible love, which he bears to the people, to

the life and happiness of the people." The scene continues to increase in intensity until Marshal Zhukov, in a ringing voice, leads the crowd in "a loud and free immortal hurrah to the great Stalin."

The style is hardly adequate to produce in the reader the emotions required by so much servility. It is hard to imagine, for example, what is meant by an "immortal hurrah." And what happened to Zhukov immediately after this triumphal occasion may already have made this work of fiction somewhat out of date. The author may now regret some of his enthusiasm.

What is saddest about all this is that the author of the mediocre fabrication has a reputation as a man of real talent. The author of *Blue Sands, The Infant, Sanctuary of Sanctuaries*, between 1920 and 1930 proved himself one of the keenest analysts of the subtle contradictions of the human soul. The police state, which has destroyed so many of his colleagues, has left him among the living, but it has killed all that is vital and true in his work. He now exists only as a house-broken and subdued confectioner of romances. He is well-paid, it is true, but whatever he possessed of conscience and of perception has been destroyed by fear.

The tale of the suffering and shame of writers under the Russian dictatorship is endless. The most recent mail brought to me news of a group of well-known "proletarian" writers in the Ukraine. Mikola Kvylovy, the most widely known, committed suicide in 1933. Arkady Lioubtchenko died under the tortures of the Gestapo. The last survivors of the group, now held in DP camps in Germany, live in the faint hope of some day being again free men who can devote their talents to the cause of liberty.

THE NEW LEADER

N.Y.

4.1.47