At the end of March 1974, I read the materials of my ‘criminal’ case (No. 27), conducted by the Oryol Region KGB.
I then officially informed Captain Oleg S. Ilyn, who led the investigation [1], that I would bring to public notice certain KGB reviews of Russian literary works.
These KGB reviews are the official judgements of the Committee of State Security [KGB], and are used by its officials in their detective, ideological, and investigative activities.
I have taken them from the so-called ‘inspection reports’.
*
INSPECTION REPORTS ON:
Osip E. Mandelstam’s poems [2]:
“The subject matter of some of these is ideologically immoderate.”
*
Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn’s novella [povest] One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [3]:
“The contents of this short novel are ideologically harmful. The author describes events connected with the period of Stalin’s Cult of Personality, and tendentiously concentrates on the events in one day in the life of prisoners, and of the severity of their living conditions.
“There is an exaggerated emphasis on the allegedly unbearable cruelty of the camp regime.”
*
A. I. Solzhenitsyn’s novel Cancer Ward [4]:
“Like his other works, it is written on a labour-camp theme in a rough kind of slang. The author describes the period from 1937 to 1954 … exaggerating and blowing out of proportion the mistakes and shortcomings that took place then.
“He defames our social and political system and libels Soviet reality.”
Nadezhda Ya. Mandelstam’s Memoirs [5]:
“The Memoirs recount the persecution and repression to which O. Mandelstam and his wife were allegedly subjected during the period of the Cult of Personality …
“The author of the Memoirs tendentiously describes Soviet reality in the pre-war period, and tries to make out that at that time the greater part of the talented and progressive intelligentsia — especially poets and writers — were being repressed by the Party and administrative agencies.”
Other ‘inspection reports’ infer that Marina Tsvetayeva’s ”An Evening Elsewhere”, M.A. Bulgakov’s Fateful Eggs, and Andrei Bely’s ”Revolution and Culture” were meaningless, inartistic, and harmful.
*
These reviews were signed by:
- First Lieutenant Alexander Georgievich Gubinsky, an official of the KGB Investigation Department, who also took part in the famous investigation of Case 24, and by
- Lieutenant Boris Gimarzevich Redkozubov in the Tambov Region.
Respectfully,
G. Superfin [6]
=======================================
NOTES
- See reference to KGB officer Ilyn in the September 1973 “Statement to the Press” (CCE 30.7 [1]), made by Yevgeny V. Barabanov.
↩︎ - The poet Osip Mandelstam (b. 1891) was a contemporary of Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov. He was arrested twice in the 1930s. Exiled to the Urals in 1934, he died in a transit camp in the Far East in December 1938.
↩︎ - With Khrushchev’s approval, Solzhenitsyn’s novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was published in the Novy mir monthly in November 1962, reaching an audience of 150,000 and more.
Subsequently it was reprinted in book form in 800,000 copies and circulated widely before being recalled in February 1974 from libraries and bookshops following the author’s deportation (CCE 34.21 [2]).
↩︎ - Solzhenitsyn’s 1966 novel Cancer Ward was never published in the USSR until the late 1980s. The chief editor of Novy mir Alexander Tvardovsky did not agree to publish it; the author circulated the text instead in samizdat .
↩︎ - Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two volumes of memoirs were renamed and first published in English in 1970 and 1974 as Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned.
The books made her famous and even led to an invitation to attend the AFL-CIO conference in 1977 (see CCE 47.15 [24] and Alexander Podrabinek, Dissidents [R], 2015).
↩︎ - On Superfin, see CCE 14.9, CCE 19.9, CCE 29.4 and Name Index.
↩︎
=========================
A Chronicle of Current Events 