Two names in this novel will tell the reader, before anything else, what kind of book it has become. Filipp Petrovich Lyutikov, "secretary of the underground district committee", is named two hundred and thirty-five times. Protsenko, the Party official who plants him in occupied Krasnodon, is named two hundred and thirty-two. Between them they are the adult Bolshevik underground that directs the boys and girls whose story this is.
They were not in the book when it was first published.
The Young Guard appeared in 1945, about a real thing: a clandestine Komsomol organisation in the mining town of Krasnodon in the occupied Donbass, whose members — most of them still at school — printed leaflets, burned a German labour exchange, and were caught, tortured and thrown down a mineshaft in the winter of 1943. Fadeyev wrote it fast, from the scene and from the survivors' families, and it made him the most widely read novelist in the Soviet Union.
Then, at the end of 1947, the novel was attacked in the Party press for a specific fault: it had shown the young people acting largely on their own, and had failed to show the leading role of the Party. Fadeyev rewrote it. The second version, with the underground Party organisation installed as the organisation's guiding hand, came out in 1951 and superseded the first. This English edition is the second version, and nowhere says so.
There is no edition statement. There is no preface. The copyright page credits the translator, Violet Dutt, the editor, David Skvirsky, and two designers, and tells the foreign reader nothing else at all. A reader in London or Delhi in 1955 was handed a rewritten book as though it had only ever had one shape.
It is worth being precise, because the short version — that he was forced to insert the Party — is too crude and does the argument no favours.
Lyutikov is not a cardboard commissar. Fadeyev was a real novelist and he built the man properly: a Donets miner in his fifties, grey at the temples, who fought in the Civil War against the Germans and Denikin, and who refuses to go under cover for a reason that is entirely practical and rather good — "I'm so well known here that it's not possible for me to go under cover... The Germans would immediately discover us; what's more we'd arouse their suspicions if we tried to hide." That is written by someone who knows how a man in that position would think.
The damage is not to the characterisation. It is to the shape of the story, and therefore to its meaning.
The 1945 book was about the young discovering, under occupation, that they had to act, and acting, and being destroyed. The 1951 book is about the young being guided. Once an experienced Party underground stands behind them, everything they do acquires a supervisor, and the central fact of the real Krasnodon story — that these were schoolchildren improvising a resistance and paying for it with their lives — is converted into an illustration of correct leadership. The martyrdom stays. The initiative moves.
And the revision cannot be confined, because the guiding hand has to be present continuously to be a guiding hand. That is why the two added names occur more than four hundred times between them. This was not a patch. It was a re-plumbing.
Before going further into what was done to this book, it is worth establishing what the book is, because the account in which the revision is the only interesting thing about it is both lazy and unjust to the dead.
The Young Guard runs to a quarter of a million words and it is, for long stretches, the work of a serious novelist. Fadeyev's subject is a mining town in the weeks when the front reaches it, and he is very good on the particular quality of that waiting. The girls, before the Germans come, "would flock together like birds and, drooping with heat and the lack of occupation, sit about for hours in some half-dark room, or under an apple-tree; or they would run down to the shady wooded gully by the river, filled with a secret premonition of disaster which was beyond their power to realize fully with either heart or mind." That last clause is exactly right about adolescents in front of a catastrophe, and it is not the sort of sentence a hack produces.
The children are individuated rather than typed. Valya, clever and convinced her life has already failed, worries in the same breath about the underground, about school, about never having managed to fall in love, and about her father — "Valya's father was Jewish". Sergei Tyulenin is reckless where Oleg Koshevoi is deliberate. Lyuba Shevtsova is a showoff whose showing off turns out to be useful. Fadeyev had talked to the surviving families and it shows: these read as particular teenagers rather than as a composite Soviet youth.
And the novel does something in 1945 that Soviet publishing would spend the next four decades avoiding. It names the killing of the Jews, plainly, and at the level of a household's daily fear. Grandma reports "that the Germans were hunting out the Jewish townsfolk and taking them to Voroshilovgrad where a ghetto was said to have been set up. But many people maintained that in actual fact they were only taken as far as the Verkhneduvannaya Grove where they were killed and buried." Maria Borts hides her husband and talks, with "a sad, almost aggrieved expression", about whether he can pass: "He doesn't really look very Jewish—don't you agree?" When Fadeyev lists the prisoners in the German cells he includes "people who had concealed their Jewish origin". Four brief passages, but they are there, they are specific, and they are more than most Soviet war fiction managed on the subject at any point before the 1980s.
And Fadeyev can write the thing the novel exists for. Here is the mass burial, watched by a captured Party man from the top of the mound — not the Young Guard's own deaths but the killing that precedes them, which is the event the whole book is answering:
Fettered hand and foot, stumbling and falling they silently clambered to the top of the mound. All that could be heard was the heavy breathing of the soldiers and the rustling of the wind-lashed foliage. ... He could see by the light of the flashing torches how the people dropped into the pit; some were leaping, others stumbling silently or with cries of protest or distress. ... Statsenko was bowing to the people as they were pushed into the pit. He had been drinking. Shulga again caught a glimpse of the woman with the child bound to her body. The infant neither saw nor heard what was taking place; it was still sleeping, nestled against the warmth of its mother's body.
The sleeping baby is the detail a lesser writer would not have risked and a propagandist would not have thought of. So is Statsenko — the local collaborator, drunk, bowing to the people he is helping to bury. Fadeyev gives the worst man in the scene a courtesy, and it is far more frightening than brutality would have been.
None of that was removed by the revision. Whatever else the rewriting did, it did not turn a good book into a worthless one, and an introduction that implied otherwise would be repaying one distortion with another.
Here the book becomes something more interesting than a damaged novel, because of who Fadeyev was.
He was not a writer who fell foul of the apparatus. He was the apparatus. Alexander Fadeyev was General Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers — the official who presided over the machinery of approval, expulsion and silence that governed every writer in the country. He administered the doctrine. When the doctrine was turned on his own novel, he did to himself what his office did to others, and did it thoroughly.
There is no need to invent an inner life for him, and no need to go outside this series for the evidence. At the Twentieth Congress in February 1956, Sholokhov stood up and took Fadeyev apart by name and to his face — and Progress published the speech in English, in At the Bidding of the Heart, which is also in our list. The house printed its own indictment.
What did Fadeyev do these last fifteen years? Did he guide the Union of Writers ideologically and politically? No, we have always believed with good reason that it's the Party that guides us. For years Fadeyev kept busy attending literary discussions, delivering reports, distributing the flats among writers and never wrote a word. He had no time for such "nonsense" as writing books.
Sholokhov's account of how it happened is better than any paraphrase. The Union, he said, was "gradually changing from the creative association which it was supposed to be into an administrative organisation", with the secretariat and its sections meeting regularly and the messengers rushed here and there, and no books appearing. Fadeyev "turned out to be a sufficiently ambitious General Secretary and refused to reckon with the principle of collective leadership", and it "dragged on for fifteen years". Then the sentence that should be set in stone over the door of every writers' union that has ever existed:
By joint effort we robbed Fadeyev of the fifteen best years of his creative life, and as a result we have neither a General Secretary nor a writer.
And what Sholokhov says they should have told him in time: "A lust for power is no use at all in the writing business. The Union of Writers is not an army unit and even less so a punishment battalion, and none of the writers are going to stand at attention before you, Comrade Fadeyev."
Two things about that speech deserve emphasis, because they cut against the easy version of this story. The first is that Sholokhov's charge is not that Fadeyev wrote badly; it is that the office stopped him writing at all. The second is that he praised this novel. Fadeyev, he said, was relieved of his secretarial duties for a few years from 1944, "got down to work immediately and in a very short space of time produced an excellent book about the Young Guard in Krasnodon" — and "none of us prose writers have anything like Fadeyev's wonderful gift for writing about young people with such stirring emotion." That is a judgement on the 1945 book by the one contemporary with standing to make it, delivered eleven years later, from the rostrum of a Party congress, in front of the author.
Three months after it, Fadeyev shot himself.
The tradition this introduction is written from had described the mechanism twenty years before it closed on him. In the seventh chapter of The Revolution Betrayed, written in 1936, Trotsky set out what the bureaucracy's command over literature would produce: "Gifted writers who cannot do sufficient violence to themselves are pursued by a pack of instructors armed with shamelessness and dozens of quotations. The most eminent artists either commit suicide, or find their material in the remote past, or become silent."
Fadeyev did sufficient violence to himself. He rewrote the book. Then he took the first road anyway.
The strongest evidence against the second Young Guard is not an argument. It is another book by the same man, printed in the same series.
The Rout — Fadeyev's first novel, written in 1925–26 — is about a small partisan detachment in the Far East that is hunted, worn down and finally destroyed, and it ends like this. Levinson, the commander, having brought nineteen men out of a detachment that no longer exists, looks at a threshing-ground where people are working:
Levinson looked silently, with moist eyes, at the vast sky and earth, which promised bread and rest, at these alien people on the threshing-ground whom he would soon have to make his own—as near and dear to him as were the eighteen who followed him in silence; and he ceased crying. A man has to live and do his duty.
A defeat. A commander in tears who stops crying because there is nothing else to do. No Party organisation visible anywhere in the frame, no vindication, no assurance that the sacrifice was correctly supervised. The last sentence is six words long and refuses every consolation it could have offered.
The young Fadeyev could write that. The General Secretary could not have published it, and by 1951 he was revising his own war novel to make sure nobody else did either.
What is set out above survives intact, and so does the opening — two girls by a creek, one of them transfixed by a water-lily, "not white, I mean it is white, but so many shades: yellow, pink, sky blue", and the war about to come over the horizon into that. The events were real, the deaths were real, and Fadeyev had talked to the families. Whatever was done to the book afterwards, it is not a fabrication, and the young people in it existed and died as it says they did.
The novel also carries, without meaning to, the most complete available record of what the doctrine required. Read it beside The Rout and the specification is legible line by line: what has to be added, what has to be supervised, what may not be left to chance.
Ask the question this series asks of every volume.
The novel honours young people who organised in secret against an occupying power, printed illegal leaflets, and refused the authority of the administration over them. It honours them precisely for acting without permission — and then, in its revised form, it takes care to establish that they did in fact have permission, from the district committee, all along. The book cannot celebrate unauthorised initiative; it has to convert it into authorised initiative before it can be published. That is the whole doctrine in one editorial operation.
And the state's treatment of its own Krasnodon dead follows the same logic. The organisation was honoured; the honours were distributed according to a version of events that the novel was made to match; and the argument about who had really led what went on for decades afterwards in a country where it could not be conducted in public. A resistance is a difficult thing to remember accurately, and this one was remembered through a novel that had been altered to a specification.
There is one more thing the reader of a 1955 English printing has no way of knowing, and it is the gravest charge in this introduction.
The Young Guard has a traitor. Yevgeny Stakhovich, a Komsomol from Krasnodon who arrives from outside, cultured and restrained and "interested in social problems", is named ninety times; the novel plants suspicion on him almost as soon as he appears — Protsenko frowns at the mention of his name, asks whether he has been with them all along or came from elsewhere, and says, "You be careful in your dealings..." Under interrogation he gives the organisation away.
Now the name that does not appear. Viktor Tretyakevich was one of the founders of the real Young Guard and, by the evidence, its commissar. He was arrested with the others and killed, thrown alive down a shaft. He is not in this novel at all — not as himself, not under an alias the text acknowledges. Fadeyev gave the leading role to Oleg Koshevoi, who through this book became the organisation's national hero, and gave the betrayal to Stakhovich.
In Krasnodon the identification was made immediately and it stuck: the invented traitor was read as the omitted commissar. Tretyakevich was treated as the man who had given up his comrades. His family lived with that. Only at the end of the 1950s, when the case was examined again, was it established that he had betrayed nobody, and he was decorated. We do not know what Fadeyev intended by Stakhovich and we are not going to guess; what is beyond dispute is the sequence, which is that a novel was written and revised to a political specification, the novel became the accepted account of the events, and a dead seventeen-year-old carried the character of a traitor for a decade and a half because a book needed one.
This is what it costs when fiction is assigned the work of the historical record. The doctrine that required the district committee to be visible in chapter after chapter is the same doctrine that made this novel authoritative, and an authoritative novel about real people with real families cannot be corrected by literary criticism. It has to be corrected by an investigation, and investigations of that kind were not available in the Soviet Union until the author was dead.
The afterlife has not finished. Krasnodon is in the Luhansk region, and in 2022 the Russian state, prosecuting a war across that ground, posthumously decorated Tretyakevich again, as a Hero of Russia. The children of Krasnodon fought an occupying army and were murdered for it. Their memory has now been conscripted three times: first by a novel rewritten to show correct leadership, then by the rehabilitation that the novel had made necessary, and now by a state that has found the story useful once more. Readers of this series will want to keep the first fact in view through all of it, which is that they were schoolchildren and they did it themselves.
The dead of Krasnodon, who are not in dispute.
And the book's unintended function as evidence. The Young Guard is the clearest surviving demonstration of what socialist realism actually did to a text, because we can see both states of the same novel by the same author, and because the author was the man in charge of the process. There is no other case in this series where the machinery is so completely exposed: the doctrine, the correction, the compliance, the compliant officer, and the revolver.
Read it for the children, who deserve it. Read it, too, as the most honest document the Soviet literary bureaucracy ever produced about itself — honest not by intention but by construction, because Fadeyev left the seams where anyone who has read his first novel can find them.