This is a good book about a great one, and the interesting thing about it is not where it fails but exactly where it stops.
Lev Grigoryevich Yakimenko was a literary scholar, not an apparatus functionary, and Sholokhov: A Critical Appreciation is recognisably the work of one. It contains close textual comparison of magazine and book versions, patient compositional analysis of how a novel's chapters are built, careful attention to imagery, and archival recovery of the author's correspondence. Progress Publishers put it out in English in 1973, but the date on the spine is the translation's. The latest sources Yakimenko cites are a Moscow Gorky volume of 1970 and a 1971 Moscow edition of The Fate of a Man used for quotation; there is nothing in the book that requires knowledge later than about 1970. The Russian title — Tvorchestvo Mikhaila Sholokhova, "The Work of Mikhail Sholokhov" — is flatter and more accurate than the English one Progress supplied. Read it as a text of the turn of the 1970s: written in the vocabulary the Twentieth Party Congress had licensed, published in English at the moment when that vocabulary was being quietly withdrawn.
The commission is not hard to reconstruct. Mikhail Sholokhov was the only Soviet Nobel laureate in literature the Soviet state was pleased to have. Bunin (1933) was an émigré; Pasternak (1958) was forced to decline; Solzhenitsyn's award in 1970, two or three years before this translation reached English readers, was a full-scale embarrassment. Sholokhov's prize in 1965 was the exception, and And Quiet Flows the Don was the one modern Soviet novel that Western readers who cared nothing for socialist realism read anyway. A monograph presenting that novel to the export market, in English, as the achievement of socialist realism rather than as an achievement in spite of it, was worth commissioning. Yakimenko's book does that job. It also, in places, does rather more, which is why it is worth republishing.
Take the rescue first, because it is substantial and because nothing said later is worth much unless this is said plainly.
Yakimenko's textual work is real scholarship. He tracks And Quiet Flows the Don through the magazine Oktyabr — book three beginning in issues 1–3 of 1929, interrupted, resuming in 1932 — and compares variants against the final text, showing for instance how a line in Grigory Melekhov's central monologue was cut from the 1932 magazine version as incompatible with the character, and how Sholokhov moved from direct statement of Grigory's doubts to a more oblique reported speech that leaves the question open. He reconstructs Sholokhov's changing plans for book four and for book two of Virgin Soil Upturned from interviews in Literaturnaya Gazeta (February 1934) and Izvestia (March 1935), quoting the writer's own announcements of intentions he then abandoned. His analysis of the chapter architecture of Virgin Soil Upturned — how the meeting that votes to evict the kulak (well-to-do peasant) families in chapter thirteen is prepared by everything from chapter five onward — is the kind of thing criticism is for. So is his reading of Yakov Lukich Ostrovnov, the farm manager who is both a gifted agronomist genuinely excited by large-scale farming and a saboteur and accessory to murder; Yakimenko defends the character's coherence against critics who found him contradictory, and he is right. His pages on the passage where a pair of wild pigeons court in Razmyotnov's yard and send him to his wife's grave are unembarrassed literary appreciation of a high order.
Most valuable of all, he prints Sholokhov's letter to Gorky of 6 June 1931 at length. This is a document of the first importance and Yakimenko not only quotes it but endorses it. Sholokhov is defending the sixth part of the novel — the Veshenskaya rising of February 1919 — against the RAPP officials blocking its publication, and he tells Gorky flatly what caused the rising: "It arose as a result of exaggerated encroachments on the interests of the middle-peasant Cossacks." He goes on: "I had to show the negative aspects of the policy which deprived the Cossacks of their special status and encroached on the interests of the middle-peasant Cossacks, for otherwise I could not reveal the causes of the uprising. For not only do people not rise up but even a flea doesn't bite just like that, without any reason." He explains that he introduced characters who "only pay lip-service to Soviet power" precisely to show "that these overzealous people distorted the idea of Soviet power". Yakimenko reinforces the point with Serafimovich writing in Izvestia in 1919 that "At times it was necessary to shoot Communist hangers-on and even Communists, who had disgraced themselves by abuse of their power and coercion", and that "the reform of the existing social structure was carried out without due regard for the special features of the economy, life and psychology of the Cossacks".
That is an honest passage about Red terror in the Don, printed in Moscow and exported in English. Yakimenko does not name the policy — the Orgburo directive of 24 January 1919 that ordered mass terror against Cossacks, the campaign known as decossackisation — but he lets Sholokhov describe its effects and he defends him for describing them. Note the analytic move, because everything that follows turns on it: revolutionary violence in excess of what the situation required is real, it has causes, it produces risings, and it is the work of "overzealous people" who "distorted the idea of Soviet power". Yakimenko has a working vocabulary for atrocity. Hold onto it.
Now the hard test, and the best thing in the book.
The central interpretive problem of And Quiet Flows the Don is that its hero ends outside the Revolution. Grigory Melekhov fights for the Reds, then commands an insurgent division against them, then fights with the First Mounted Army against Wrangel, then joins Fomin's outlaw band, and finally throws his weapons in the river and comes home to a son and nothing else. He is never reconciled. Soviet criticism argued about this for forty years, because a novel with a national hero who ends unreconciled is not obviously a novel the state can hold up as its own.
Yakimenko's answer is not evasion, and it deserves to be stated fairly. He insists on the tragedy. He gives it a full chapter and returns to it repeatedly. He writes that Grigory "broke with the past without accepting the future. He did not go as far as to completely renounce his class views and habits, and this was his tragedy". He tracks the moral destruction with real feeling — the drinking, the mother's reproach, the recurring image of the wolf, the great steppe-fire passage from the end of the novel, of which he says: "A broken, morally bankrupt and utterly unhappy man is the tragic image of Grigory we carry away from the last few pages of the novel." He is alert to how Sholokhov works indirectly, revealing Grigory's turns of mind through the sequence of his questions rather than by description. This is genuine criticism of a tragic hero.
And then the tragedy is converted. "Sholokhov's sympathy with his hero, Grigory Melekhov, does not mean that he justifies him," Yakimenko writes; the novel offers "its author's clearly expressed condemnation (in which his own judgment has the support of history)". He praises socialist realism because "it refrained from idealising the innocent victims of history". Grigory's command of the rising "aggravated his guilt before the Soviet government and made his reconciliation with the people more difficult". The conclusion is stated as a demonstrated proposition: "Sholokhov's novel shows with a tremendously convincing force that there is no third way in the Revolution, that fighting against his people leads a man to moral bankruptcy and dehumanisation."
So: genuine tragedy, but tragedy of error — the aesthetic weight is granted in full and then made to carry a verdict. Grigory is not a victim, he is a man who chose wrongly and is condemned by history and by his author.
Two things break this reading, and both are visible in Yakimenko's own pages.
The first is that Sholokhov refused the verdict in advance. Yakimenko himself prints the writer's warning from Izvestia in March 1935: "Melekhov's destiny is a purely individual phenomenon and I have no intention of suggesting that it is typical of the middle-peasant Cossacks. I take him away from the Whites, of course, but I will not make a Bolshevik of him. He is no Bolshevik." A novelist who says he will not convert his hero is not writing a book whose point is that the hero should have converted. Yakimenko reads this as a caution against crude typology; it reads at least as easily as a refusal to supply the ending the doctrine wanted.
The second is the "third way" itself. Yakimenko describes the Veshenskaya insurgents accurately: they marched under red banners reading "Long Live the Soviets! Down with the Communists!", they kept "Comrade" as the form of address, they set up a Cossack republic, and they fought both the Whites and the Bolsheviks. He calls this "the kulak Socialist-Revolutionary slogan". It is a phrase doing an enormous amount of work. Soviets without Communists was not a kulak invention and not confined to the Don; it was the slogan of the Tambov peasant war of 1920–21 and, in substance, of the Kronstadt sailors in March 1921 — men who had been the shock troops of October two years earlier. That the third way was defeated is a fact. That there could be no third way is a doctrine, and it is the doctrine on which the single-party state was built. Yakimenko has to write the sentence "there is no third way in the Revolution" because the alternative is to admit that in 1919, and again in 1921, large numbers of the labouring people the Revolution was made for concluded that the party had become something they had to rise against. Sholokhov's novel is great partly because it lets you feel why they concluded that. Yakimenko's criticism is good enough to transmit the feeling and obliged to gainsay the conclusion.
The second test is collectivisation, and here the book's silences are precise enough to be dated.
Give Yakimenko his due first, because he says more than a 1973 Progress title had to. He is sharp about Makar Nagulnov, the local Communist whose zeal shades into mania. He notes that Nagulnov "quotes Marx and Engels frequently enough, but does not understand the actual way the class forces are drawn up at all"; that Sholokhov repeatedly likens him to a bird of prey; that his "fanatical obsession makes him ready to go to the extremes of brutality". He quotes the appalling outburst in full — Nagulnov, told that Razmyotnov pities the children of the families he has been sent to dispossess, screaming "Is this how you serve the Revolution? Sorry for them? Why, I'd ... give me thousands of old men, children, women.... I'd do it with a machine-gun ... every one of 'em!" He says of Sholokhov that "true humanist writer that he is, he is quite merciless in exposing" what is unpleasant in Nagulnov. That is not whitewash.
But look at the frame. The clash between Nagulnov and Davidov is "essentially a reflection of the struggle between two styles of leadership: one the true Leninist approach, which sought to patiently explain and convince, and the other an anti-Party approach, which sought to overcome difficulties by frontal attack using threats and coercion." Coercion is a style. It is a deviation, individual and psychological, traceable to Nagulnov's war wounds and his fits. And the corrective, three times over, is Stalin's article "Dizzy with Success". It arrives with the post on 20 March, the Cossacks read it, the conspirators lose their following, and the old Cossack tells Polovtsev: "We're not against Soviet power, we're against the disorders in our own village." In this entire book Stalin appears essentially in no other role. Yakimenko is writing after the Twentieth Congress, he uses the phrase "the personality cult" without embarrassment when discussing literary genres, and the one thing Stalin is permitted to do in his pages is publish the article that stops the excesses.
"Dizzy with Success" appeared in Pravda on 2 March 1930. It blamed local officials for the results of a policy the Politburo had ordered, produced a mass exodus from the collective farms in the spring, and was followed by the resumption of the drive. The excesses were not a deviation from the policy; forced collectivisation was the policy, and the dispossession and deportation of roughly 1.8 million people to special settlements in 1930–31 was its execution. Yakimenko's Nagulnov is a man who took the line too far. Nagulnov's real-life counterparts were carrying out instructions. The Soviet citizen interviewed by Fourth International in June 1945 — a man broadly loyal to the regime, who defended Soviet wage differentials and thought the USSR socialist — put the ordinary fact plainly: "The kolkhozes (collective farms) were imposed almost exclusively by force, according to plans laid down by members of the Party."
And then there is 1932–33. Yakimenko does not pretend the years did not happen. Twice he approaches them. Sholokhov, he writes, "was forced to put aside his writing for some time, due to the difficult situation that arose on the Don in 1932–1933." And, more remarkably: "One cannot help wondering whether Sholokhov had intended writing of the gross distortions in the policy of collectivisation which had such tragic consequences in 1932 and 1933. That is a question that cannot be answered without the help of the author."
That sentence is the hinge of the whole book. It admits that something happened, that it was caused by policy, and that its consequences were tragic. It is more than most Progress volumes of the period concede about anything. And it stops there. The word famine does not occur in this book. Neither does starvation, in connection with 1933. No number is offered, no region named, no cause described. What happened on the Don in 1932–33 was that the grain quota was set beyond what the harvest could yield, that requisition brigades took seed grain and food stocks, that villages were blacklisted and cut off from supply, and that people died of hunger in the tens of thousands in the North Caucasus krai. Estimates of Soviet famine deaths across 1932–33 remain genuinely contested and range roughly from five to seven million, with the Ukrainian SSR and the Kuban and Don worst hit; the historiography argues about intent and about attribution by republic, but not about the deaths.
Now set that against the second half of Yakimenko's sentence: the question "cannot be answered without the help of the author." Sholokhov was alive. He was in his mid-sixties when this book went to press in Moscow, living at Veshenskaya, a deputy to the Supreme Soviet, the most decorated writer in the country, and the most accessible subject a Soviet literary scholar ever had.
And the author had already answered, in print, thirteen years earlier. In 1957, writing under the title "Keep in Step with the Party, with the People", Sholokhov turned to the fortieth anniversary of Soviet power, apologised for how far writers had fallen behind the pace of events, and said this: "if you take a practical view of life, you'll agree that no particular harm was done because I did not go further than the 1930s in my Virgin Soil Upturned, but think how terrible it would have been if our agriculture and industry had still remained at the 1930s level!"
That is the answer. Not writing about 1932–33 did no particular harm; and the proper measure of the period is that output has risen since. A novelist who had described the destruction of his own district to the head of the government in 1933 was, by 1957, offering the tonnage figures as consolation.
What makes this decisive rather than merely sad is where the passage was printed. It is in At the Bidding of the Heart, a selection of Sholokhov's speeches and articles compiled by Y. Lukin and issued in English by Progress Publishers in 1973 — the same house, the same year, the same export list as the Yakimenko volume you are holding. A reader who bought both books was told by the critic that the question could not be answered without the author's help, and by the author, in the companion volume, that the question did not much matter.
The private truth was different, and Yakimenko cannot be blamed for not printing it. In the spring of 1933 Sholokhov wrote to Stalin from Veshenskaya describing the confiscation of food, the beatings and torture used by requisition brigades in his district, and mass starvation among collective farmers; he named officials and asked for grain and for an investigation. Stalin sent grain, ordered an inquiry — and replied that the peasants of the district were themselves waging a quiet war against Soviet power. Those letters were not published in the USSR until the era of glasnost. That is a real constraint and it should be stated as one. But it does not explain the sentence Yakimenko did print. He could have written nothing. Instead he wrote that the question cannot be answered, which was not true in 1970 and had not been true since 1957.
The companion volume seals it from the other end. At the Bidding of the Heart runs to some 104,000 words of Sholokhov's public prose across four decades, and the word famine does not occur in it either. Its earliest item of any kind is dated 1934. The years 1929 to 1933 — collectivisation, dekulakisation, and the hunger that followed them through the district he lived in and wrote about — are simply not represented in his collected public writing. A piece in that volume called "Cossack Collective Farms", which a reader might reasonably expect to belong to the collectivisation years, turns out to be a harvest dispatch of 1941, full of Don horses and cavalry caps and women in the fields shouting after the conscripts: "Strike the nazi vipers dead!"
There is a second, smaller mark of the same pressure. Yakimenko quotes Sholokhov complaining that manuscripts deposited in the local archive for safekeeping were lost in the war — "the manuscripts of Tales from the Don, And Quiet Flows the Don, Virgin Soil Upturned, my correspondence with Stalin and Gorky, and other valuable material". Yakimenko prints the phrase "my correspondence with Stalin" and does not pause on it for a syllable. He pursues the Gorky letters and recovers a magnificent one. The Stalin correspondence he passes over in silence. And when he lists the Veshensky district Party officials who were Sholokhov's close friends in the 1930s — P. Lugovoi, P. Krasyukov, T. Logachev, remembered for hunting trips and New Year parties and verse riddles for the children — he does not mention that these men were arrested in the Terror, or that Sholokhov went to Stalin to get them out. Lugovoi returns a few pages earlier as a memoirist, recalling Sholokhov's kerosene lamp burning past midnight. That is all the reader is told about him.
The chapter titled "The Enemies" completes the picture, and it needs a fair hearing. The enemies of Virgin Soil Upturned are real: Polovtsev is a White officer running a genuine armed conspiracy, Ostrovnov freezes the collective farm's oxen and is an accessory to the murder of the Khoprovs and starves his own mother to death. Sholokhov wrote them that way and Yakimenko reads them faithfully and well. But the chapter validates the category, and the category is the problem. In the world of the novel, resistance to collectivisation is conspiracy, directed by former officers, hoping for foreign deliverance. In the Don of 1932–33, the people who hid grain were hiding it because their children were starving. There is no room in "The Enemies" for them, and Yakimenko does not make room.
The third absence is the man himself, and it is total.
The Sholokhov of this book is an artist, a son of the Don, a deputy who never found his duties a burden, and a mentor who tells the Kazakhstan Writers' Congress that young writers should be trained as the golden eagle trains its young, driven higher and higher "so that they may become real golden eagles in literature, and not bedraggled crows or domestic hens". The book's last pages are given to his views on criticism: that a young writer needs "open, unrestrained criticism", that partiality and group sympathies ruin literature, that inferior craftsmanship "is at the same time an ideological flaw".
In April 1966, at the Twenty-Third Party Congress, Sholokhov spoke about the writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel, tried two months earlier — "convicted of maligning the Soviet Union in their literary productions and given sentences of seven and five years respectively", as Intercontinental Press later put it — for publishing satirical fiction abroad under pseudonyms. He never used their names from the rostrum. He did not need to. He called them "these convicted apostates" and said he felt "doubly ashamed of people who are offering their services and applying for permission to go bail" for them. Then:
"There are some who, invoking humanism, bewail the sternness of the verdict. I see here a group of delegates from the Party organisation of our Soviet Army, and I wonder what they would do if traitors were discovered in one of their units? Our soldiers know better than anyone else that humanism and slobbery are different things altogether. "There's something else I'm thinking of. Had this happened in the memorable 1920s when cases were tried more by revolutionary justice than the strictly demarcated clauses of the Criminal Code, a very different, oh so very different punishment would have been meted out to these turncoats! And here, if you please, people are talking about the 'sternness' of the verdict!"
A Nobel laureate is telling a Party Congress that two writers in labour camps should have been shot. Having said it, he moved on without a pause to the pollution of Lake Baikal and a mismanaged vegetable-drying factory at Kalyazin.
It drew a reply. Lidia Chukovskaya, author of The Deserted House, "wrote an open letter to Mikhail Sholokov, the author of And Quiet Flows the Don, denouncing him for demanding stiffer sentences for Andrei D. Sinyavsky and Yuli M. Daniel" — the spelling of his name is Intercontinental Press's own. Three years later Solzhenitsyn, expelled from the Writers' Union of the Russian Republic, threw the letter back at the men who had expelled him: "Thus neither [Mikhail] Sholokov nor all of you put together dared to answer the famous letter of Lidiya Chukovskaya, pride of Russian essayists." Both passages are in Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 40, 1 December 1969, p. 1066. The letter itself appeared in English in World Outlook for 9 December 1966; that issue is not in the archive from which this series works, and nothing here should be taken as standing in for the document.
Now watch what Progress did with that speech in 1973, because the two volumes handle it differently and the difference is instructive. At the Bidding of the Heart prints it in full, demand and all — Progress was not ashamed of it; in Moscow in 1973 it was a creditable thing to have said. But Y. Lukin, introducing that volume, also quotes the speech in his own essay, and he quotes exactly two paragraphs of it: the passage about how "Wherever and in whatever language Communists speak, we always speak as Communists." He stops there. The next paragraph of the speech — "It is a very different matter when an author writes one thing in the Soviet Union and publishes something else abroad" — is where the attack begins, and it is where Lukin's quotation ends. The compiler prints the knife and then, in his own voice, hands the reader the handle only.
Nor was 1966 the end of it. In August 1973 — the year this translation appeared in English — thirty-one Soviet writers signed an open letter condemning Andrei Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn. "Among the signers was Mikhail Sholokhov, Nobel prize-winning author of And Quiet Flows the Don. Sholokhov has previously sided with the bureaucrats against dissidents," Intercontinental Press reported on 10 September 1973. The English edition of Yakimenko's tribute and its subject's signature on that letter belong to the same twelve months.
Yakimenko goes further than Lukin. His book contains not one word about the trial, the speech, or the reply; nor about Sholokhov's part in the campaign against Pasternak. Instead it quotes the Stockholm address on the artist's duty "to tell people the truth, however bitter", and gives its closing pages to his advice on criticising the young with fatherly exigence. So the export list of a single publisher in a single year offers three treatments of the same event: the speech entire, the speech trimmed at the point where it turns ugly, and no speech at all. The silence is not accidental and it is not Yakimenko's alone. It is what a Soviet monograph on a living laureate was for.
One more thing must be reported accurately, because it is easy to get wrong in either direction. Yakimenko devotes a single sentence to the authorship controversy: describing the difficulties over book three, he writes: "The enemies of Soviet literature were doing their utmost to slander the writer, maintaining that he had plagiarised the first two books of the novel." That is the whole of it — no names, no account of the charge, no mention of the commission of writers who investigated it in 1929 and published a defence of Sholokhov in Pravda, and no evidence adduced. The reader is told there was slander and that Sholokhov fought on.
The charge dates from the late 1920s, when it was said that a man in his early twenties from a remote village could not have written such a book and that he had used the papers of a dead Don writer. It was revived in 1974 — the year after this translation, so Yakimenko is not answering it — in a book published abroad under the initial "D", written by Irina Medvedeva-Tomashevskaya, with a preface by Solzhenitsyn. It stayed live, and it stayed dangerous. In March 1975 the dissident Marxist historian Roy Medvedev was called into the public prosecutor's office in Moscow and told to cancel a contract with a Western publisher for a book on Sholokhov; Medvedev held "that Soviet Nobel laureate Sholokhov did not write all of the novel The Quiet Don", and said his investigation was "continuing and he now claims to have located, hut not yet seen, the archives of Fyodor Dmitrievich Krukov, who he thinks wrote the major part of the book attributed to Sholokhov" — the mangled words are the scanned text's, and the writer's name is normally given as Fyodor Kryukov (Intercontinental Press, vol. 13 no. 14, 14 April 1975, p. 500). A state that prosecutes a question is not settling it, and Medvedev's claim about the Kryukov archives was never substantiated. The question has not been closed to universal satisfaction, but the weight of evidence has moved decisively. Statistical and computational studies of the text, beginning with the work of Geir Kjetsaa and his collaborators in the 1980s, found the disputed books consistent with Sholokhov's other writing and not with the proposed alternative author; and manuscripts of the first two books in Sholokhov's hand, long thought lost, were located in the 1990s and published in facsimile. Current scholarly opinion favours Sholokhov. The irony is that Yakimenko was better placed than he knew: his own patient collation of the Oktyabr* variants against the final text — a writer visibly working and reworking his material over years — is exactly the sort of evidence that bears on the question, and he never thinks to use it, because in Moscow in 1970 the charge was not a question but an insult.
The argument Yakimenko is making had been answered before he made it, and answered on the ground he himself chooses.
The most striking episode in his book is Sholokhov's fight with the "orthodox" leaders of RAPP — the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers — who held up book three of And Quiet Flows the Don, scrawled "That's counter-revolution!" in the margin beside a line about Red Army men riding badly, and demanded cuts that would have taken three-quarters of the text. Yakimenko is scathing about them: they had "a speculative approach to the historical process", using it "as an a priori postulate to 'sanctify' all past events". He is right. But the principle at stake had been stated plainly in 1923, in the essay "Communist Policy Toward Art", by the man whose name Yakimenko cannot print. "The domain of art is not one in which the party is called upon to command," Trotsky wrote. "It can and must protect and help it, but it can only lead it indirectly." The whole quarrel over Sholokhov's sixth part was a quarrel about whether a literary bureau could tell a novelist what a rising had been caused by. Yakimenko wants the RAPP officials to have been wrong in that particular case. He cannot afford to say they were wrong in principle, because the apparatus that replaced RAPP in 1932 — the single Union of Soviet Writers, with socialist realism as its statutory method — claimed the same authority on a far larger scale, and it is that method Yakimenko spends his book celebrating as giving "the writer more scope for artistic expression than any other creative method".
The fuller answer came in June 1938, in a letter to Partisan Review published as "Art and Politics in Our Epoch", written while Sholokhov was completing the last part of the novel. Trotsky's judgment of the regime is unsparing and has worn well: "The October revolution gave a magnificent impetus to all types of Soviet art. The bureaucratic reaction, on the contrary, has stifled artistic creation with a totalitarian hand." Naming the writers then endorsing Vyshinsky's prosecutions or glorifying Stalin to order, he identifies the motive not as conviction but as fear — "It is not a 'creative hatred' that guides the pen of these writers but paralyzing fear" — and states the principle against which Yakimenko's whole enterprise has to be measured: "a truly revolutionary party is neither able nor willing to take upon itself the task of 'leading' and even less of commanding art, either before or after the conquest of power... Art, like science, not only does not seek orders, but by its very essence, cannot tolerate them."
Honesty requires adding that in the same essay Trotsky overreached. He wrote that it was "impossible to read Soviet verse and prose without physical disgust", and dismissed the art of the Stalin period wholesale. That verdict was delivered in the year Sholokhov dated the draft of his eighth part, and it does not survive contact with And Quiet Flows the Don. Something was still being written in the USSR in 1938 that was not a manufactured myth, and a reply that could not see it was to that extent blunter than the case required. The interesting question is how. And the answer is on Yakimenko's own pages: because Sholokhov fought the literary bureau over book three and won with Gorky's help, because he told an interviewer in 1935 that he would not make a Bolshevik of his hero and then did not, and because he wrote to Gorky in 1931 that people do not rise up for no reason. Sholokhov survived as an artist in the 1930s to the exact extent that he resisted being commanded. That is Trotsky's principle demonstrated, not refuted — and it is Yakimenko who supplies the evidence.
Where the same tradition was exact rather than sweeping, it has been vindicated completely. In July 1941, in "The Blind Alley of Soviet Literature", L. Yakovlev surveyed the flight of Soviet writers from contemporary subjects and dropped a footnote about those who still wrote about the civil war: "it is no simple task to provide a realistic depiction of the civil war without once mentioning the name of Leon Trotsky or other legendary heroes of the Red Army and always portraying Stalin as a genius" (Fourth International, vol. 2 no. 6, July 1941). That is a specific, testable claim about what a particular kind of book would have to leave out. Yakimenko's book is a study of the greatest civil war novel in Russian, running to something over 130,000 words in English. It discusses the Southern Front, Denikin's thrust towards Moscow, the First Mounted Army, the Red Army on the Don in 1919, and the rising in the Red Army's rear. It names Podtyolkov more than a dozen times. The name of the man who founded and commanded that army does not occur in it once. A reader in 1973 with no view whatever on Trotsky's politics would close this book unaware that he had existed.
In Sholokhov's own collected prose the name survives exactly once, and only as an epithet. Speaking in 1937 about the Spanish war, he told his audience that Soviet writers were "deeply perturbed by developments such as the events which took place in Catalonia a short while ago when Trotskyite-fascist elements, provoking certain groups of anarchists to action, attempted to organise a mutiny in the rear of the republican front with the aim of undermining the Popular Front" — and drew the moral from his own revolution: "Everyone knows that Soviet power waged an uncompromising struggle against the enemies of the working class, and we won because we ruthlessly smashed and routed all traitors to the cause." The Barcelona May Days of 1937 were the suppression of the POUM and the CNT by the Republic's own government, and the "certain groups of anarchists" were the largest workers' organisation in Catalonia. This is the same erasure viewed from the other side: a name that cannot appear as a person appears without difficulty as a category of enemy, and the workers killed in Barcelona enter Soviet prose only as its illustration.
The mechanism was described from inside four years later. In June 1945 Fourth International published an interview with a Soviet citizen who had left the USSR, and the interviewer asked him directly what he thought of And Quiet Flows the Don and of the fiction of collectivisation. He had read the novel and seen the film, and was "very fond of writers who wrote about the civil war". Asked about Trotsky, he answered without rancour and without hesitation: "He is no longer considered to have been the principal organizer of the Red Army." That is what a successful erasure sounds like when it is repeated back by someone who has simply never been told otherwise. Twenty-five years later Yakimenko wrote the book that assumption makes possible.
What, then, is this book for a reader now?
It is the best available Soviet account of the finest novel the Soviet Union produced, written by a scholar who could read, and it should be read for that. Yakimenko on the composition of Virgin Soil Upturned, on Ostrovnov, on the pigeons in Razmyotnov's yard, on the drafts of And Quiet Flows the Don, is worth any reader's time. He is also the clearest available demonstration of what the doctrine cost. He possesses, on his own pages, a serviceable analysis of revolutionary excess: he applies it to the Don in 1919, where Sholokhov had already applied it and where the dead were safely distant. He cannot apply it to the Don in 1932–33, where the same requisition brigades, the same "overzealous people", and a policy signed at the top produced a far greater catastrophe. The tool is in his hand; he is not permitted to turn it around. And the writer he spent a career admiring had by then done the turning for him — describing that catastrophe to Stalin in 1933 and being told he was mistaken, then telling the reading public in 1957 that no particular harm had come of leaving it out. That is the shape of the book, and it is worth seeing whole: a man who could think, thinking as far as he was allowed to and stopping at a line he did not draw.