RUSSIA: Jackals with Fountain Pens

Tough writers are seldom tough guys, but Alexander Fadeyev was an exception. His early novels are Russian-style westerns, full of galloping hooves and gun battles against terrible odds, simple taciturn heroes who figure that the only way to give an order is to snap yes or no. Fadeyev himself lived this kind of life as a Soviet guerrilla during the civil war, and he believed that if it was not yes it must be no. Later, when it became his job to ride herd on Soviet literature for Dictator Stalin, tough Fadeyev made many an author bite the Siberian mud.

Russian literature, a powerful weapon in the Russian people's struggle for liberation from the Czars, was plunged into confusion after the establishment of the Soviet state. Many famous authors (Kuprin, Bunin) went into exile voluntarily; disillusionment led others (Yesenin, Mayakovsky) to suicide. To give literature drive and direction, and broaden its appeal, the party formed the Union of Soviet Writers, headed by famed Maxim Gorky. But Gorky's optimistic ideas about "socialist realism" did not suit Stalin. The dictator found his man in Fadeyev, the steely-eyed yes man.

Rising Man. In 1936, two years after Fadeyev joined the presidium of the Union of Soviet Writers, Gorky died suddenly. Then people began asking questions. Where is Isaac (Red Cavalry) Babel? What has happened to Novelist Boris (Mother Earth) Pilniak? Why is the work of Poet Boris (Above the Barriers) Pasternak no longer published? About lesser writers there was no mystery: they had been arrested as "enemies of the people." While they disappeared, Fadeyev became No. 1 man in the Soviet Writers' Union. Disdaining elegant clothes, he habitually wore the party uniform, but he had his own chauffeur-driven car and a luxurious apartment. There was always a bottle of vodka within his easy reach.

By 1939 the Union of Soviet Writers was a well-drilled literary claque which dutifully applauded Stalin's deal with Hitler and praised his "military genius" when the Germans drove to the outskirts of Moscow. The union helped whip up enthusiasm for the "patriotic war," and Fadeyev himself produced a long, turgid novel called Young Guard about underground operations in the Ukraine. The Kremlin's kept writers grew fat on the war (Young Guard sold 3,000,000 copies), but when it was all over, Stalin cut them down to size in a new purge. Described as "filthy" and "obscene" in journals controlled by Author Fadeyev's union were two survivors of the revolutionary epoch: Satirist Mikhail (The Adventures of an Ape) Zoshchenko and Poetess Anna (The White Flock) Akhmatova. Even Fadeyev, criticized in Pravda, had to eat a little crow. Told to rewrite Young Guard, he said: "I quite agree."