A solemn pledge to abstain from truth

Gary Saul Morson has an interesting piece in The American Conservative on a new book detailing the psychic conflicts in the Soviet Writers' Union -

 
The Soviet Writers' Union and Its Leaders: Identity and Authority under Stalin - by Carol Any.

What exactly was the Soviet Writers’ Union? Like all unions in the USSR, it existed not to pressure authorities on behalf of its members but, quite the contrary, to transmit party orders. If writers obeyed, they earned material rewards out of the reach of ordinary citizens; but if they did not, they would be humiliated or worse. Proclaimed in 1932, the union began with 2,200 members. By the time Stalin died in 1953, 2,000 had been arrested, three-quarters of whom were executed or perished in labor camps...

Writers, like all cadres, were expected to be permeated by the spirit of “partiinost,” party-mindedness, which meant that, ideally, their will coincided entirely with that of the party. There was no room for the private or personal, and frivolous literary forms like love poetry or pessimistic ones like tragedy were frowned upon. Artistry was, at best, secondary to ideological correctness. Cultivating individual talent earned one reproof for “Mozartism” (ever more pejorative “-isms” were always being discovered). Literary critics, who wrote scathing attacks on works that deviated ever so slightly, lorded it over creative talents...

"ever more pejorative “-isms” were always being discovered" - sounds almost too familiar doesn't it?

“Socialist Realism,” the regime’s official aesthetic, entailed the doctrine of “two truths.” When Vasily Grossman wrote to Maxim Gorky—a sort of patron saint of Soviet literature—for help in publishing a novel, he argued that it portrayed Soviet life “truthfully.” Gorky replied that beyond mere empirical truth, there was a higher truth, the essential nature of things according to Marxism-Leninism. Bourgeois writers see only what is before their eyes; Soviet writers must detect the seeds of the glorious Communist future...

Solzhenitsyn referred to Socialist Realism as “a solemn pledge to abstain from truth,” and gifted writers sought ways around it.

A lesson telling us that although we have no Stalin to contend with, censorship and repression are never absent. Unless we defend free speech as a line in the sand we are bound to discover among us, people prepared to make “a solemn pledge to abstain from truth”.