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Statement from SSP General Secretary A. A. Fadeev to the TsK VKP(b) secretaries on the “antipatriotic group of critics” participants B. L. Dairedzhiev and I. L. Altman

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By Bulyga, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (Fadeev) Union of Soviet Writers

Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953

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Document 181

Statement from SSP General Secretary A. A. Fadeev to the TsK VKP(b) secretaries on the “antipatriotic group of critics” participants B. L. Dairedzhiev and I. L. Altman. 21 September 1949. AP RF, f. 3, op. 34, d. 189, ll. 12–15. Original. Typewritten.

21 September 1949

To the VKP(b) TsK To Comrade I. V. Stalin To Comrade G. M. Malenkov To Comrade M. A. Suslov To Comrade G. M. Popov To Comrade M. F. Shkiryatov

In connection with the exposure of groups of antipatriotic critics in the Union of Soviet Writers and the All-Russian Theatrical Society, I draw the attention of the TsK VKP(b) to two representatives of this criticism in need of additional political verification, inasmuch as many facts about them lead one to assume that these are two-faced men.

B. L. Dairedzhiev, VKP(b) member since 1919. Dairedzhiev made his appearance in literary criticism during the existence of RAPP, as an active “figure” in the anti-Party group Litfront, whose leaders were enemies of the people Kostrov, Bespalov, and Zonin. In the early 1930s, he published a Trotskyite book, On the Sandbar [Na otmeli], with a foreword by the now-arrested A. Zonin, a book containing slanderous assertions about the degeneration of the Party. It's hard to imagine how Dairedzhiev held onto his Party card during those years, being the author of this hostile book.

Now that he has been expelled from the Party, Dairedzhiev has attempted to vindicate himself by saying that the book needs to be approached historically and that in its day it was not judged in the same way, as proof of which he cited excerpts from an article of the period printed in the RAPP journal. After checking, it came out that Dairedzhiev had quoted excerpts from an article by enemy of the people A. Selivanovsky.

After publication of On the Sandbar, Dairedzhiev disappeared for a few years from the pages of the press and surfaced shortly before the war, when he presented to the Writers Union a disparaging, ultraleft book about Sholokhov that never saw the light of day.

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During the Great Patriotic War, Dairedzhiev again showed no signs of life, but after the war he began to appear rather actively in the press and at meetings with articles that aimed to discredit the themes of Soviet patriotism in literature and overthrow many of the best works of Soviet literature.

In 1948, I removed from a collection of critical works Dairedzhiev's essay about Belinsky, in which, claiming to explain Belinsky to the modern day, Dairedzhiev concentrated all his false pathos on Belinsky's struggle with “kvass [Russian populist] patriotism,” casting aspersions in passing on contemporary criticism for not struggling against “kvass patriotism.” With its methods of dragging out hostile little ideas, this essay by Dairedzhiev bears a thoroughly double-dealing nature.

Like several other representatives of antipatriotic criticism, Dairedzhiev preferred to pursue his occupation somewhere far from Moscow in the literature of one of the fraternal republics, counting on it having weaker oversight over his activities. Thus for several months Dairedzhiev “worked” in Tadzhikistan, where he subjected to ridicule and disarray performances of the Russian theater in Stalinabad based on the plays of Soviet playwrights and supported inside the theater people who held to the same line. The newspaper Communist of Tadzhikistan [Kommunist Tadzhikistana] of 10 April 1949, revealed this hostile activity of Dairedzhiev's in a major article, “Decisively Expose Rootless Cosmopolitans and Their Accomplices” [“Reshitel'no razoblachit' bezrodnykh kosmopolitov i ikh posobnikov”].

Having been exposed in all these actions, Dairedzhiev refuses to admit anything and slithers out of any criticism.

I. L. Altman was born in Orgeev (Bessarabia). His career began with the Left SRs in the years 1917–1918. He joined the VKP(b) as of 1920. He belonged to the anti-Party group in literature, Litfront. He began his literary activity with a major work on Lessing in which he set forth his view of the West's primacy over Russia in all spheres of ideology. Having been before the war an editor of Theater [Teatr], he pursued a line leading to the discrediting of Soviet dramaturgy on modern themes, together with the critics Gurvich, Yuzovsky, and so on, and in particular printed Borshchagovsky's disparaging article against Korneichuk's play In Ukraine's Steppes [V stepiakh Ukrainy]. For distorting the Party line in matters of theater and dramaturgy, he was removed from his position as editor of Theater by a resolution of the TsK VKP(b).

In 1937, while I. L. Altman was head of the literature and art department at Izvestia, he received a severe reprimand for a dubious “typo” in Izvestia (in 1944 the reprimand was lifted).

The Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers was unable to clarify the nature of the conflict in which during the Great Patriotic War I. Altman

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was removed from his job in the political organs and army press and discharged from the army before war's end.

In his literary criticism and public activities of the postwar years, Altman occupied a double-dealing position, while depicting himself in oral conversations as an enemy of antipatriotic criticism, nowhere in the press or at meetings did he speak out against them, slithering like a snake between the antipatriotic line he in fact supported and the Party statement of the issue. Thanks to this double-dealing line, Altman managed to create in the literary world a notion of his supposedly greater closeness to the Party line than that held by his cosmopolitan friends, although in fact he was following a much more cleverly masked hostile line.

We need to verify additionally the facts of Altman's close contact with bourgeois Jewish nationalists in the Jewish theater and in the Moscow section of Jewish writers, inasmuch as Altman's close connection with these circles is widely known in the literary world. Com. A. E. Korneichuk has informed me that Altman by private means, taking advantage of his familiarity with and connections among prominent figures in literature and art, distributed subscriptions to the Jewish theater, i.e., actively supported this artificial method of assistance for the theater by means of “private philanthropy” rather than by improving its repertoire and the quality of its performances.

Like Dairedzhiev, Altman, having been exposed for his hostile literarycritical activities, is not admitting to his actions and is trying to slither out of criticism.

At the present time, by decision of the Party organization of the Union of Soviet Writers, Dairedzhiev and Altman have been expelled from the Party and are “struggling” at higher levels for a repeal of the decision of the SSP Party organization.

For my part I feel that there is no place for Dairedzhiev and Altman in the Party and I ask the TsK VKP(b) to allow the Secretariat of the Union of Soviet Writers to raise before the Presidium the issue of expelling Dairedzhiev and Altman from the Writers Union.

A. Fadeev

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Document Details

Document TitleStatement from SSP General Secretary A. A. Fadeev to the TsK VKP(b) secretaries on the “antipatriotic group of critics” participants B. L. Dairedzhiev and I. L. Altman

AuthorBulyga, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich (Fadeev); Union of Soviet Writers

RecipientRussian Communist Party (Bolshevik), Bolshevik Party, Bolshevik Center, Central Committee, RKP(b), Members of the Central Committee of the; Communist Party, Executive Commission of the Bolshevik; Party, Executive Committee of Bolsheviks, Provincial and Regional Party Committees of; the RKP(b), Communist Party of the Soviet Union,; CPSU, All-Union Communist Party, VKP(b), CC and CCC of the VKP(b), Central Control Commission of the; VKP(b), Republic and Territorial (Regional) Control; Commissions, Conference of the Russian Communist; Party, Plenium of the Central Committee VKP(b); (Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party), RK VKP(b), Congress of the Communist Party, Central Committee of the VKP(b) (All-Union; Communist Party (Bolsheviks); Dzhugashvili, Iosif Vissarionovich (Stalin); Malenkov, Georgy Maksimilianovich; Suslov, Mikhail Andreevich; Popov, Georgy Mikhailovich; Shkiriatov, M. F.

RepositoryAPRF

ID #f.3, op.34, d.189, ll.12-15

DescriptionN/A

Date1949 Sep 21

AOC VolumeSoviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917-1953

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