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  • In Search of the Collective AuthorFact and Fiction from the Soviet 1930s
  • Mary A. Nicholas (bio) and Cynthia A. Ruder (bio)

Collectively authored projects were a staple of creative life in the 1930s, part of the literary and historical landscape in this decade of broad strokes and communal gestures. Jointly authored projects captured the imagination of writers and historians in the United States, England, and the European continent, but nowhere was the concept more compelling than in Stalinist Russia. The creation of collective works in the Soviet Union was a complex process, full of such conflicting and contradictory developments that scholars still debate the most fundamental questions surrounding the topic. The end of the Soviet era has made it easier to draw conclusions about this chapter of cultural history, of course, but issues of chronology, authorial motivation, the exact role of coercion in Stalinist literary and historical production, and even questions of terminology remain unresolved. Much of this ongoing debate revolves around the transitional period from the end of the 1920s to the middle of the 1930s, overlapping the first and second Five-Year Plans. This phase in the history of Russian book culture deserves much closer critical attention for what it can tell us about the origins of Stalinism and the role of Soviet writers in creating it.1

The years of prewar Stalinism witnessed an explosion of large-scale government sponsored construction projects, including canals, railroads, public transit systems, even entire cities. From the beginning, those plans went hand-in-hand with schemes of collective authorship. Early Soviet construction projects were rushed, wasteful, and often coercive endeavors, but the regime nevertheless took pride in its efforts to industrialize peasant Russia, and numerous cultural campaigns were organized on the literary front to publicize this push toward modernization. Writers were newly conceptualized [End Page 221] as literary laborers, some even provided with official status and marching orders from local factories.2 Groups organized into official writer "brigades" were assigned specific tasks, usually to herald a particular construction project or Soviet accomplishment, and there were great hopes that such activities would produce that still elusive but much desired phenomenon: genuine Soviet literature.

Well-known writers in such brigades were valued for their literary and pedagogical expertise and were naturally expected to produce significant individual contributions to Soviet literature. Just as important, however, was the training they were intended to provide for worker-colleagues, who then would be able to give authentic voice to the aspirations of the laboring class. Authors were expected to play the role of both teacher and chronicler, as they set out to document heroic exploits of workers who would ostensibly soon replace them at the writer's desk. The inherent contradictions of such expectations make the Soviet experience with collective authorship particularly interesting to book historians. This article closely examines two of the best-known projects of Soviet collective authorship, surrounding the construction of the Belomor Canal and the Moscow subway, both of which were carried out under the auspices of the publishing house "The History of Factories and Foundries." Together they cast new light on the special role, successes, and failures of collective authorship in the formation of Stalinist literary culture.

Modern readers are understandably skeptical of claims regarding contemporary enthusiasm for the Soviet project, but numerous responses at the time demonstrate a seemingly genuine conviction in the possibilities for collective projects in literature, art, and history. Recent work on long-hidden Soviet diaries makes it clear that even many who doubted the value of the collective nevertheless fervently wanted to believe in it.3 Historian Sergei Zhuravlev has pointed out that one of the many crimes of Stalin's regime was, in fact, its "parasitic use of the sincere enthusiasm" that people felt during this period.4 In the literary world, the "utopia of collective creative work" beckoned true believers and fellow travelers alike.5 Many of these fellow travelers—nonparty writers sympathetic to societal reform—were particularly eager to demonstrate their affinity with the evolving Soviet project, and a number of them specifically requested inclusion in organized trips to actual building sites.

Work on the most prestigious collectively authored volumes was orchestrated by...

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