For us everything is permitted, because we are the first in the world to wield the sword not to oppress and enslave, but to liberate mankind from its chains Blood?

Let blood flow!

Krasnyi mech (Red Sword, Organ of the Cheka), August 1919

By the early thirties, attacks on creative work deemed highbrow and sophisticated had made it amply clear to Soviet writers that they were required to provide agitation.

Many did so, repeating the language, stock phrases, and messages that were being broadcast in political pronounce­ments, newspaper articles, posters, and films. In the years 1932-34, prominent figures like Pavlo Tychyna and Leonid Pervomaiskyi lent their voices to the campaign against dissenters by castigating peasants, intel­lectuals, “bourgeois nationalists,” and “wreckers.” At the thematic and ideological levels, there was considerable uniformity to this literature. Poetry, in particular, broadcast the simple message that ruthless violence was required so that the Soviet state could collectivize agriculture and industrialize. However, at the stylistic level, attempts to comply with the party’s demand for a literature comprehensible to the common people (a basic tenet of Socialist Realism after 1932) produced varying results. Tychyna, for example, turned to “popular burlesque and vulgarian forms” in an attempt to project the vox populi, using jargon, slogans and strong rhymes (Grabowicz 1977, 94, 111) Although it has often been dismissed as poor writing, a retreat into tendentiousness and extremist politics, this writing nonetheless produced a number of artistically suc­cessful poems (Grabowicz 1977; 1997). Nonetheless, almost all poets demonstrated the required militancy by employing threats, curses, and exclamations. The call to violence, especially in the Ukrainian poetry of 1932-34, is brutal and crude, and cannot be missed. Katerina Clark is no doubt correct in asserting that “full-blown” Socialist Realism did not arise overnight, that the basic myths of Stalinist culture, especially the idea of a conscious vanguard party that nurtures understanding in indi­viduals prone to “spontaneous” action, and the concept of a Manichean struggle between forces of good and evil, can be traced to earlier writings (Clark 1997, 30). However, the brutally violent sentiment and tone of 1932-34 can only be matched by the political rhetoric deployed during the Red Terror of 1918-22.

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