The Brezhnev-era literary gatekeeper who celebrated Siberia while enforcing official aesthetics as head of the Writers' Union for 15 years
At the 25th Party Congress, 1976: "The deep, wise report of Comrade Brezhnev contains a gigantic, immeasurable energy of inspiration. As if along wires, this energy has jolted into the hearts of people, inspiring them to work and great achievements."
Born the thirteenth child of a Siberian bear-hunter near Tomsk, he joined the Komsomol at 13 and launched a career in journalism and fiction. His epic novels (Strogovy, Salt of the Earth, and Siberia) chronicled peasant life and the taiga, winning him the Stalin and Lenin Prizes. In 1971 he became First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers and for fifteen years enforced literary policy: he led campaigns against Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, and personally awarded Brezhnev the Lenin Prize for the leader's memoirs. Though his books sold millions and were adapted into TV serials, intellectuals mocked them as volumes nobody read; with perestroika he resigned in 1989.
Career Timeline
- 1927–1931Komsomol work in Tomsk
- 1931–1941Editor of newspapers and magazines in Novosibirsk and Omsk
- 1941–1945War correspondent, Trans-Baikal Front newspaper Na Boyevom Postu
- 1956–1971Secretary, Board of the Union of Soviet Writers
- 1959–1965Chairman, Moscow branch of the Union of Writers of the RSFSR
- 1971–1986First Secretary, Board of the Union of Soviet Writers
- 1971–1990Member, CPSU Central Committee
- 1986–1989Chairman, Board of the Union of Soviet Writers
Gatekeeper of Literature: Years as First Secretary of the Writers' Union
For fifteen years, from 1971 to 1986, Markov presided as First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers, the supreme administrative authority over Soviet literature in the Brezhnev era. Under his leadership the Union rigorously enforced the boundaries of socialist realism, organizing the exclusion and public denunciation of writers deemed disloyal to the regime. On 31 August 1973, Markov joined Sholokhov, Fedin, Simonov, and other literary notables in signing an open letter published in Pravda that condemned Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov as 'slanderers of the Soviet state and social system.' The letter was also read aloud on the central television program Vremya.
Markov's own literary output became the quintessential specimen of 'secretary prose' (секретарская литература), the officially sanctioned genre produced by Writers' Union functionaries. His sprawling novels, judged ideologically sound, were printed in the millions and adapted into television serials. Yet among Moscow's educated readership they were derided as books nobody actually read. Vladimir Voinovich, after emigrating, recorded that he "asked more than a hundred educated people in Moscow and could not find a single one who had read a line of Markov." Nonetheless, Markov was twice made a Hero of Socialist Labor (1974, 1984), received the Lenin Prize (1976), and in 1978 personally chaired the literary awards committee that bestowed the Lenin Prize on Brezhnev's ghostwritten memoirs.
Markov opposed the openness of perestroika, and on 18 January 1989 he resigned, framed as voluntary, from the chairmanship of the Writers' Union. He died in Moscow two and a half years later, in September 1991, three months before the Soviet Union itself collapsed.