Poet of "Zemlyanka" and the Writers' Union enforcer who led the campaign against Pasternak
Trapped under fire near Istra in November 1941, his coat shredded by shrapnel, Surkov said: 'Not one step back from the regimental HQ. And to death — four steps.' Those words became 'Zemlyanka.'
Russian Soviet poet and literary functionary who served as First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers (1953–1959). Author of the iconic WWII song "Zemlyanka" and two-time Stalin Prize laureate, he led the official campaign against Boris Pasternak during the Doctor Zhivago affair, traveling to Italy in 1957 to press Feltrinelli to halt publication. A paradoxical nomenklatura enforcer who, in 1937, secretly slipped 300 rubles into the pocket of a destitute Osip Mandelstam and quietly aided Anna Akhmatova during the Zhdanov years.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1918–1922Red Army service, Civil War
- 1926–1928Editor-in-chief, Severny Komsomolets
- 1934–1939Deputy editor, Literaturnaya Uchyoba; lecturer, Literary Institute
- 1940–1941Editor-in-chief, Novy Mir
- 1941–1945War correspondent, frontline press
- 1944–1946Editor-in-chief, Literaturnaya Gazeta
- 1949–1953Editor-in-chief, Ogoniok
- 1953–1959First Secretary, Union of Soviet Writers
- 1956–1966Candidate member, CPSU Central Committee
Related historical events
Enforcer of Literary Politics: The Campaign Against Pasternak
Surkov's clash with Pasternak predated his tenure as First Secretary. At a writers' meeting in April 1932, after Stalin ordered RAPP and all other literary groups disbanded and merged into a single writers' union, Surkov attacked Pasternak as a 'subjective idealist' who believed 'the world is not outside us but inside us.' At the First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, he was the first speaker to rebut Nikolai Bukharin's report on poetry, which had praised Pasternak, insisting that 'abstract craftsmanship' did not exist and that good verse must carry a Bolshevik tinge.
The hostility is said to have deepened after an incident in 1946, when Surkov was reciting poetry and a late-arriving Pasternak was greeted with thunderous applause as he slipped into the hall. Writing in the journal Culture and Life in 1947, Surkov condemned Pasternak's verse as 'the pose of a recluse living outside time' that spoke 'with obvious hostility and hatred towards the Soviet Revolution.' In October 1957, after the manuscript of Doctor Zhivago reached the Italian communist publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, Surkov traveled to Italy to press him to halt publication. When this failed, he held a press conference on 19 October claiming Pasternak had agreed to revise the work, and drew a comparison to the 1929 foreign publication of Boris Pilnyak's banned novel Mahogany, an author later publicly vilified. The threat backfired: it stimulated worldwide interest, and the first print of 6,000 copies sold out in a single day.
When Pasternak was named the Nobel laureate in October 1958, Surkov was summoned to the Kremlin to brief Khrushchev. He called Pasternak a scoundrel and his poetry anti-Soviet, and on the basis of this report the vicious official campaign was launched; after the scandal erupted worldwide, Khrushchev grabbed Surkov by the collar, shook him, and scolded him for failing to mention that Pasternak was a world-famous author. Around this time the Writers' Union expelled Pasternak from membership. At the Writers' Congress in May 1959 Surkov attacked Pasternak for 'treachery,' but the speech was poorly received, and he lost the leadership of the union.
Yet the rigid enforcer had another side. Konstantin Simonov testified that during the anti-Semitic campaign of Stalin's last months, culminating in the Doctors' Plot, Surkov 'deeply, organically despised and hated both anti-Semitism as a phenomenon and anti-Semites,' and was more consistent and braver about it than Simonov himself. Of the 300 rubles Surkov secretly slipped into her husband's pocket in 1937, Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote that in any final reckoning of Surkov 'one should not forget this gift of money,' likening it to the onion a sinner must hold onto to be pulled into heaven at the last moment.