Nikolai Semyonovich Tikhonov

Soviet Union state institutions Soviet communism 1896–1979 ○ Natural causes

Poet of the “Ballad of Nails” and non-party literary leader who chaired the board of the Union of Soviet Writers

Born in St Petersburg in 1896 to a barber’s family, he fought in a hussar regiment in the First World War, joined the Red Army in 1918 and was demobilised in 1922. His 1922 collections Orda and Braga, with ballads such as the “Ballad of Nails”, made him one of the most popular Soviet poets of the 1920s, and he joined the Serapion Brothers. He took part in the Winter War and worked in the political administration of the Leningrad Front during the siege. He chaired the board of the Union of Soviet Writers in 1944–1946 until Stalin dismissed him for being too tolerant of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. From 1949 he chaired the Soviet Peace Committee; he was not a party member, and in 1966 he became the first Soviet writer made a Hero of Socialist Labour.