ACTIVITIES OF THE STAVROPOL AND KRASNODAR BRANCHES OF THE UNION OF WRITERS AS A TOOL OF STRENGTHENING THE NEW COMMUNITY «SOVIET PEOPLE» IN THE CONDITIONS OF A NEW POLITICAL COURSE (1956-1964)

Abstract

The article examines the activities of the Stavropol and Krasnodar branches of the Writers’ Union in the context of the new political course of 1956-1964. Based on the analysis of archival sources and materials from central and local periodicals, the author shows the specifics of the cultural policy of the party and state leadership in the context of its implementation on the ground using the example of the activities of the regional branches of the Writers’ Union.The article analyzes in detail the material on the approach of the capital’s creative intelligentsia to the needs of regional cultural workers. In this context, the material about the holding in June 1964 in the Krasnodar Territory of the Plenum of the Board of the Writers’ Union of the RSFSR is interesting. The main issue on the agenda of the Plenum was “Problems of the modern village in the works of the writers of the Russian Federation”. Before the opening of the Plenum, in the spirit of the time when the thesis about the rapprochement of cultural workers with the life of city and village workers was popular, the guests visited collective and state farms, industrial enterprises of the region.The author paid attention to such a problem as the subject of literary works. The article shows that practically all creative activity was subordinated to party decisions and instructions. The indispensable party duty of every writer of the agrarian region was his direct participation in the implementation of the decisions of the central committee of the cPSU, devoting his work to the progressive people of agricultural production. Thus, the party’s agrarian policy formed the basis for the works of such writers as M. Usov, A. Isakov, P. Denisenko, I. Chumak.The article presents interesting material about the persecution of B. Pasternak in the regional organizations of writers after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for the novel Doctor Zhivago. The regional branches of the Writers’ Union were necessarily involved in these campaigns. The writers’ associations of the Kuban and Stavropol regions also contributed. The author showed how at the end of October 1958 a meeting of writers and literary activists was organized in the Stavropol branch of the Writers’ Union.The reason for this was the article by D. Zaslavsky «The noise of reactionary propaganda around the literary weed», published in the newspaper «Pravda» on October 26. Within the framework of this article, the issue of the recognition of regional literature was raised, as evidenced by the days of Kuban culture in Moscow on April 16-17, 1961. This recognition is evidenced by the publication of the Stavropol writer S. Babaevsky in the magazine «Yunost» of his new story «Suhaya Buivola».

Keywords

• writers’ union
• artistic intelligentsia
• «khrushchev thaw»
• social life
• cultural policy
• the southern province
• marxist-leninist ideology