Overview

"The USSR's Writers' Union, a form of cultural and political organization unknown to the West, has ruled every aspect of Russian writers personal and professional lives from the time of Stalin to Gorbachev. John and Carol Garrard provide a rare and informed view of how this powerful institution has worked to influence a writer's life, words, ideas and publications over the last five decades. Based on extensive research and interviews with Soviet writers and officials, both inside and outside Russia, the book portrays the ""non-governmental"" Union as a unique microcosm of Party structure and ideology as well as an extensive, paternalistic club whose members form a social and economic elite."

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9781850432609

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This dully written, fact-choked look from the outside at the Soviet Writers' Union is unable to step back from its subjects; the Garrards have their foreheads to the glass and never take an ironic breath. But everything you wanted to know - and more - about this extremely cozy and influential piece of the Russian apparat is here: its dismal history of inquisition (writers make wonderful policemen when they're not creatively engaged: let no one rise higher than me), the daily perks, the Soviet publishing system, the dizzying array of editorial knives a poor manuscript passes under as though a dead chicken in a slaughterhouse. Gorbachev's attempts to reform the Union with glasnost and perestroika are, as elsewhere in the society, striking; as are the Garrards' tales of individual heroism when union members have (infrequently) protested some shabby treatment or other. For the most part, though, it's a book that better might have been a magazine article, hampered as it is by non-first-hand experience. (Kirkus Reviews)

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