USSR Union of Writers
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The USSR Union of Writers, or Union of Soviet Writers was a creative union of professional writers in the USSR. It was founded in 1932 on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party
The aim of the Union was to achieve Party and State control in the field of literature. For professional writers, membership of the Union became effectively obligatory, and non-members had much more limited opportunities for publication. The result was that exclusion from the Union meant a virtual ban on publication. In spite of this, the history of the Union of Writers also saw cases of voluntary self-exclusion from its cadre. Thus Vasily Aksenov, Simeon Lipkin and Inna Lisnyanskaya left the Union of Writers in a show of solidarity following the exclusion of Victor Yerofeev and Evgenie Popova in punishment for self-publishing.
After the fall of USSR, the Union of Soviet Writers was divided into separate organizations for each of the Post-Soviet states. The Russian section was transformed into the Union of Russian Writers
The post of chair of the Union of Writers has been held by:
- Maxim Gorky (1934-1936)
- Vladimir Petrovich Stavsky (1936-1938)
- Alexander Fadeyev (1938-1944 and 1946-1954)
- Nikolay Tikhonov (1944-1946)
- Nikolai Semyenovich Surkov (1954-1959)
- Konstantin Fedin (1959-1977)
- George Mokeevich Markov (1977-1986)
- Vladimir Vasilievich Karpov (1986-1991)
