Stalin once, famously, called writers "the engineers of human souls". It's a striking phrase, odd, eerie, uncomfortable. Yet chillingly beautiful, too, resonant and unforgettable: its author could not have been insensitive to literature.
Stalin, of course, did massive human-engineering works, tinkering not perhaps with the souls but certainly with the structure of writers' lives in a way that made creative existence - or even physical survival - impossible for many. He was a principal architect in 1932-34 of the "socialist realism" which was to govern the artistic output of that highly creative country for the next half-century. Demanding that art should deal with "typical characters under typical circumstances" (although only the rosiest view of revolutionary life counted as "typical"), it was obviously mendacious and blinkered - but also an almost risible attempt at artistic control over a literary tradition that was essentially allusive, metaphorical, satiric.
Stalin also - as we all know - waged against writers one of the most consistent and merciless campaigns of margin-alisation, repression, persecution and murder that the world has seen. Yet - to return to that haunting phrase of his - the tension of brutality and beauty within it well reflect Stalin's feelings about books and writers. Russian tyrants have always known the unique power of writers in that country, and attempts at silencing these troublesome beings were usually the result of fear - as with Pushkin or Dostoevsky under the Tsarist authorities. That rulers bothered with such measures shows their awareness of the artists' enormous potential influence, and that as individuals they too felt some of the same strange awe and love and almost-veneration towards writers that they feared in their people.
It was so with Stalin. In the terrible catalogue of his years in power, we don't in fact see the ruthlessly efficient Man of Steel simply batting away everyone who displeased him, or who did not fit the socialist mould. The story is more random, more full of contradictions, chance and personal dislike or prejudice - as well as personal admiration, respect, even perhaps love. There were writers Stalin loved - Maxim Gorky, principally; writers he tolerated and even promoted, on sometimes mysterious grounds - Mikhail Bulgakov, for instance; and thousands of tragic others whose fate was brutal and immediate, sometimes again for no obvious reason.
Stalin was not much interested in visual art, intent only on imposing the iron-fisted kitsch of socialist realism. But if he relentlessly harassed and destroyed the artists of the early Bolshevik era - Malevich, Rodchenko, Lissitsky and many other talents - and brought to an abrupt end the exuberant creativity of that time, with its spiky modernism and spirit of experiment, he didn't perpetrate Taliban-style destruction. We still have much of this work; a box of matches would have seen to it that we didn't.
But literature was different, for Stalin. He had had a scanty formal education but had become the consummate autodidact, surprisingly well and widely read. French authors such as Stendhal and Balzac were favourites of his - and these sociologically acute Frenchmen he considered more in tune with socialist principles than great Russians such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, with their "excessive" moral and religious concerns. Stalin was reputed to read every new book submitted for the Stalin Prize, sometimes annotating them and telephoning the author to discuss his reactions.
Stalin's judgments on writers past and present show no consistent pattern. He declared Mayakovsky the great poet of the Bolshevik era, even though that brilliant enfant terrible of Revolution had become a thorn in the side of Lenin, who once called his work "double-dyed silliness". Mayakovsky's unconventional personal life shocked the prudish Bolsheviks, and he was always stridently at the centre of experimental groups of modernists, futurists and artistic radicals of all sorts in cinema, theatre, design and visual arts as well as literature - everything, in fact, that socialist realism hated and was set to stamp out. What's more, in 1930 Mayakovsky had taken the irretrievably bourgeois step of killing himself in despair and disillusion - but perhaps that meant he was safe for adulation, since he was safely out of the way.
Boris Pasternak was not out of the way, and was one whom Stalin might easily have chosen to destroy. He had never conformed to the socialist-realist model, nor indeed before Stalin's era had he fitted into the prevailing orthodoxy. He was an idealist, an individualist; his autobiographical work discussed pre-revolutionary influences: many people died for less. Yet, as legend has it, Stalin is supposed to have instructed his henchmen to "leave that cloud-dweller alone".
The cloud-dweller, however, survived but did not fare well, forced into silence, or the relative safety of translation work. And in the Khrushchev era Pasternak suffered the most savage official persecution after the publication in the west of Doctor Zhivago and his 1958 Nobel Prize - which he was forced to decline.
Another who survived the Stalin years in the body-armour of silence was Anna Akhmatova, already an acclaimed poet before the Revolution. Her first husband, the poet Nikolai Gumilyov, was shot in 1921, and her work was banned there-after. Her son was arrested; her long-time lover executed; she saw the disappearance of her great friend and fellow poet Osip Mandelstam - but she survived. The slight thaw of the war years meant that she could publish again for a short time in the 1940s, but not for long. Like Pasternak she survived by translating; she complained that for a poet such work was "like devouring one's own brains". But at least she lived to work and publish again, and to inspire the next generation.
Every movement must have its heroes, and Stalin's regime found a candidate with impeccable credentials in Maxim Gorky. An autodidact like Stalin, Gorky was born in 1868, orphaned and alone on the streets at the age of 11, scratching a living among the poorest of the urban underclass. By the age of 30, however, he had become a prominent member of the pre-revolutionary leftist intelligentsia and a successful playwright and novelist. He joined the Bolshevik Party in 1905, and remained the established literary chronicler of the proletariat and its terrifying deprivations. For Stalin, he was perfect: a socialist writer before socialism was invented, his 1906 novel Mother was held up as a socialist-realist template. He was also strikingly good-looking, charismatic and extremely tough-minded.
But Gorky's attitude towards the Brave New World was ambivalent. Lenin had allowed him to live abroad between 1921 and 1931, ostensibly for his health, on a sort of licensed parole basis - he never broke with the Bolshevik regime, used his influence to help other writers and artists, and published his new work in the USSR. In 1931 he made a triumphant return, and in the early 1930s became the front-man of socialist realism at home and a cultural ambassador abroad. He lived in style in a pre-1917 art deco mansion in Moscow, and his house became a sort of literary-politburo HQ frequented socially by all the Kremlin gratin and their families; he was probably one of the richest individuals in Russia.
When Gorky died in 1936 he was given a lavish state funeral, and for the next several decades his status as the greatest Russian writer of the 20th century stayed officially intact. Yet many people think that the circumstances of his death are suspicious, and the jury is still out on his real literary merits. The big question that remains is whether Stalin's literary standard-bearer carried his flag willingly to the end - or whether he was overtaken by revulsion at what he had been so implicated in. Still, for Stalin he was another safely dead literary hero.
Even stranger, in some ways, was Stalin's relationship with Mikhail Bul- gakov. He had struggled to survive as a playwright in 1920s Moscow, with some success, and published novels and sketches about the horrors he had witnessed during the civil war - not a subject to endear him to the authorities. By 1929 all his dramatic work had been proscribed, leaving him with no source of income, and he took the bold move of writing to Stalin to ask permission to go abroad. The result was a historic telephone call from the Kremlin. "Where, comrade Bulgakov, do you think a Russian writer should live and work?" Stalin asked. In an answer that probably saved his life, Bulgakov replied that a true Russian writer could only flourish in Russia - but that he had to eat.
In one of those strokes of apparent whimsy that characterised the man, Stalin immediately re-assigned Bulgakov to the Moscow Arts Theatre. It was there that Bulgakov's The Days of the Turbins had opened, played succesfully, been banned, was revived. Since the play followed the themes of his The White Guard -about the fate of intellectuals and Tsarist officers caught up in the revolution - it was bizarre not just that the play was performed at all, but that - odder still - it was one of Stalin's favourites.
Though he was now deeply in Stalin's debt, Bulgakov was not one to shut up. He wrote a play called Molie re, or The Cabal of Hypocrites, about a writer's struggle for artistic freedom. It took four years to get through the censors, and came off after a handful of performances; other work was banned before rehearsals began. Bulgakov spent his last years on his masterpiece novel, The Master and Margarita - in which Stalin is cast as Pontius Pilate - and died in 1940, aged 49. But at least he died at home in his bed. Why Stalin allowed him to do that is almost impossible to say.
This may be a good moment to reflect on the whimsicality of dictators. The relationship between Stalin and these writers shows how the brutal logic of repression can co-exist with an apparently random sentimentality - almost a skittishness - which in its unpredictability can come to seem almost more terrible. In that rich world of Russian letters, a few thrived, a few survived, many were destroyed, or compromised, or died. And we'll never know why.