Alexey Surkov

Alexey Alexandrovich Surkov (Russian: Алексе́й Алекса́ндрович Сурко́в; October 13, 1899 – June 14, 1983) was a Russian Soviet poet, editor, literary critic and high-profile nomenklatura figure, the head of the Soviet Union of Writers in 1953–1959, notorious for his role in the persecution of Boris Pasternak.

Early career

Alexei Surkov was born in the village of Serednevo, in Yaroslavl region. At the age of 12 or 13, he was sent to work in a factory in St. Petersburg, where he joined the shipworkers' union after the February Revolution. He served in the Red Army for four years, during the Russian Civil War, and subsequently worked for Komsomol. He started publishing poetry in 1930, as a Komsomol activist and a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, who believed that soviet art should be politically committed and pro-communist.

During a writers' meeting in April 1932, after Stalin had ordered RAPP and all other literary groups to disband and merge into a single writers' union, Surkov launched an attack on Boris Pasternak, calling him a "subjective idealist ... (for whom) the world is not outside us but inside us."

At the first First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Surkov was the first speaker to be called to rebut the report on poetry delivered by Nikolai Bukharin, who had praised Pasternak. Surkov claimed that there was no such thing as "abstract craftmanship", that good poetry must have a Bolshevik tinge, and that Pasternak's work was "not a suitable compass point by which to chart our growth." Surkov own work has been described as "jingoistic verses, glorifying the heroism of the civil war. During the Great Purge, he wrote a poem vilifying Old Bolsheviks who had been forced to appear as defendants at the Moscow show trials, confessing to crimes that they had not committed.