Kremlin Efforts to Revive Soviet-Style Writers Union Won’t Work, Pryanikov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 3 – Kremlin efforts to revive the basic principle of the Soviet-era Writers Union in which writers will be well paid in exchange for writing what the regime wants won’t work, Pavel Pryanikov says. That approach didn’t work even at the end of Soviet times and there is even less reason to think it can be revived and work effectively now.
    Just as Putin has used cash to buy himself an army for his war in Ukraine, the commentator suggests, the Kremlin leader now wants to use cash to buy off the creative intelligentsia and in the first instance Russian writers (rosbalt.ru/news/2025-02-03/pavel-pryanikov-eto-ne-srabotalo-v-sssr-ne-srabotaet-i-segodnya-5314065).
    But that tactic did not work in the final decades of Soviet power, Pryanikov says; and there is even less reason to think it will work for Putin and his regime now.  At the end of Soviet times, writers who had willingly collected money from the Soviet state, “even the most faithful ones, directed to the camp of the vacillators” and in fact helped destroy the Soviet Union.
    A clear example of this, the commentator continues, is the case of Valentin Rasputin who generally stayed within the limits the Soviets set in order to collect his money but became the first to declare at the Congress of Peoples Deputies that Russians were fed up with feeding the periphery, the USSR should die, and an “’independent’ Russian Federation” should be set up.
    What agenda for writers could today’s Kremlin set? And how could they get Russians to read their books?  There are lots of competitors on the Internet and so “today it would be more profitable not to publish anything from such state writers but to pay them for their silence” because “the main thing is that they do not defect to the enemy’s camps.”
    Trying to get them to sell Putinism not only will not work but very likely will backfire when those asked to do so decide they can make more by crossing over to the camp of the opposition, Pryanikov says.