ABSTRACT
A revolution, then, for Louis Fischer consists of a sudden feeling of “disgust” in “highest quarters” with the regime which they have been cherishing for a decade. It consists of the fact that at last for some mysterious reason “complaints begin to reach” these “highest quarters” in their isolation from all public information. The truth in Auerbach’s contrary statement is that Stalin used this monstrous growth of bigotry, this Auerbach, this “Marxo-Leninist” esthetic Inquisition, to purge the literary world of “Trotskyism,” of honest and courageous revolutionary critics. Moreover, so far from constituting a “revolution,” or even a fundamental change in the relations between art and practical politics in the Soviet Union, that decree of April 23rd merely emphasized the central feature of it, the arbitrary and absolute domination of creative effort, so far as that is humanly possible, by the inside clique in a bureaucratically organized political machine of power.
