Isaak Babel - Clashes With The Authorities

Clashes With The Authorities

In 1930, Babel travelled in Ukraine and witnessed the brutality of forced collectivisation and dekulakisation. Although he never made a public statement about this, he privately confided in Antonina,

"The bounty of the past is gone -- it is due to the famine in Ukraine and the destruction of the village across our land."

As Stalin tightened his grip on the Soviet intelligentsia and decreed that all writers and artists must conform to socialist realism, Babel increasingly withdrew from public life. During the campaign against, "Formalism", Babel was publicly denounced for low productivity. At the time, many other Soviet writers were terrified and frantically rewrote their past work to conform to Stalin's wishes. However, Babel was unimpressed and confided in his protégé, the writer Ilya Ehrenburg, "In six months time, they'll leave the formalists in peace and start some other campaign."

At the first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers (1934), Babel noted ironically, that he was becoming "the master of a new literary genre, the genre of silence." American Max Eastman describes Babel's increasing reticence as an artist in a chapter called "The Silence of Isaac Babyel" in his 1934 book Artists in Uniform.