Aleksandr Voronsky
The local organisers, Sergei Malyshev and Maria Ulyanova, younger sister of the Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, initially turned him away because they thought he was too excitable and liable to buckle under arrest.
When the February Revolution came, he became a member of the Odessa Executive Committee of the Council of Workers' Deputies and edited the local Bolshevik newspaper, Golos proletariya (Voice of the Proletariat).
After the October Revolution, he helped the Bolsheviks take power in Odessa and in early 1918 moved to Saratov, Moscow, and then Ivanovo, where he assisted his friend Mikhail Frunze, edited the newspaper Rabochii krai (Workers' Land), and headed the provincial Party Committee.
Krasnaya Nov was a revival of a 19th century Russian tradition of the 'thick' journal - a periodical containing hundreds of pages, with sections on history, science, literature etc.
Contributors to early issues included high ranking Bolsheviks - Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya, Nikolai Bukharin, Karl Radek, Yevgeni Preobrazhensky the late Rosa Luxemburg and others - who wrote "not the polite testimonials one might expect of busy politicians, but substantial and thoughtful articles.
[8] Voronsky also hosted literary evenings in his double room in the Hotel National, Moscow, where writers and leading Bolsheviks met, everyone brought a bottle of red wine and poetry or prose was read by their authors.
When the Press Section of the Central Committee convened the first officially sponsored debate on literary politics, held over two days in May 1924, Voronsky was the main speaker in defence of 'fellow travellers', backed by Trotsky, Radek, Bukharin, Anatoly Lunacharsky and other major Bolsheviks, while his leading opponents, Vardin, and Leopold Averbakh were relatively minor figures.
[13] In October 1923, Voronsky signed The Declaration of 46, drawn up by Bolsheviks who were backing Trotsky in the power struggle that developed while Lenin was terminally ill.
In an autobiography, published in 1927, he described hearing Trotsky speak at a public meeting in 1917 - "His words were cooling, sober, and among the jubilation and joyful excitement they sounded for the first time for me on that day, the exorbitance and heaviness of the paths of the revolution, the inflexibility and ruthlessness of its iron heel, its calculation and its will to subdue chaos and the elements.
[15] Voronsky expounded the idea of aesthetic evaluation, an exercise in dialectical materialism that combined the search for objective truth with the complexity of human emotion and feeling.
Voronsky, in agreement with Trotsky, viewed art as an exercise between the subjective and the objective world of the artist to facilitate a deeper understanding of humanity.
Artistic truth is determined and established precisely through such an evaluation.Voronsky's friendship with Trotsky, which was an asset at the start of the controversy over 'proletarian literature' became the cause of his political destruction, and death.
By January 1925, Voronsky was no longer listed as an editor, but soon afterwards he was reinstated and Raskolnikov had been removed - possibly because Maxim Gorky had angrily refused to contribute to the journal under the new editorship.
In a reply, published in Pravda, the head of the Press Section of the Central Committee, Sergei Gusev accused Voronsky of being a Trotskyist, and/or a Socialist Revolutionary.
However, his work remained heavily censored and devoid of the criticism of socialist realism as well as of the growing Stalinist bureaucracy from his time with the Left Opposition.
