First Congress of Soviet Writers

The Congress began with an open air event on 8 August 1934, held by moonlight in the Moscow Park of Culture and Rest, attended by a crowd numbering tens of thousands,[2] and continued for fifteen days in Moscow's Hall of Columns, which was decorated for the occasion by huge portraits of Shakespeare, Balzac, Cervantes, Tolstoy, Gogol, Pushkin and others.

Most of the writers then living in the Soviet Union whose reputations have outlived the Stalin era, such as Anna Akhmatova, Mikhail Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov were not delegates to the Congress.

According to Ilya Ehrenburg: All the delegations 'presented claims': the women textile-workers wanted a novel about weavers, the railwaymen said that writers neglected transport problems, the miners asked for a description of the Donbas, inventors insisted on inventor-heroes ...

[4]The main business of the Congress, conducted at the end, was to agree to create the Union of Soviet Writers, and the composition of its governing bodies.

Some, including Gorky and Zhdanov, died of natural causes, or were killed during the war with Germany, but a very large proportion are likely to have been victims of the Great Purge, during which Bukharin, Stetsky and Babel were executed, and Radek was sent to the Gulag, where he was murdered.