[2] Using his literary pseudonym, Ilya Vardin, Mgeladze was a founder of the All-Russian Association of Proletarian Writers (VAPP), and editor of its magazine, Na Postu (On Guard), launched in 1923.

According to the writer, Ilya Ehrenburg, "the Na Postu group abused everybody – Alexey Tolstoy and Mayakovsky, Vsevolod Ivanov and Yesenin, Akhmatova and Veresayev.

"[4] They also constantly attacked the magazine Krasnaya Nov and its editor, Aleksandr Voronsky, for publishing literature by 'fellow travellers' -ie writers sympathetic to the revolution who were not proletarian.

"[6] Afterwards, the Politburo adopted a cautiously worded resolution that warned against a "frivolous and careless" attitude to the old cultural legacy, and that the party should 'fight attempts at purely hothouse 'proletarian' literature".

Their son, Leonid, was arrested as a member of a family of an 'enemy of the people' and sentenced to five years in prison, then was conscripted and sent to the front line during the war with Germany, but survived to become an eminent saxophonist.