Ivan Gronsky

[2] He had a few pieces published in radical newspapers, for which he was invited by Maxim Gorky to his home, when he met some of Russia's leading cultural figures.

[1] After the Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 (old style), Gronsky was elected to represent soldiers from his infantry division on the Dvina front.

[3] Gronsky broke with the Socialist Revolutionaries when right wing SRs, led by Boris Savinkov attempted a coup against Bolshevik rule in Yaroslavl in 1918.

In 1930 Gronsky persuaded Pilnyak to write the novel The Volga Flows to the Caspian Sea, celebrating the drive to industrialise Russia, which rehabilitated him in the eyes of the communist leadership.

[5] In April 1932, Gronsky was appointed a member of a five-man commission to review the situation in the soviet arts, in the wake of the disbanding of RAPP.

Shortly before the commission met, he was summoned to a private session with Joseph Stalin, in which they discussed literary politics, and came up with the term Socialist Realism to define what was to be the official style of soviet literature for the remainder of the 1930s.

The poet Boris Pasternak thought he was "stupid", telling the visiting French writer André Gide that Gronsky had introduced a practice of printing a portrait of Stalin and a poem to his glory in almost every issue of Novy Mir, and that he talked in political cliches - "but it is impossible to blame him for that".

He was sacked from the editorship in April 1937 for his alleged lack of 'Bolshevik vigilance' - ie for having published work by Pilnyak, Galina Serebryakova and others now under arrest, and by Boris Pasternak, who was under suspicion.