In 1918 Kirpichnikov, now a Russian Communist Party (b) (RKP(B)) member, was transferred to the Caucasian Front's First Army's HQ, joined the local military section of Cheka, and by the end of the Civil War had been a brigade commissar.

Three years later, now a secretary of the Northern Caucasian Association of Proletarian Writers (СКАПП), and the Communist Party official superintending the stocking up of wheat harvest in Kuban, he joined Na Podyome (On the Rise) magazine as its editor-in-chief.

[2] In 1932, under the guidance of the CPSU Central Committee, Stavsky took active part in the formation of the Soviet Union of Writers, of which he became the General Secretary in 1936, after Maxim Gorky's death.

Pasternak crossed Stavsky by refusing to sign an Open Letter calling for death sentences for Grigori Zinoviev and the other defendants at the show trial of August 1936.

[3] Mikhail Sholokhov might have been the victim of his overzealousness too: after paying a visit to the And Quiet Flows the Don author on 16 September 1937, Stavsky wrote a personal report to Stalin, accusing the latter of being 'politically misguided'.