Curated playlist
Soviet male writers
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynAleksandr Solzhenitsyn watched Moscow's victory fireworks from a prison cell. He was a decorated Red Army captain.
- Andrei BelyIn Andrei Bely's novel Petersburg, a young man is assigned to kill his own father. The target is a government official.
- Mikhail BakhtinMikhail Bakhtin once tore up his own book prospectus to roll cigarettes.
- Garry KasparovGarry Kasparov won the world chess title at 22 by beating Anatoly Karpov 13-11.
- Mikhail BulgakovStalin phoned banned playwright Mikhail Bulgakov in 1930 and asked if he wanted to leave.
- Vladimir MayakovskyPoet Vladimir Mayakovsky once threw tea at his audiences. He later wrote propaganda posters for the Communist Party.
- Boris PasternakBoris Pasternak won the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature, then his government forced him to decline it.
- Maxim GorkyWriter Maxim Gorky visited a Soviet labor camp that had been staged for him, and he did not notice.
- Yevgeny ZamyatinYevgeny Zamyatin smuggled his banned novel We out of the Soviet Union. He wrote to Stalin and left in 1931.
- Dmitry MerezhkovskyDmitry Merezhkovsky's ruined reputation rests on a 1941 radio speech his biographer believes Nazis fabricated.