The final days of Russian writers: Maxim Gorky

On June 18, 1936, Maxim Gorky, Russian writer, died at the age of 68. An excerpt from the article:

"As the 1930s drew on, Gorky’s position within Soviet society became more conflicted. He led the propaganda campaign for the White Sea Canal, which was built with heavy loss of life by prisoners of the Gulag. In his book “The Gulag Archipelago,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn characterizes Gorky’s actions during this period as “material self-interest” rather than delusion.

The first congress of the Union of Soviet Writers was scheduled for the summer of 1934, and Gorky was asked to give the opening speech. However, in May of that year the writer’s son, Maxim Peshkov, died days after returning from a binge with Genrikh Yagoda, the Soviet Interior Minister.

There was speculation that Maxim had been killed to frighten Gorky and prevent him from making unwanted comments or inflammatory speeches during the congress. Whatever the truth, Gorky was devastated, and the congress had to be postponed until August. The writer did ultimately appear, giving a seminal speech on the future of Soviet literature.

The strain between Gorky and Stalin continued to grow, until relations broke down completely in June 1935. Gorky pulled out of the First International Congress of Writers in Paris at the last minute, citing health problems.

Although Gorky really was very ill with tuberculosis, Stalin took it as an unpardonable betrayal, particularly as Russia had organized the event itself. Gorky was forbidden from communicating with foreign writers and was placed under constant surveillance, hardly leaving his luxury mansion in the center of Moscow.

Rumor has it that in Gorky’s last years Stalin asked him to write his biography, but the writer firmly refused. The Russian historian Arkady Vaksberg claims that Gorky did not die from heart disease as the official version states but was poisoned on Stalin’s orders. However, this is unproven, and in any case the writer was a very sick man by this late stage in his life.

When the Maxim Gorky finally died, his brain was surgically removed within a couple of hours. It is still held in the Neurological Institute in Moscow, along with the brains of Mayakovsky, Lenin, and many other Russian thinkers, writers and politicians."