From Moscow, TIME Correspondent John Hersey cabled this account of Soviet writing and publishing in 1944:
The Russian alphabet is still away at war. Even on the eve of victory not a word is written in this country which is not a weapon. Every sentence written in Russia must help beat Hitler or help build a Communist Russia that will make another such war impossible.
Maxim Gorki had a singing phrase to describe the function of the writer—"the engineer of the human soul." During the Russian war this has certainly been true. Never before have Russian writers had such an audience. Never before have they had such immediate influence and such great responsibility. Perhaps J. B. Priestley exaggerated when he said that recent Russian writings had been "the conscience of the world," but they have unquestionably been the conscience of Russia.
To assess the worth of these works in American terms it is not enough to apply ordinary standards of literary criticism. The war is the thing, and as one writer says: "It is better to be without literary criticism than without victory." The only fair test is to see whether writers have fulfilled their aims. According to the chairman of the Writers' Union, their aims are, first, "to tell the truth about the war," and second, "to feel the heart and soul of the Soviet man."
State Publishing. The number of state publishing houses in the Soviet Union runs into the hundreds. The most important group of them is known as OGIZ— —initials for Obiedineniye Gosudarstvennikh Izdatelstv, meaning Amalgamated State Publishing Houses. It has seven member houses in Moscow and Leningrad and one in each of the 16 Soviet Republics.
OGIZ is a tremendous, self-contained industry. It publishes fiction, poetry, translations, pamphlets, broadsides and books on politics, music, art, science and agriculture. It controls the production of prints and colors. It runs 14 print shops like "The Model Printery" in Moscow, which hires 2.000 workers, and "The Printing House" in Leningrad, which printed the equivalent of 24 billion pages a year before the war. It has more than 3.000 book shops, stands and rare-book stores throughout Russia. It is an influence over writers, since no book may be published without the signature of the editor of a state house.
The Readers. There is a truly extraordinary demand for reading matter here which the state publishing houses cannot possibly satisfy for years to come. The Government has maintained a consistent and highly successful campaign to "liquidate illiteracy." The appetite here for literature is hard to imagine in America.
Books are extremely hard to buy on the open market. About three-quarters of all editions are sent directly to libraries, which are open to the public. A large list of military and political leaders, writers, doctors, scientists and engineers get monthly bulletins on forthcoming books and they have the privilege of checking off what they want and can buy up to one thousand rubles' worth each month. Most of what is left goes on the open market and is bought up in a matter of hours. The average price for a novel on the open market is ten rubles, or about $2 at the official rate of exchange.