Returning to Russia in July 1917, Kerzhentsev worked for the newspaper
Novaya Zhizn until 1918, when he was appointed deputy editor-chief of
Izvestia. In 1919-1920, he was director of
ROSTA, forerunner of the
TASS news agency. In 1920, he was part of the soviet delegations during negotiations with Finland, then held senior posts in the People's Commissariat of Foreign Affairs. In 1921-23, he was
soviet plenipotentiary in Sweden. He opposed
piece work and other incentives which he believed would create a 'working class aristocracy. In 1925-26, he was
Soviet plenipotentiary in Italy in 1925–26, and deputy head of the Central Statistical Administration, 1926–28. In 1927, he published an article attacking the
Moscow Art Theatre over its staging of
The Marriage of Figaro, because it depicted relations between "very pleasant aristocrats" and their servants as "friendly and peaceful", instead of accentuating the class struggle, which he claimed was what the writer,
Pierre-Augustin de Beaumarchais, had intended. He took a particular exception to the playwright,
Mikhail Bulgakov. In January 1929, he played a pivotal part in getting Bulgakov's fourth play,
Flight, banned. He then wrote an article that appeared in
Pravda on 7 February 1929, alleging that the Ukrainian people were being insulted by a play performed at the Moscow Arts Theatre, his obvious target being Bulgakov's first and best known play,
The Day of the Turbins known to western audiences as
The White Guard, set in
Kyiv. He criticised the People's Commissar for Enlightenment,
Anatoli Lunacharsky for allowing it to be staged. The play was suppressed in March 1929, but later revived, because Stalin liked it. He resumed his campaign in February 1935, after the first two performances of Bulgakov's last play,
Moliere, or "
The Cabal of Hypocrites had sold out. Kerzhentsev wrote to
Joseph Stalin as
General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, alleging that the play was an allegory which drew a parallel between Molière's humiliating treatment by Louis XIV and the treatment of Soviet artists - which very likely was Bulgakov's intention. The play was immediately banned.
Shostakovich When the
Soviet Union was founded, cultural policy was devolved to the governments of the component republics. This changed in January 1936, with the creation, on 17 January, of the
State Committee on the Arts, with Kerzhentsev as its inaugural chairman, which meant that he was responsible for theatre, opera and music, painting and sculpture, as well as all the other art forms. Within days of its formation, two articles appeared in Pravda attacking
Dmitri Shostakovich over his opera
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, and another of hjis works. The composer turned to Kerzhentsev for advice, and was told to write less complex music that the masses could understand.
'Formalist' art On May 19, 1936, Kerzhentsev sent a Memorandum “On the need to remove from museum exhibitions paintings of the Russian avant-garde, paintings of "
Knave of Diamonds" group and other formalist groups” jointly addressed to Stalin and to
Vyacheslav Molotov as
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars saying that: He appealed to Stalin and Molotov to approve “the removal of paintings of formalist sort from the general exhibition halls of Tretyakov Gallery and Russian Museum in Leningrad. Simultaneously, he asked them to permit special exhibitions of the realist artists
Ilya Repin,
Vasily Surikov and
Rembrandt “for the purpose of promoting realistic art”. In June 1936, he published article “About the Tretyakov gallery” in “Pravda”, where he repeated the thesis already mentioned in his Memorandum of May 19, 1936:
Meyerhold In November 1937, during preparations to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Kerzhentsev and other officials went to watch a production of the play
One Life, by
Nikolai Ostrovsky, directed by Russia's best known experimental theatre director,
Vsevolod Meyerhold, at the theatre named after him. On 17 December, Kerzhentsev launched an attack on the production, and the director, alleging that "Meyerhold cannot and, apparently, will not comprehend Soviet reality or depict the problems which concern every Soviet citizen..." The Meyerhold theatre was closed three weeks later, and Meyerhold was arrested, tortured, and killed. ==Dismissal and Later Life==