Early career Vladimir Petrovich Kirpichnikov was born in
Penza, to a family of a
cabinet-maker. After his mother's death in 1915, he went to work, in 1918 joined the
Red Army and soon became a commander of a fighting unit engaged in the suppression of numerous anti-
Bolshevik mutinies. 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.
Head of the Union of Writers 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. As such, Stavsky sanctioned the suppression and subsequent prosecution of many prominent literary figures.
Boris Pasternak, who survived, was one of his first targets. 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. Stavsky forged Pasternak's signature on the letter, and delivered a long complaint against Pasternak at a writers' meeting in December.
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 Sholokhov of being 'politically misguided'. In his 1938 letter to the
NKVD narkom Nikolai Yezhov, Stavsky demanded to "resolve the question of
Mandelshtam," labeling the latter's poetry as 'obscene and libelous'. Soon after that, the poet was arrested and sentenced to five years of hard labour. In the same letter Stavsky condemned
Valentin Katayev and
Iosif Prut for "defending Mandelshtam violently." During 1938, he kept a private diary, in which he recorded his growing fear for his own future. In August, he told a fellow official,
Pyotr Pospelov "Sooner or later it will all be clear who it was that wanted to do me in, a good Stalinist and Bolshevik."
World War II and death (second from left), member of the Military Council A.A. Lobachev and Pravda correspondent Vladimir Stavsky inspect enemy equipment captured by Soviet troops, December 10, 1941. As World War II broke out, Stavsky relinquished his posts and, as a war correspondent, went first to Mongolia then to the Finnish War (where he was heavily injured), the
Western and the
Kalinin Fronts. Stavsky, the only Soviet author to have received two
Orders of the Red Banner before 1941, was lauded for bravery by colleagues. In November 1943, accompanying the Red Army sniper Klavdia Ivanova, he entered the neutral zone nearby
Nevel in Pskov region, where he was killed. Vladimir Petrovich Stavsky is interred in
Velikiye Luki, where one of the streets bears his name. ==Bibliography==