Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks), Decree on the Reconstruction of Literary and Artistic Organizations. April 23, 1932

Here the Party Central Committee passes a resolution abolishing all proletarian organizations in literature and other arts and decreeing the formation of a single Union of Soviet Writers.

The Central Committee states that over recent years literature and art have made considerable advances, both quantitative and qualitative, on the basis of the significant progress of Socialist construction.

A few years ago the influence of alien elements, especially those revived by the first years of NEP, was still apparent and marked. At this time, when the cadres of proletarian literature were still weak, the Party helped in every possible way to create and consolidate special proletarian organs in the field of literature and art in order to maintain the position of proletarian writers and art workers.

At the present time the cadres of proletarian literature and art have managed to expand, new writers and artists have come forward from the factories, plants, and collective farms, but the confines of the existing proletarian literature and art organizations (VOAPP, RAPP, RATIM, etc.) are becoming too narrow and are hampering the serious development of artistic creation. This factor creates a danger: these organizations might change from being an instrument for the maximum mobilization of Soviet writers and artists for the tasks of Socialist construction to being an instrument for cultivating elitist withdrawal and loss of contact with the political tasks of the present and with the important groups of writers and artists who sympathize with Socialist construction.

Hence the need for the appropriate reconstruction of literary and artistic organizations and the extension of the basis of their activity.

Following from this, the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) decrees:

1. Liquidation of the Association of Proletarian Writers (VOAPP, RAPP).

2. Integration of all writers who support the platform of the Soviet government and who aspire to participate in Socialist construction in a single union of Soviet writers with a Communist faction therein.

3. Execution of analogous changes with regard to the other arts.

4. Charging of the Organizational Bureau with working out practical measures for the fulfillment of this resolution.

Source: John E. Bowlt, ed., Russian Art of the Avant-garde: theory and criticism, 1902-1934 (New York: Viking Press, 1976), pp. 288-290.