11 Facts About Alexey Surkov

Alexei Surkov was born in the village of Serednevo, in Yaroslavl region.

Alexey Surkov served in the Red Army for four years, during the Russian Civil War, and subsequently worked for Komsomol.

Alexey Surkov started publishing poetry in 1930, as a Komsomol activist and a member of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers, who believed that soviet art should be politically committed and pro-communist.

At the first First Congress of Soviet Writers in 1934, Alexey Surkov was the first speaker to be called to rebut the report on poetry delivered by Nikolai Bukharin, who had praised Pasternak.

In October 1953, Alexey Surkov was appointed First Secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers.

On this occasion, Alexey Surkov was acting on instruction from the Central Committee.

In October 1957, after Pasternak had passed a manuscript of his novel Doctor Zhivago to the Italian communist and publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, knowing that it would be banned in the USSR, Alexey Surkov travelled to Italy to try to persuade Feltrinelli not to publish it.

Alexey Surkov compared this affair to the publication abroad in 1929 of the banned novel Mahogany, whose author, Boris Pilnyak, was subjected to public vilification, which was interpreted as a threat that the same was in store for Pasternak.

In November, Alexey Surkov addressed a large meeting of writers and artists, warning them against "attempts to canonise" Pasternak, and attacked recent revived interest in artists who had suffered censorship or worse during the 1930s - Vsevolod Meyerhold, Mikhail Bulgakov, Pilnyak, Isaac Babel and Marina Tsvetaeva.

When Pasternak was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1958, Alexey Surkov was summoned to the Kremlin to brief the head of the communist party, Nikita Khrushchev:.

Alexey Surkov said that Pasternak was a scoundrel and God knows what else and that his poems were terribly anti-Soviet and his influence on Russian literature baleful.