Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks)

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks) is presented through the working life of Efraim Ivanov, a party member since 1902, rather than through an institutional portrait. Ivanov writes and edits pamphlets, procures paper, and acts as a liaison with sympathetic writers; after the revolution, his duties multiply even as his literary prospects falter. He sponsors Boris Abramovich Ansky’s admission to the party, but in 1935 the party expels Ivanov, and the following year he is arrested during the Great Purge. Across these episodes, membership is both a daily commitment and a source of exposure to political discipline.

Ivanov’s Party Work

Before the revolution, Ivanov sustains himself through a succession of jobs, including work for scientific and agricultural journals, proofreading, selling lightbulbs, and clerical work in a lawyer’s office. Alongside this unstable employment, he continues his party service without complaint. His tasks are practical as well as literary: he writes and edits pamphlets, finds paper, and connects the party with like-minded writers and fellow travelers. The passage makes political commitment visible as labor performed alongside the means of earning a living, not merely as a declared belief.

The revolution brings no improvement to Ivanov’s professional prospects. Instead, his party duties double, sometimes triple or quadruple, while he continues to carry them out. His eventual success as a writer comes through a science-fiction story, “The Train Through the Urals,” which he writes in three hours at a request for a story about Russian life in 1940. Its reception is overwhelming, but that success belongs to a period in which literary work and party service remain intertwined, rather than replacing one another.

Sponsoring Ansky

Ivanov’s connection to the party also shapes his relationship with the young Boris Abramovich Ansky. Despite reservations about Ansky’s temperament and artistic self-conception, Ivanov accepts what the narrative describes as an offer too tempting to refuse. A month later, Ansky joins the party with Ivanov and Ivanov’s former lover Margarita Afanasievna as his sponsors.

Ansky’s papers compare the occasion to a wedding. The group celebrates at the writers’ restaurant and then visits several Moscow bars. The episode gives party membership a social and personal setting: admission is not recorded as a bare administrative act, but as a milestone among writers and their companions. Ivanov’s sponsorship places him in the role of intermediary between the party and a younger writer whose experiences and ideas have drawn his interest.

Expulsion and Repression

In 1935, Ivanov’s novels are removed from bookstores, and an official notice informs him that he has been expelled from the party. According to Ansky, Ivanov spends three days unable to get out of bed, with his three novels beside him. He rereads them, searching for grounds that might explain the decision, and handles their spines as he tries to make sense of the rupture. The scene links institutional exclusion to the loss of literary standing and to a profound personal disorientation.

The consequences deepen the next year, when Ivanov is arrested at the beginning of the Great Purge. He spends four months in a cell and signs the papers placed before him. After his release, former literary friends avoid him. He writes to Maxim Gorky asking him to intervene, but Gorky, gravely ill, does not answer; after Gorky dies, Ivanov attends the burial. When two members of Gorky’s circle challenge his presence, Ivanov explains that Gorky had written to him and liked his novel, and that attending is the least he can do for him. The party’s power is thus registered not only in formal expulsion and arrest but also in the social isolation that follows.

Political Belonging and Literary Life

The novel gives no general account of the party’s structure or policies; its institutional presence emerges through Ivanov’s work, sponsorship, expulsion, and arrest. This narrow focus makes the contrast especially sharp: the same man who serves the party for decades and helps bring Ansky into it can be removed from its ranks and imprisoned. The account does not reduce Ivanov’s literary disappointments to party politics, but it shows political belonging as a material condition of his life, bound to work, publication, reputation, and danger.