From Louis Aragon’s epic History of the USSR 1962 (1964)
“Although it may have been necessary to remind creative artists and writers of the national context of art and to dissuade them from a vulgar Imitation of foreign models often (though not necessarily) the vehicles of the ideology of a hostile regime, there is no doubt that the systematic campaign that began with these observations and which was, under the name of the fight against ‘ going down on one’s knees before the West’, to go on for several years, arose from that truly Stalinian spirit of distrust, and it appeared to be influenced by the mistaken theory that the dangers increase in proportion to the success of socialism. It is perfectly understandable that there should have been, and that there ought to have been, a struggle for a national art, for the usefulness of that art and for its taking part in the improvement of the people. But it is not so easy to understand that everything that seemed to draw its nourishment from elsewhere or that seemed (perhaps rightly) to be merely useless or trifling should be put on the same footing as treason. In the unbalanced sense of values that the ‘cult’ [of personality] introduced and in its practical consequences, trifling faults took on the appearance of crime, and ended by serving to hide crime itself . .. Not that this in any way means that in the ideological field the party did not have to intervene, in the spirit of Leninism. On this point, as on others, one may differ in one’s opinion as to the direct Intervention of a political party in these matters; but the difference will be in exact proportion to one’s rejection of Lenin’s theses. Yet the need for intervention does not mean that at the time when Beria was exercising his well-known influence on government decisions, the enemy whom it was most urgently necessary to unmask should have been the poetess Akhmatova, even if her verse was as devoid of sense” (Aragon 1962/1964: 481)
Trinketization 