“It is difficult to pursue the truth in our country”: the Astrakhan writers on the eve of the “Prague autumn” (1965 - 1968). Part one

The historical and documentary essay tells about already forgotten events that occurred in the life of the young Astrakhan writers’ organization during the period of tightening the ideological policy of the Communist Party after L.I. Brezhnev came to power. These events, which were reconstructed by the minutes of general and party meetings of Astrakhan writers of 1965-1968, almost broke the fate of Yuri Vasilyevich Selensky (1922-1973), a famous Astrakhan writer, and nearly crossed out his literary activities. In his story “Two Fistfuls of the Sea,” published in 1967, he critically portrayed journalists and the editorial office of the Astrakhan regional newspaper “The Volga,” where he himself worked for almost 12 years. As the story skillfully shows, the journalists and the newspaper’s editorial staff became part of the ideological apparatus of the regional committee of the Communist Party, an instrument for the ideological and political education of the population. In response, “The Volga” published a harsh, even hostile review of the story. In this review, Yuri Selensky was accused, by and large, of denigrating Soviet journalism and abandoning “socialist realism”. Such an accusation threatened the writer with expulsion from the Communist Party and the USSR Union of Writers. In these events of a “regional scale” one can see the tragedy of a unique creative personality who could not and did not want to adapt to the change in the political regime in the country. But this tragedy was an “ordinary story,” one of the aspects of Soviet literary everyday life, when the CPSU in post-Stalin times began to widely practice “ideological education” of Soviet writers.