title: Tortured words : the first Soviet Writers Congress, Moscow 1934 : socialist realism and Soviet reality in Stalin's Russia 1934-1939
abstract: Both the academic and the fiction element of the thesis concerns events in the Soviet Union and elsewhere in Europe in the 1930s. The first element informs the second. The academic portion is based on the first Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, the only such gathering allowed by Stalin in his lifetime and an event following which many of its delegates were murdered. Primary research sources include the stenographic verbatim record of the Congress itself and an addendum consisting of biographical 
journal: St Andrews Research Repository (St Andrews Research Repository)