Stalin's complete control of Soviet authors was exemplified by the First Congress of Soviet Writers, held in 1934.
"Have you shown us Stalin in all his magnitude?"
-Emelyan Yaroslavsky, party leader speaking to the 1934 Writer's Congress
What made Stalin's control over Soviet writers unique was not the limits put on what could be published, but the demands put on writers as to what they would produce. Censorship, and controlling anti-Stalin material is restricting enough, but Stalin's regime went beyond this. Soviet writers were actually required to build up Stalin's image.
Stalin's image on the part of writers was most grossly fabricated by the official historians. In such works as Emelyan Yaroslavsky's 1938 History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolsheviks): Short Course, Stalin is inseparably linked to the revolution. Stalin's newly constructed revolutionary past was not just presented in the official version of history. High ranking officials in the party and the state also lent credibility to Stalin's expanded claims of revolutionary importance. NKVD head, and fellow Georgian, Lavrenti Beria published in 1952 K voprosu ob istorii bolshevistskikh organizatsii v Zakavkaze. Beria credits Stalin with single-handedly organizing Bolshevism in the Caucasus. Beria's statements are particularly interesting given the evidence that Beria was behind Stalin's death.
Even in the West there was some validity given to Stalin's version of history. Isaac Deutscher's Stalin: A Political Biography, published in 1949, chronicles Stalin's life in the Tiflis seminary, underground work in the Caucacus, the revolution of 1905, early banishment to Siberia, editorship of the Pravda, work in the Politburo and People's Commissariat of Nationalities, role in the civil war, appointment to the General Secretaryship in 1922, the collectivization, the Great Purges, foreign policy and the Comintern, the war, and victory. With the space given to the collectivization and the Great Purges, this biography obviously was more then political propaganda. The negatives Deutscher writes on Stalin give more weight to the positives. Deutscher's account of Stalin's political life prior to the collectivization is not unlike the official version coming from Moscow (Deutscher relies on Stalin's Sochineniia (collected works). This serves to win over supporters for Stalin from Marxists outside of the Soviet Union while backing up the version of history originating from Moscow in regards to Stalin's revolutionary past.
With the terror effecting every segment of Soviet society, and Stalin personally intervening in the writing of literature, Soviet writers had a well founded fear of writing anything other than exactly what Stalin wanted to read. Writing anything other than what the Writer's Union called for could earn one the title "saboteur," and a trip to the Gulag. Needless to say, this fear inhibited the creative process of most writers. Soviet literature served little more than to promote Stalin's own creative reinterpretation of historical events.
Stalin in Film 
Stalin as a Visual 
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