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State University and obtained a position in the
children's division of the Leningrad branch of the
state publishing house, Gosizdat, working under
the direction of Samuil Marshak, a close friend of
her father. Under the pseudonym of Aleksei
Uglov, she published a number of well-regarded
children's stories, such as
Leningrad-Odessa
(1928),
The Story of Taras Shevchenko
(1930), and
On the
Volga
(1931). Chukovskaya suffered personally
from the terror of the 1930s: her husband was
arrested in 1937 while she was under surveil-
lance from the secret police. Of her many publi-
cations, the novel
Sofia Petrovna,
an account of
the impact of the repression of the 1930s on sim-
ple, apolitical citizens, written in 1939-40 but
first published in Paris in 1965, is considered her
masterpiece. In the 1960s she emerged as a par-
ticularly courageous opponent of the Soviet gov-
ernment's persecution of literary and political
dissidents. Her defense of the writers Andrei
SINYAVSKY
and Yuli Daniel during their 1966 trial
and her repeated interventions on behalf of
Andrei S
AKHAROV
and Aleksandr
SOLZHENITSYN
ultimately led to her expulsion from the Union
of Soviet Writers in 1974. In 1978 she published
a collection of her poetry under the title
On this
Side of Death.
From 1976 to 1980 she published
in book form under the title
Notes about Anna
Akhmatova
the text of her notes of conversations
she conducted with Anna
AKHMATOVA
in the
years from 1938 to 1941 and from 1952 to
1962, an invaluable historical document of the
poet whom the Soviet government had much
maligned.
worked one year in London as a correspondent
(1903-4), and by 1914 he had become a suc-
cessful journalist. His knowledge of English
helped him develop a second career as a transla-
tor, translating numerous authors including
Walt Whitman. With the poet Nikolai
GUMILEV
,
he published a work on the art of translation in
1919. As a literary critic, Chukovsky was partic-
ularly interested in the work of the radical poet
Nikolai
NEKRASOV
(1821-77), producing an edi-
tion of his complete works that was published in
1927. But it was in the area of children's litera-
ture that Chukovsky made an indelible imprint
in the Russian and Soviet world. Beginning with
The Crocodile,
published in 1917, he wrote
numerous books that captivated children and
adults with their humor, wordplay, metaphors,
puns, and made-up words. Many of these stories
later provided the material for radio, television,
and film scripts. His own complete works were
published in six volumes in Moscow (1965-69).
Oxford University awarded him an honorary
doctorate in literature in 1962. Chukovsky died
in Moscow on October 28, 1969. His daughter
Lidia Chukovskaya became a noted writer and
literary critic in her own right.
Communist Party
The Communist Party was formally founded in
1919 when the former
BOLSHEVIK
Party was
renamed the All-Russian Communist Party.
Until 1991 it exercised a monopoly of power
within the Soviet Union, while exercising a
hegemonic influence over most other Commu-
nist parties elsewhere. Until his death in 1924,
Vladimir
LENIN
dominated the party, although he
carried no formal title. At the time of the Bol-
shevik revolution, the party had only about
200,000 members, most of who had joined dur-
ing the revolutionary year of 1917. The civil war
of 1918-21, during which the party changed its
name from Bolshevik to Communist, tested its
ability to organize a new government and rule a
vast country in the process of disintegration.
With ruthless determination and, some would
Chukovsky, Kornei Ivanovich
(1882-1969)
writer
A writer, critic, historian, and translator, Chu-
kovsky was perhaps best known to generations
of readers as the author of popular children's
stories. Chukovsky was born Nikolai Vasilievich
Korneichukov in St. Petersburg, but grew up in
ODESSA
with his mother, a Ukrainian peasant.
His writing career began while still in Odessa. He
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