I just knew that a few people speak Russian, and since the book wasn't translated I figured there was little point in translating it. But it probably is of some moderate interest to people to read reviews of books that might be translated at some point.

The interesting thing about Stalin is that he was intensely interested in literature and authors. His understanding of what was good literature was very bad, and he very frequently completely misunderstood the basic points that stories and novels were trying to make. Even so, he realized the importance of literature in a way Lenin didn't - Lenin said he would just get rid of the arts if he could. Stalin never dreamed of that. To the contrary, he wanted to co-opt the arts to make the Soviet Union an empire to be reckoned with in all aspects. The entire "cultural arms race", from the Olympics to the Nobel Committee for Literature, was an outgrowth of Stalin's vision of the Soviet Union.

With respect to calling Sholokhov, Fadeev, Simonov and Tolstoy "scum", it went far beyond what they needed to do in order to "survive". In the case of Sholokhov, it involves the personal dedication that he put into attacks on other authors, even when he didn't have to and well after Stalin was dead. In the case of Fadeev, he personally oversaw some of the most vicious attacks on other writers imaginable and his deranged attack on Khrushchev and the de-Stalinization shortly before killing himself (in favor of Stalin's Terror) went far beyond merely justifying the murders of other writers. In the case of Simonov, he oversaw the attacks on Pasternak in 1956 (and that was well after Stalin was dead). Tolstoy maybe doesn't warrant the epithet, though Bunin said to him (oddly, in a postcard that he mailed to the newspaper Izvestia), "You're an asshole but you're still a damn good writer" (that's the tone, if not a word-for-word translation). Also, Fadeev, Simonov and Sholokhov each took part in completely over-the-top anti-Semitic attacks on other authors, even some who used to be their friends. With Fadeev, one author even said, "You now accuse me of sheltering my son from the front during the war by giving him a job at the newspaper I was editor of, but you know that he died at age 15 when he went to the front as a journalist. You stood with me at his grave."