Union of Soviet Writers

Union of Soviet Writers, USSR Union of Writers, or Soviet Union of Writers (Russian: Союз писателей СССР, romanized: Soyuz Sovetstikh Pisatelei) was a creative union of professional writers in the Soviet Union.[1] It was founded in 1934 on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1932) after disbanding a number of other writers' organizations: RAPP, Proletkult, and VOAPP.

The aim of the Union was to achieve Party and State control in the field of literature. For professional writers, membership of the Union became effectively obligatory, and non-members had much more limited opportunities for publication. The result was that exclusion from the Union meant a virtual ban on publication. In spite of this, the history of the Union of Writers also saw cases of voluntary self-exclusion from its cadre. Thus Vasily Aksenov, Simeon Lipkin and Inna Lisnyanskaya left the Union of Writers in a show of solidarity following the exclusion of Victor Yerofeev and Yevgeny Popov in punishment for self-publishing.

After the fall of Soviet Union, the Union of Soviet Writers was divided into separate organizations for each of the Post-Soviet states. The Russian section was transformed into the Union of Russian Writers.