and embarrassed that the story was dedicated to him and declared that "I reject this dedication with disgust." The offending edition of Novy Mir was banned and the OGPU visited all known subscribers to confiscate their copies. They were later sent a substitute edition with a different story in place of Pilnyak's The magazine issued a public apology. He was in China, on a tour of the Far East when the storm broke, and could have defected, but instead hurried back to defend himself. Despite showing no enthusiasm for the Bolshevik revolution, he knew several high ranking communists, and turned for protection to the chief editor of Izvestya, Ivan Skvortsov-Stepanov who introduced him to the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (or prime minister) Alexei Rykov. At Rykov's urging, he wrote a letter expressing remorse, which was published in Novy Mir in January 1927. By now Pilnyak was second only to Maxim Gorky as the most read living Russian writer, in the Soviet Union and abroad. To protect his copyright had an arrangement under which all his works were published simultaneously in Moscow and Berlin. His best known novel, Mahogany (Кра́сное де́рево, 1927, translated 1965), was banned in Russia, but—like his other work—was published in Berlin. This gave Pilnyak's enemy, Leopold Averbakh, head of the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers the pretext to launch an attack that was carried through four successive weekly editions of the 'Literary Gazette', which Averbakh controlled, and which headlines such as 'A Hostile Network of Agents in the Ranks of Soviet Writers' and 'Boris Pilnyak, Special Correspondent for the White Guard'. The poet Vladimir Mayakovsky joined in, claiming that "at the present time of darkening storm clouds this is the same as treachery at the front" and Maxim Gorky wrote to one of the secretaries of the Communist Party, Andrey Andreyev complaining about how "Pilnyak has been forgiven for his story about the death of Comrade Frunze". Unlike Yevgeny Zamyatin, who was subjected to a similar attack at the same time and refused to apologise or back down, Pilnyak capitulated and agreed to comply with the regime's requirements. He found a new protector in Nikolai Yezhov, the future murderous head of the NKVD, who acted as his personal censor during the composition of his next novel, The Volga Flows into the Caspian Sea (Волга впадает в Каспийское море, 1930; translated 1931), which described the