forced industrialisation drive in glowing language. Victor Serge visited Pilnyak while this work was in progress. "Pilnyak would twist his great mouth. 'He has given me a list of 50 passages to change outright! Ah!' he would exclaim, 'if only I could write freely!' At other times I found him in the throes of depression. 'They'll end up by throwing me in jail, don't you think?' I gave him heart by explaining that his fame in Europe and America safeguarded him." In Artists in Uniform, published in 1934 Max Eastman wrote a chapter entitled "The Humiliation of Boris Pilnyak." After he had debased himself, he was allowed to resume his place in the elite, and to travel to Paris, New York and Tokyo. Another of his well-known works is Okay! An American Novel, (О’кей! Американский роман, 1931; translated 1932), an unflattering travelogue of his 1931 visit to the United States. He used the visit to Japan to write A story about how stories come to be written. He was also allocated a private dacha on an estate reserved for privileged writers, where his neighbour was Boris Pasternak, one of the few who had defended him in 1929. In 1936, they were visited by the French novelist André Gide, who was seeking an honest opinion about life in the Soviet Union. A police informer told the NKVD that Pilnyak and Pasternak had several secret meetings with André Gide, and supplied him with information about the situation in the USSR. There is no doubt that Gide used this information in this book attacking the USSR." Despite his public debasement, Pilnyak acted courageously in secret. When he heard that Karl Radek, a prominent member of the left wing opposition, was living in hardship after being exiled to Tomsk, Pilnyak sent him money. He also corresponded with the Spanish communist, Andres Nin, who broke with Stalin in 1927 and founded the POUM (the party George Orwell supported during the Spanish civil war). When Victor Serge was arrested in Moscow, Pilnyak urged Nin to generate international pressure to secure his release. This correspondence was discovered when the NKVD kidnapped Nin in Barcelona. On 28 October 1937, Pasternak dropped by to congratulate Pilnyak and his Georgian wife, Kira Andronikashvili, on their son's third birthday. That evening, Pilnyak was arrested. He was accused of plotting to kill Stalin and Yezhov, and of being a Japanese spy. He