thick journals like Krasnaya Nov were "fortresses and beachheads of the armies of literature" and therefore by publishing works by 'bourgeois' writers, according to the critic Ilya Vardin, Voronsky had "become a weapon in the cause of reinforcing the position of the bourgeoisie," and was "utterly hopeless in the resolution of the active political tasks of the proletariat in the field of literature." At the start of this campaign, Voronsky was in a strong position because he had high level party support. When the Press Section of the Central Committee convened the first officially sponsored debate on literary politics, held over two days in May 1924, Voronsky was the main speaker in defence of 'fellow travellers', backed by Trotsky, Radek, Bukharin, Anatoly Lunacharsky and other major Bolsheviks, while his leading opponents, Vardin, and Leopold Averbakh were relatively minor figures. The outcome was a cautiously worded statement which established the principle of party intervention in literary disputes. Voronsky's strongest ally at the top end of the communist party was Leon Trotsky, who did not believe that in this early stage of the revolution there was any such thing as 'proletarian art', but only "the simple formula of a pseudo-proletarian art", which, he wrote, was "not Marxism, but reactionary populism." Trotysky's book, Literature and Revolution was originally published in Krasnaya Nov in 1924. Also in 1924, Voronsky hosted a literary evening in his flat, to hear a recitation of a poem by Eduard Bagritsky, where guests included Trotsky, Radek, and Isaac Babel, at which Radek spoke disparagingly about the party leadership. This soiree formed of the case against Babel when he was arrested and shot 16 years later. In October 1923, Voronsky signed The Declaration of 46, drawn up by Bolsheviks who were backing Trotsky in the power struggle that developed while Lenin was terminally ill. In an autobiography, published in 1927, he described hearing Trotsky speak at a public meeting in 1917 - "His words were cooling, sober, and among the jubilation and joyful excitement they sounded for the first time for me on that day, the exorbitance and heaviness of the paths of the revolution, the inflexibility and ruthlessness of its iron heel, its calculation and its will to subdue chaos and the elements." Voronsky's aesthetics Although Voronsky considered himself an orthodox Marxist, he was far from the ideological rigidity that was enforced after Stalin took control. Victor Ehrlich called