him "flexible and humane" and wrote:He combined political orthodoxy with a strong personal commitment to literature, a commitment underpinned by an aesthetic which, though not incompatible with Marxism, could be easily construed within the Soviet Marxist framework as a "bourgeois-idealistic" heresy. To Voronsky, art was not primarily a matter of mobilizing or manipulating group emotions on behalf of a class-determined world view. It was a distinctive form of cognition, a largely intuitive mode of apprehending reality ... a true artist, armed by intuition and creative integrity, cannot help seeing and embodying in his work certain truths that run counter to his conscious bias and to the interests of his class ... No wonder Red Virgin Soil ... became one of the most vital and readable Russian periodicals in the 1920s. Voronsky expounded the idea of aesthetic evaluation, an exercise in dialectical materialism that combined the search for objective truth with the complexity of human emotion and feeling. Voronsky's criticism of art lay in opposition to the artificial representation of life presented in Stalin's school of socialist realism. Voronsky, in agreement with Trotsky, viewed art as an exercise between the subjective and the objective world of the artist to facilitate a deeper understanding of humanity. Aesthetic evaluation, he wrote, requires a strong correlation to the nature of the object portrayed. Defeat and death Voronsky's friendship with Trotsky, which was an asset at the start of the controversy over 'proletarian literature' became the cause of his political destruction, and death. In June 1924, the party leadership, now controlled by Trotsky's enemies, Joseph Stalin and Grigory Zinoviev appointed two new members of the editorial board of Krasnaya Nov. One was a party official, the other was Fyodor Raskolnikov, a former sailor who aspired to be a proletarian writer. By January 1925, Voronsky was no longer listed as an editor, but soon afterwards he was reinstated and Raskolnikov had been removed - possibly because Maxim Gorky had angrily refused to contribute to the journal under the new editorship. But over the next three years "RAPP cleverly targeted Voronsky's most vulnerable point, his friendship with Trotsky" In May 1927, Voronsky used Krasnaya Nov to attack Averbakh over the way he was controlling the newly formed Federation of Organisations of Soviet Writers. In a reply, published in Pravda, the head of the Press Section of the Central Committee, Sergei Gusev accused Voronsky of being a Trotskyist,