This fanzine is not going to follow in the footsteps of all those hideous hideous Manics ones with pages and pages of whinging drivel, along the lines of
"I sat on the toilet one day and realised that the world was a sad and corrupt place
This nation of consumer destructionism and emptiness
The aching pit inside my stomach cried for the centuries past
Heaved for the exploited
I felt myself go down into the darkness
And emerged 4 stone and empty" blaa di blaa blah.
I'm sure these people do have problems and do have genuine concerns. However their rampantly self pitying and egocentric views are boring to anyone other than themselves and there shall be none of it here I tell you. NONE OF IT. If anyone should feel motivated to send me any poetry however, or stories, I shall print them if I like them, or if they are my friends. Fascist dictators do indeed have to start somewhere.

## MINI FACTFILE: Gorky, the man

I thought I might do a little research into Gorky the man as it was him that enabled Gorky's to be flown to Russia for free. This is what Megan said about him in an interview ages ago:
" Gorky was a Russian peasant, a pro- revolutionary who didn't like to see what was going on with the Russian people, but didn't romanticise them either. He was a big mate of Lenin's- he was very upset when he died. His memoirs are aright, but then he got into socialist realism and started going a bit downhill. He tried to shoot himself and missed."
This is what some history books say:
ALEXEI MAXIMOVICH PESCHKOV, 1868- 1936, otherwise known as Gorky Maxim. (Gorky was his pseudonym and means bitter).
Gorky the playwright and novelist supported the Bolsheviks idealogically and financially until 1917 when he opposed the seizure of power and set up his own left wing group. He fled to Italy (1921- 28) and returned to Russia once the political climate had cooled down. He headed the writers union and has been heralded as the founder of Social Realism.
social Realism was the doctrine by which all Soviet art was to be judged and produced, stretching form cinema and theatre to music and painting. It was meant to reflect a "truthful, historically concrete depiction of reality in it's revolutionary development" but towed the party line resulting in dull, stultrified work, similar to that of contemporary Nazi Germany.
He was friends with Stalin, sharing the same disgust for all things peasantry (despite being orphaned as a child and living in abject poverty). His death was mysterious, with Stalin claiming the Trotskyists to be at fault, giving him the excuse for the subsequent purges of the period. The portrait of Gorky shown here was painted by Boris Grigorev in 1926.

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