Size: 14.5×9.5cm./5.7×3.7inch.
Weight: 555gr./19.5oz.
VIDEO
 
Bust made in the Soviet Union, with Mikhail Sholokhov. With signature. Made in the cold war era. Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov (1905-1984) was a Russian novelist and winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature. He is known for writing about life and fate of Don Cossacks during the Russian Revolution, the civil war and the period of collectivization, primarily in his most famous novel, And Quiet Flows the Don. Sholokhov met Joseph Stalin in 1930, and subsequently was one of very few people who dared to give the dictator a truthful account of what was happening in the country and nonetheless was not punished. In the 1930s, he wrote several letters to Stalin from his home in Veshenskaya about the appalling conditions in the kolkhozes and sovkhozes along the Don, requesting assistance for the farmers.
In January 1931, he warned: “Comrade Stalin, without exaggeration, conditions are catastrophic!”. On 4 April 1933, he sent a long letter in which, among many other details, he named two OGPU officers whom he accused of torturing prisoners from his district.
Stalin reacted by sending a senior official, Matvei Shkiryatov, to investigate. The two officers were arrested and sentenced to death; their sentences were later revoked, but they were banned from working in Sholokhov’s home village. Stalin also arranged for extra food to be sent to Veshenskaya and the neighbouring district.
During World War II, Sholokhov wrote about the Soviet war effort for various journals. He also covered the devastation caused by Wehrmacht troops along the Don. His mother was killed when Veshenskaya was bombed in 1942. Sholokhov’s unfinished novel They Fought for Their Country is about World War II (known in the Soviet Union, and now in Russia, as the Great Patriotic War). Sholokhov’s collected works were published in eight volumes between 1956 and 1960, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965.
Mikhail Sholokhov died on 21 February 1984, from laryngeal cancer.