USSR Union of Writers

The Union of Soviet Writers, USSR Union of Writers, or Soviet Union of Writers (Russian: Союз писателей СССР, romanized: Soyuz pisatelei SSSR) was a creative union of professional writers in the Soviet Union. It was founded in 1934 on the initiative of the Central Committee of the Communist Party (1932) after disbanding a number of other writers' organizations, including Proletkult and the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

The aim of the Union was to achieve party and state control in the field of literature. For professional writers, membership of the Union became effectively obligatory, and non-members had much more limited opportunities for publication. The result was that exclusion from the Union meant a virtual ban on publication. However, the history of the Union of Writers also saw cases of voluntary self-exclusion from its cadre. Thus, Vasily Aksyonov, Semyon Lipkin, and Inna Lisnyanskaya left the Union of Writers in a show of solidarity after the exclusion of Viktor Yerofeyev and Yevgeny Popov in punishment for self-publishing.