Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

===== By the early 1920s, Israel had become a rising star in Soviet propaganda circles. A poet of considerable talent and ideological clarity, he served as both an editor and writer for the People’s Commissariat of Enlightenment (Narkompros) and was instrumental in campaigns to bring revolutionary literature to the provinces. =====

His 1923 anthology Burning Alphabet featured lines that became slogans etched on factory walls:

: 

Yet even as he ascended, Israel began to feel the shadow of Zhdanovshchina-style aesthetic orthodoxy. His friend and fellow poet Isaak Babel warned him in 1925: “Write fewer truths. The state prefers fiction it can control.”

Still, Israel was too useful—and still ideologically compliant enough—to face censure… yet.