Vladko Paper Submitted to AATSEEL 2027¶

Oleh Shynkarenko has submitted a paper, "Aerotorpedoes Turn Back: A Loyal Text Destroyed Anyway," to AATSEEL 2027, for the stream on canonical writers of the Stalin era organized by Andrew Reynolds (University of Wisconsin–Madison).

The paper examines the strange fate of Volodymyr Vladko's 1934 novel Aerotorpedoes Turn Back — an orthodox, Stalin-endorsed work that was nonetheless withdrawn and destroyed within months of publication, despite its author facing no punishment. It weighs several explanations for the novel's suppression and argues that in Stalinist print culture, a book's survival depended on shifting politics rather than an author's loyalty.