Vladimir Stavsky  Vladimir Petrovich Stavsky (Владимир Петрович Ставский; born Kirpichnikov, Кирпичников; 30 July 1900 – 14 November 1943) was a Soviet Russian writer, editor (in 1937–1941, of "Novy Mir") and literary administrator, the head of the Soviet Union of Writers in 1936–1941. As World War II broke out, Stavsky relinquished his posts and, as a war correspondent for "Pravda" newspaper, went first to Mongolia then to the Winter War (where he was severely injured) and finally to the Western front where in 1943 he was killed in combat. Vladimir Petrovich Kirpichnikov was born in Penza, to a family of a cabinet-maker. After his mother's death in 1915, he went to work, in 1918 joined the Red Army and soon became a commander of a fighting unit engaged in the suppression of numerous anti-Bolshevik mutinies. In 1918 Kirpichnikov, now an RKP(B) member, was transferred to the Caucasian Front's First Army's HQ, joined the local military section of Cheka, and by the end of the Civil War had been a brigade commissar. After demobilization in 1922, Kirpichnikov started his journalistic and literary career, starting out as a Rostov-on-Don-based "Molot" newspaper author. Three years later, now a secretary of the Northern Caucasian Association of Proletarian Writers (СКАПП), and the Communist Party official superintending the stocking up of wheat harvest in Kuban, he joined "Na Podyome" ("On the Rise") magazine as its editor-in-chief. In 1928 he moved to Moscow to become the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers secretary. Writing under the pseudonym Stavsky, Kirpichnikov published several short novels, a book of short stories and numerous documentary sketches, highlighting collectivization, calling for ruthlessness in the class war and singing paeans to Stalin's internal politics. In 1932, under the guidance of the CPSU Central Committee, Stavsky took active part in the formation of the Soviet Union of Writers, of which he became the General Secretary in 1936, after Maxim Gorky's death.