Quote Originally Posted by joysof
Or do you think that Sakharov chose to be a physicist because he expected enormous material gains?
No, of course he didn't. He did, however, find himself in Gorky/Nizhny Novgorod against his will.

Does that not constitute suppression?
Did I ever ask anything about suppression? In this thread anyway? The question was about "communism does not motivate" and you failed to answer that question.

[quote:3b6tafj8]How was creativity disallowed in the USSR?
Mandelstam paid for a poem with his life;[/quote:3b6tafj8]

If I remember correctly, his poem was highly anti-Soviet (using the terminology of that time), and that was explicitly forbidden. The criminal code had an article dealing with just that. Dura lex sed lex.

Tsvetaeva was forbidden to publish
Hello? She left the USSR in 1925 and returned in 1939, and committed suicide in 1941. If she was not published during the two years (and what years!) she spent there, that hardly means anything.

Bulgakov had most of his plays suppressed and his best work wasn't published until long after his death.
Which plays were suppressed? His best work, which you apparently think was M&M, was never published -- but it was never finished either. He died editing it. Of the finished works, I personally prefer "The White Guards", and it was published, moreover, he made a play after it, and it was a success. Stalin himself liked it, could it be more successful than that in the thirties?

If you want more examples, I'll provide them: there are hundreds, after all.
Yeah, go ahead.

Taken together, all of these things would seem to serve as a disincentive to unorthodoxy, and, tangentially, creativity.
Granted. Unorthodoxy was not welcome (is it anywhere?). However, you're going off the tangent yourself. I responded to the message that linked creativity to economy, and that could not possibly mean creativity in poetry.