Word: arbator
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That appeal apparently had little effect, and later in the day Reagan got a lesson in U.S. and Soviet cultural differences. When he and Nancy went for an unscheduled walk around the Arbat, a quaint Moscow shopping mall, the friendly but thrusting crowds alarmed the KGB. Guards appeared out of nowhere to form a flying wedge around the Reagans and roughed up everyone from journalists to children. "It's still a police state," the President was heard to mutter. That night Reagan was expected to visit the Moscow apartment of Yuri and Tanya Zieman, refuseniks who have been denied permission...
...terror tactics in a secret speech to the 20th Party Congress in 1956. Intellectuals were allowed a whiff of free air in 1962 when the literary journal Novy Mir published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novella of Stalin's prison camps, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. But Arbat is of a different order: it is not only indicative of Mikhail Gorbachev's leash-loosening policies but also an official seal of disapproval on the past. Now every literate Soviet citizen can get a popularized characterization of Stalin as he broods about the brutal nature of power and dreams...
Western readers may not fully appreciate Arbat as a political event, but its literary markings should be familiar: a solidly conventional narrative style, made-for-TV characters representing various layers of society, public and private lives linked in short chapters and history hovering portentously in the wings. Rybakov, 77, is an old pro who has written teenage adventures and Heavy Sand, a widely read novel about Ukrainian Jews during World War II. A bemedaled tank commander during that conflict, he has maneuvered well within the Soviet literary system and enjoys one of its most visible rewards, a dacha at Peredelkino...
Like Rybakov himself, Sasha Pankratov, the student hero of Arbat, lived in the capital's bohemian Arbat district during the '30s. Also like Rybakov, he was arrested on a trumped-up infraction and sentenced to three years in Siberian villages. These are not the feared Gulag but the world of administrative exiles living on odd jobs and packages from home. Sasha becomes an itinerant farmhand and because of his good looks has little trouble keeping warm on cold nights...
Back in the Arbat, Sasha's family and friends grapple with their lives and careers, while the Kremlin bureaucracy manhandles a recalcitrant economy, ponders the growing power of Hitler's Germany and worries about which way Stalin will jump. Readers expecting a personification of moral depravity will be disappointed. Instead, Rybakov's Stalin resembles a deeply suspicious and ruthless vestige of the revolutionary past -- if not a historical necessity, at least an inevitability...