Word: kuznetsov
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
BABI YAR by Anatoly Kuznetsov. 399 pages. Dial...
...which this Babi Yar, "a documentary novel," could be published last fall in Russia, where it was widely read and acclaimed. The first full-length account for Russians of Kiev's years under the German occupation, Babi Yar is fictional only in narrative form, not fact. Novelist Kuznetsov, a gentile, was twelve years old when the Nazis arrived; he spent the next two years in Kiev discovering war and deprivation along with his own manhood. He has taken his personal story and added to it interviews with Babi Yar's few survivors and facts from official Soviet records...
Part of a System. Kuznetsov seems refreshingly careless about which official toes he steps on, and there is hardly a stereotyped opinion-or character-in the book on either side. His grandfather is pictured as first looking forward to the Nazi reign with something like enthusiasm, since he had never forgiven the Communists for robbing him "of his dream of getting rich" as "an entrepreneur." And although hatred for the Germans seethes through nearly every page, Kuznetsov also renders faithfully the few encounters with Germans who showed him or his family any kindness...
...victim to be reprieved from obscurity was Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who showed up, replete with honors and ribbons, for last month's V-E-day celebrations in Red Square. Finally, after a decade in the doghouse, the wartime chief and "father" of the Soviet navy, Admiral Nikolai G. Kuznetsov, surfaced with the publication of excerpts from his Potsdam memoirs in Neva...
...able to surprise Moscow was that Stalin ignored "detailed" reports from Soviet intelligence; moreover, his security police "instead of fighting the real enemies of the state, were used for entirely different purposes"-meaning Stalin's personal reign of terror over his own citizens. Nor do Zhukov or Kuznetsov get off scot-free: Zhukov has not been cleared of what Khrushchev called his "Bonapartist" tendencies to put the army outside party control, nor has Kuznetsov been absolved of his temerity in opposing Khrushchev's emphasis on submarine over surface ships...