Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This blockbuster success was not unexpected; one might say it was virtually certain. For 20 years Soviet authorities have suppressed the publication of Rybakov's broadly autobiographical novel about power and powerlessness under Stalin just before the purges of the mid-'30s. During the '60s and '70s, the public was teased by announcements that Arbat would soon appear. It never did. Then last year Druzhba Narodov, a Soviet Writers Union periodical, serialized the work in three installments, and the stage was set for the mass market...
Criticism of Stalin is not new in the Soviet Union. For the edification of the ruling class, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the late dictator's 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...
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...
...factual is Rybakov's Stalin? The author's flashback depiction of the son of a Georgian bootmaker who became a revolutionary after dropping out of a seminary should cause few objections. The outlines of Stalin's political career are familiar and generally accepted, as is Rybakov's assertion in the novel that the dictator had Sergei Kirov killed as an excuse for starting the purge...
...dramatic effect; scenes must be arranged, dialogue concocted and interior monologues imagined. Rybakov's technique is no different from that of other popular novelists who incorporate historical figures into their books. Like most, he succeeds best when his imagination runs freest. A case in point: a scene in which Stalin's dentist, a competent though nervous practitioner, finds himself in the unenviable position of handling the bite that feeds...