Word: stalins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This week an obscure literary journal, Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of Peoples), will publish the first of three monthly installments of Anatoli Rybakov's startling novel, Children of the Arbat, which takes place during Stalin's reign of terror. The publication has been eagerly anticipated by Soviet intellectuals for more than a year, and many are hailing it as the literary event of their generation. People who have already read the novel are heaping praise on it. "This is a great book, a great moment in our literature," declared Poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko. "Rybakov was the man to do this...
Children of the Arbat sheds light on the dark corner of Soviet history when Stalin ruled his country through fear. The title refers to a circle of young friends who live with their families in a building at 51 Arbat Street, near the center of Moscow. The main character is Sasha Pankratov, a Young Communist League leader at an engineering institute. He is arrested on an obviously false political charge, interrogated by the secret police of the NKVD (predecessor of the KGB) and sentenced to Siberian exile. Some of his friends try to organize a protest petition. A few people...
Parallel with the story is a secondary plot that focuses on Stalin and his actions. Rybakov, relying on both fact and imagination, attempts to enter Stalin's mind and to understand the process of cunning and paranoia that led him to terrorize an entire nation. In lengthy internal soliloquies that some ^ readers of the manuscript have found deeply disturbing, Stalin coldly ruminates on what Rybakov calls the "technology of power." At one point the tyrant says, "A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then...
...book ends with the assassination of Sergei Kirov, the Leningrad party leader, whose death in 1934 was used by Stalin as an excuse to launch the bloodiest of the purges. The novel strongly suggests, as do a number of Western historians, that Stalin was responsible for the murder...
...Children of the Arbat to be the most important work of fiction by a Soviet author since Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago, not least because it treats subjects that Soviet literature has never dealt with before. Rybakov's book is an attempt to come to literary terms with the Stalin era, just as Pasternak tried to give literary meaning to the Russian revolution and civil war of his own generation. But unlike Doctor Zhivago, which first appeared in Italian, Children of the Arbat is coming out in its author's native land and language...