Word: stalins
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...author sits at a rough wooden trestle table in his country house near Moscow, thumbing through a stack of page proofs for his novel. "This book is ^ about power," he says. "Stalin was consciously aware of the uses of power, the abuses of power, how to get power and how to keep power. He could have debated with Machiavelli because he would have considered that Machiavelli knew less about power than...
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...
...know why this century has such terrible events happen? The Turks killing two million Armenians, the Holocaust, Hitler killing most of the Jews in Europe, Stalin killing fifteen million Ukrainians, nuclear destruction unleashed, the final war apparently inevitable? It is because God agreed to let the Great Prince Satan have his way with men for a hundred years--this one hundred years, the twentieth century...