From Publishers WeeklyIn this sequel to his international bestseller Children of the Arbat , Rybakov picks up the story of Sasha Pankratov and his friends from Moscow's fashionable Arbat district as Josef Stalin launches the reign of terror that saw millions of Soviet citizens arrested, exiled or shot for counterrevolutionary activities... moreFrom Publishers WeeklyIn this sequel to his international bestseller Children of the Arbat , Rybakov picks up the story of Sasha Pankratov and his friends from Moscow's fashionable Arbat district as Josef Stalin launches the reign of terror that saw millions of Soviet citizens arrested, exiled or shot for counterrevolutionary activities. Exiled to Siberia in the previous novel for writing satirical verse in a student newspaper and now forbidden to return to Moscow, Sasha migrates to a provincial town where he finds work as a driver. Back on Arbat Street, his friends Varya, Nina, Yuri, Yadim, Lena and Vika grapple with the moral dilemma posed by the purges: should they remain silent and tacitly acquiesce, or participate in hopes of personal gain? Rybakov brilliantly segues from this cross-section of the Moscow intelligentsia to a chilling interior monologue in which Stalin plots the destruction of high-ranking members of his inner circle. Rybakov's complex, fascinating, repellent and utterly convincing psychological portrait of a demagogue ranks among his finest achievements here, which also include the fruitful further development of the intriguing personalities established in Children of the Arbat . This dynamic, sweeping saga of "Stalin's children," the first truly Soviet generation, captures the fluidity and confusion of the purge years, serving as a powerful testament to their legacy of fear.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.From Library JournalHow could the wholesale murder, torture, and forced starvation of the Stalin years have been allowed? Fear , the second novel in a trilogy that began with Children of the Arbat (Little, Brown, 1988), attempts to explain. Written over 20 years ago, the "Arbat Trilogy" only recently saw publication in Russian; this is the first English translation. Fear tells the story of life under Stalin's dictatorship from the viewpoint of Sasha Pankratov, an exiled former student. Here, Sasha returns from Siberia, affording the reader a rare look at life in exile and the traveling conditions in Stalin's Russia. Sasha's mother and friends, who live in the Arbat section of Moscow, form the second strand of the novel. The third major character is Stalin himself. Each layer of the novel helps to illustrate how deception, power, and terror can extirpate honor and replace it with madness. Highly recommended for all collections of historical fiction. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 10/1/91.- Ruth M. Ross, Olympic Coll. Lib., Bremerton, Wash.Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.----------------------------------------------------------------A Bloody Job, but Someone's Got to Do ItBy Michael ScammellPublished: September 20, 1992FEAR By Anatoly Rybakov. Translated by Antonina W. Bouis. 686 pp. Boston: Little, Brown & Company. $24.95THE example of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" has done irreparable damage to Russian literature in this century. Throughout the 1920's, 30's, 40's and into the 50's, Soviet writers labored mightily and mostly unsuccessfully (Mikhail Sholokhov and "The Quiet Don" being a partial exception) to emulate the master. Even Boris Pasternak, who should have known better, was seduced into turning out his clumsy Tolstoyan pastiche, "Doctor Zhivago," and for the last two decades the magisterial Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who seems to be suffering from a terminal dose of Tolstoyitis, has been toiling over his multivolume epic on war and revolution, "The Red Wheel."Anatoly Rybakov is not in the same league as these writers, and at first glance his "Arbat" trilogy (of which "Children of the Arbat" was the first installment and "Fear" is the second) seems not to fit the mold. His subject is Soviet society in the mid-30's, when the Soviet Union was officially at peace. Yet a closer look reveals that his focus is the "war" that Stalin waged against the Soviet people with his series of purges between 1934 and 1937, which he contrasts with the "peaceful" lives of the main characters between episodes in that war. Mr. Rybakov's literary strategy is also Tolstoyan (in the debased form to which decades of socialist realism have reduced it) in that he alternates scenes of "peaceful" private life with scenes of "warlike" political action that involve real historical characters engaged in real historical events, and weaves them together through the device of having his fictional characters interact with the historical ones.Although it is intended to stand alone, "Fear" can more easily be understood if one has some knowledge of "Children of the Arbat," which appeared in English four years ago (fortunately, the publishers provide a summary for new readers). In that novel, Mr. Rybakov described the trials and tribulations of a group of privileged Moscow youngsters who grew up during the late 20's and early 30's, when Stalin was first fashioning his police state. The novel's hero was an idealistic young student called Sasha Pankratov, who was exiled to Siberia for three years for publishing a feeble political joke in the student newspaper. Another important character was Pankratov's former friend, Yuri Sharok, a scheming and upwardly mobile student of working-class origin.Sharok joined the party establishment by enlisting in the secret police, the N.K.V.D., and making a promising career for himself. Along the way he succeeded in seducing, and almost killing (as the result of an illegal abortion), a female friend of Sasha's, the virtuous Lena Budyagina, daughter of a prominent Soviet diplomat, and in entrapping yet another friend, Vika Marasevich, the frivolous daughter of a famous professor, who became a reluctant informer for him.The historical sections of the novel were devoted mainly to the character and activities of Stalin, and to his manipulations of the Communist Party hierarchy, climaxing in the murder of Sergei Kirov in December 1934. Kirov was then the popular boss of the Leningrad Party Committee and was seen by Stalin as his chief rival."Fear" takes up the story where "Children of the Arbat" left off, and covers the years 1935-37. In this volume Sasha Pankratov completes his period of exile and returns to the small town of Kalinin just north of Moscow (as a former political exile he is banned from living in Moscow itself). Pankratov is secretly in love with Varya Ivanova, the sister of another former classmate, Nina Ivanova, who is living in Moscow. Varya loves him too, but their bashfulness, combined with his unexpected discovery that Varya was married before, and to a wastrel at that, conspires to keep them apart.Meanwhile, the villain of the piece, Yuri Sharok, moves center-stage as a rising star in the N.K.V.D. As Stalin's great purge gathers momentum, Sharok becomes an interrogator and is drawn into the bloody work of extracting confessions by torture. He hates his job, but takes comfort in the thought that he is exacting revenge on the class that had formerly humiliated him, and he exults in his status as a leading member of the all-powerful security service.Sharok's rise is paralleled by that of another young careerist, Vadim Marasevich, Vika's brother and a corrupt and self-serving literary critic. Vadim, like Vika in volume one, is trapped into becoming an informer by one of Sharok's colleagues, and he suffers pangs of conscience for it, but Vika seemingly escapes by calculatingly marrying a French newspaper correspondent who takes her back to Paris with him. However, as "Fear" draws to a close, we see Sharok enlisted into the foreign department of the secret police and closing in on Vika again as part of an assignment to work with emigre spies, while Vadim is drawn ever closer into the N.K.V.D.'s web as more and more demands are made on him.It is the "war" chapters of "Fear," however, that are likely to attract more attention from the average reader, if only because they deal with the ever fascinating and sensational series of purges and show trials Stalin organized and orchestrated from 1934 to 1937 and beyond. Mr. Rybakov's interest is not so much in the trials themselves as in the methods of interrogation and torture used by the N.K.V.D. to prepare the way for them, and in the psychology of both the leaders who were victimized (including Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin) and of their persecutors (the secret police chiefs Genrikh Yagoda and Nikolai Yezhov, the prosecutor Andrei Vyshinsky and party stalwarts like V. M. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovich). At the center of the entire conspiracy, of course, stands the enigmatic figure of Stalin, whom Mr. Rybakov treats as one of his main characters and whom he portrays in considerable detail.Mr. Rybakov's goal is evidently to uncover the roots of the Soviet totalitarian state and to analyze the psychological and political underpinnings of the terror it imposed on its citizens. To this end he treats his historical characters just like fictional ones, entering into their thoughts and presenting conversations between them as if they had actually taken place. In this way he attempts to get at the motives of the principal actors and offer an explanation for the otherwise inexplicable -- the grotesque accusations of treason by party leaders, the abject confessions of the accused to every imaginable crime, the implacable thirst for retribution by Stalin and his lieutenants.TO some degree Mr. Rybakov is successful, especially in his understanding of that characteristic combination of sadism, sentimentality and cynicism that Dostoyevsky described so well and that seems endemic to the perpetrators of revolutionary terror. However, his overall analysis is vitiated by a larger fault of interpretation that runs through the novel like a signature tune. This is the conviction, voiced countless times by both historical and fictional characters and repeatedly endorsed by the author, that Stalin alone was the fount of all the Soviet Union's political ills, and that the idea of the purges and the manner in which they unfolded sprang fully formed from Stalin's head.Moreover, Stalin is supposed to have planned the terror and been plotting its realization from virtually the moment he became a Bolshevik, that is to say, from before the Revolution. A corollary, both implied and stated by Mr. Rybakov, is that Lenin's intentions and policies were completely different, and that the Soviet system he fashioned would never have produced such results had it not been for Stalin.If this theory sounds familiar, it may be because it essentially repeats and enlarges upon the explanation for the terror offered by Nikita Khrushchev as long ago as 1956, when he gave his famous secret speech on the crimes of Stalin to party leaders. It also reflects the views of Mikhail Gorbachev and his chief aides in the period of perestroika, when they attempted to build on Khrushchev's reforms and reintroduce a controlled liberalization of Soviet society. It is no accident, therefore, that the "Arbat" trilogy was one of the first literary fruits of Mr. Gorbachev's policies, and was strenuously promoted by the Soviet leader's cultural establishment as evidence of radical change. Amid the resulting publicity, "Children of the Arbat" sold millions of copies in the Soviet Union and achieved virtual best-seller status elsewhere.But the claims of political and literary radicalism for that novel (and equally for "Fear") are deceptive, just as Mr. Gorbachev's claim to be introducing revolutionary change in the Soviet Union turned out to be exaggerated. A quick look at the "thaw" novels of Ilya Ehrenburg and Vladimir Dudintsev, for example, written during the same period as Khrushchev's secret speech, confirms that Mr. Rybakov's esthetics come essentially out of the 50's, that is to say, they reproduce the strategies of Stalinist socialist realism while modifying the political message wrapped up inside. And in this case the message, though anti-Stalinist, is by no means radical or revolutionary, and has been far outstripped by actual political developments within the former Soviet Union.MORE important, Mr. Rybakov's account of and interpretation of the purges has long since been outstripped and superseded by other writers'. After the works of Mr. Solzhenitsyn (whose shadow hangs heavily over this book in terms of both form and content), of Varlam Shalamov, Nadezhda Mandelstam, Eugenia Ginzburg and a host of other memoirists -- not to mention historians like Robert Conquest or Roy Medvedev -- "Fear" comes as an anachronism, offering too little and too late. Furthermore, Mr. Rybakov's interpretation of the psychology of the victims represents no advance on Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon," written as long ago as 1940.Despite the pretensions to Tolstoyan spaciousness and grandeur (themselves socialist realist in inspiration), "Fear," ably translated by Antonina W. Bouis, is also utterly pedestrian as a work of literature. Mr. Rybakov's powers of description are rudimentary and his characters, whether fictional or historical, are pasted together out of cardboard. Neatly divided into good (lovable idealists who have not the slightest doubts about Stalin's villainy) and bad (those who are either taken in by Stalin or, more often, decide cynically to work for him), they are almost all designed to illustrate a simple thesis or to act as vehicles for the author's opinions.By overreaching himself with a novel five times its natural length, Mr. Rybakov may succeed temporarily in attracting more attention than his work deserves. That cannot hide the fact that "Fear" amounts to little more than a Soviet soap opera, albeit with sinister overtones and a sensational historical backdrop. At best it might provide unsophisticated elements of the Russian reading public with a Reader's Digest version of the Soviet terror in a form they can easily assimilate. However, with the arrival on Russia's bookstands of work by Robert Ludlum and Stephen King, even that is increasingly doubtful.Michael Scammell, a professor of Russian literature at Cornell University, is writing a biography of Arthur Koestler. less
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