Soviet Union Tales from a Time of Terror

By James O. Jackson/Moscow

The 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 he did."

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. He is old enough to be a witness to that time. Mother History chose him. After this, it will be impossible to have the same history books in our libraries and schools."

The man Mother History chose is a vigorous 76-year-old with the stature and stubbornness of a fireplug, but by no means a political dissident. He is a decorated war veteran, a believer in Communism and a well-established Soviet writer. His best-known previous book was Heavy Sand, a story about the sufferings of Jews in a Nazi-occupied Ukrainian village.

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 sign it, but most find excuses not to. One of them becomes an informer for the NKVD and finally a full-fledged agent. Some of the most vivid scenes in the novel are detailed descriptions of NKVD investigations, arrests and interrogations.

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 be passed on to the people."

The 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.

Many intellectuals consider 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.

The book's publication is due in large part to Rybakov's patience. Says he: "Twice before, in 1966 and 1978, it was announced that this book would be published. Both times it was stopped. This time I believe it will succeed." For all those 20 years Rybakov rejected offers to publish it in the West despite the frustration of repeated rejection by Soviet authorities. "My people and my country need this novel," he says. "It must be published at home before it is published abroad."

The book obviously has high-level support. No apparatchik would have dared authorize it without powerful political backing. Rybakov does not know if Party Leader Mikhail Gorbachev has seen it or cleared it. "The reason it is being permitted now must be that those on high must have felt it was timely and needed," says Rybakov. "They must have realized that until we have eliminated the consequences of Stalinism in the psychology of our people we cannot move further forward. If we say we wish to live honestly and truthfully, then we must be truthful about the past. We cannot bring up our children on lies."

The first to agree with that proposition was Alexander Tvardovsky, former editor of the literary journal Novy Mir, which in 1962 published Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, a book about life in a Stalinist prison camp. Tvardovsky ran a notice in 1966 saying that the first part of Children of the Arbat would appear in 1967. It never did. In 1978 another monthly, Oktyabr, included Children of the Arbat in a list of books to be serialized in 1979. But again the year passed with neither publication nor explanation. The version that begins running this week in Druzhba Narodov, a publication of the Soviet Writers Union, is 600 pages long and will appear in the magazine's April, May and June issues. Rybakov expects that a Soviet publishing house will eventually produce a hardback edition.

Children of the Arbat is a popular success even before its appearance. The manuscript has been read and commented upon by half a dozen newspapers and magazines. Druzhba Narodov long ago stopped selling subscriptions because its limited press run of 150,000 copies has already been sold out. Thousands of would-be readers are on waiting lists for library copies, and subscribers report that friends are begging to read their copies. The black-market price of the April issue of Druzhba Narodov, which sells for 1 ruble 10 kopecks ($1.65), is expected to soar to more than 50 rubles ($75). Meanwhile, foreign publishers are bidding briskly for rights, with offers reportedly running past $100,000.

Like Solzhenitsyn's work, Children of the Arbat is highly autobiographical and is as much nonfiction as fiction. Rybakov spent his childhood at 51 Arbat Street, where much of the action takes place. Many of the book's characters, including Stalin, his private secretary Alexander Poskrebyshev and Sergei Kirov, are real people. Most of the fictional characters are also patterned after actual Soviet citizens.

"Sasha Pankratov is me, of course," says Rybakov of the main fictional character. "The parents are my own parents. The relatives and friends are fictional, but they are made up from parts of those I knew in my youth, so they are partly real people too. Every writer writes about his childhood."

Rybakov's early life was distressingly similar to many others in the Moscow of the 1930s, years of terror on a mass scale. He was yanked from his automotive-engineering studies in November 1933 during the political purges. After a week's interrogation he was sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia. He was charged under Article 58, a law used to arrest people for "assisting" in counterrevolutionary activity even though they had no idea what they were supposed to have done wrong and there was no evidence to support the charges. The article was a convenient catchall that secret-police officials used to fulfill their quotas for arrests.

"I went through the Lubyanka and Butyrka," Rybakov says, referring to the main prison processing centers in Moscow for political prisoners. From the Butyrka interrogation, which he describes in considerable detail in the novel, he was sent into exile in a series of villages in western Siberia. Rybakov shows a visitor photographs of himself as a handsome, dark-haired young man with laughing eyes. Then he shows photos of a grim, tired, middle-aged-looking man with dead eyes. "The difference was only one year between these pictures," he explains. "I was very depressed after the arrest, for I had done nothing. But I soon found out from others that if you did nothing you only got three years. If I had done something, they would have given me ten years."

Rybakov was lucky. In the still more terrible sweeps that took place later on, innocent victims were sentenced to long terms in labor camps or, in many cases, shot. The Siberian exile that the author endured was mild by comparison. After his three-year sentence, Rybakov drifted from village to village, taking jobs as varied as truck driver and ballroom dance instructor. He never stayed at one place more than a few months because his record as an "Article 58er" made him vulnerable to rearrest by authorities and to a prison-camp sentence.

All those experiences were raw material for his novel, but it was only after the passage of many years -- and his 1960 "rehabilitation" -- that Rybakov could bring himself to attempt the actual writing. "I felt almost ashamed of what happened to me, because my sentence was brief and not very difficult alongside those who really suffered -- those who were shot or who spent 16 or 17 years in camps and came home with their health destroyed," Rybakov says. "And for many years I knew that because of my record, anything I wrote would never be published. But I did some writing anyway, and during the war I left all my notes with my parents in Moscow."

After fighting with the Red Army as far as Berlin and winning medals for heroism, Rybakov returned home. "I went to the house at No. 51 Arbat, and suddenly it all came rushing back to me, vivid and strong," he says. "All my friends, my comrades, were gone -- some killed in the war, some killed before ^ it, some gone to other things. I began moving toward the book then."

But before Rybakov could tackle it, he built a successful career as a children's novelist, winning praise for his first novel, The Dirk, in 1950 and following it with a sequel, The Bronze Bird, in 1956. Next came two more teen stories, The Adventures of Krosh and Krosh's Vacation, written in the early 1960s.

By then the country was in the midst of the cultural thaw of Khrushchev's destalinization, a time of extraordinary ferment in the arts. Rybakov wrote an anti-Stalinist novel, Summer in Sosnyak, about a girl whose parents were killed in the 1937 purges. It was relatively mild politically and appeared in Novy Mir but was later suppressed until the publication of Rybakov's collected works in 1982. In 1964 he started Children of the Arbat, but by that time the thaw was over and the long twilight of the Brezhnev era was setting in. "Tvardovsky, the courageous Novy Mir editor, told me, 'I'm a great fan and admirer of yours, but I can't do a thing,' " Rybakov says. "He said the magazine was in trouble, and he could not get the book published. Who objected to it? They never say. It's just somebody higher up. Always somebody higher up."

It is clear why some people would voice powerful objections. The book's characters represent a cross section of Soviet society of the Stalinist era. Those who lived through it can see themselves in the story, and the portrait is not always pretty. "There is much that will be appearing for the first time," Rybakov said. "Many people of my generation will recognize themselves. This is an important step politically."

Rybakov intends to take two more such political and literary steps. "I have already started the next part of the story, with the working title 1935 and Other Years. That will go through 1938," he says. "Then I want to write a third volume to cover the war. If God grants me six more years, I can do it."