Red-Hot Children of the Arbat

By R.Z. Sheppard

The word from Moscow is that Anatoli Rybakov's Children of the Arbat is selling like blini on May Day. An initial printing of 500,000 copies sold out faster than the lines could form at the bookshops. As this classic supply-and- demand problem mocked Marxist economics, the cost of the novel rose from the official price of 2.5 rubles ($4.20) to an extortionist 25 rubles on the black market. Plans at Sovietsky Pisatel and Moskovsky Rabochy, the popular author's two publishers, call for at least 2.4 million additional hardbacks in Russian, plus editions in Ukrainian, Armenian, Lithuanian, Estonian and Latvian.

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. Now every literate Soviet citizen can get a popularized characterization of Stalin as he broods about the brutal nature of power and dreams of rebuilding Moscow as a monument to his reign.

Western readers may not fully appreciate Arbat as a political event, but its literary markings should be familiar: a solidly conventional narrative style, made-for-TV characters representing various layers of society, public and private lives linked in short chapters and history hovering portentously in the wings. Rybakov, 77, is an old pro who has written teenage adventures and Heavy Sand, a widely read novel about Ukrainian Jews during World War II. A bemedaled tank commander during that conflict, he has maneuvered well within the Soviet literary system and enjoys one of its most visible rewards, a dacha at Peredelkino, the writers' colony west of Moscow.

Like Rybakov himself, Sasha Pankratov, the student hero of Arbat, lived in the capital's bohemian Arbat district during the '30s. Also like Rybakov, he was arrested on a trumped-up infraction and sentenced to three years in Siberian villages. These are not the feared Gulag but the world of administrative exiles living on odd jobs and packages from home. Sasha becomes an itinerant farmhand and because of his good looks has little trouble keeping warm on cold nights.

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.

How 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 of 1934.

But fiction is not history. Liberties are taken for 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 him.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Moscow