Children of the Arbat
아르바트의 아이들
A novel by Anatoly Rybakov (1987). Young people who grew up in one house on Moscow's Arbat go into exile, turn informer or join the secret police during the terror of the 1930s. Blocked from publication since the 1960s, it appeared during perestroika and caused a great public stir.
In depth
What is the story?
Young people in one house on the Arbat: Sasha Pankratov of an intellectual family, the tailor's son Yura Sharok, the sisters Nina and Varya Ivanova, the diplomat's daughter Lena Budyagina, the doctor's children Vika and Vadim Marasevich. Around 1933 their lives begin to diverge.
At a party meeting of the Transport Institute, Sasha defends a deputy director under attack. Expelled from the institute and the Komsomol, he is reinstated, but that does not save him: accused of anti-Soviet sentiment, he is sentenced under Article 58 to exile in Siberia. In Moscow he leaves his mother, his friends and Varya, whom he comes to love through their letters.
After Kirov's murder in 1934 the terror sets in. Sharok joins the NKVD and takes part in arrests and torture. Lena's father and then her mother are shot, and she is left with a child as the daughter of an enemy of the people. Vadim becomes an informer and has those close to him taken away. Fear makes executioners of people and no one trusts anyone. The novel goes into Stalin's own psychology, trying to understand "the phenomenon" of Stalin.
With the later volumes the novel completes Sasha's story. In the war he rises to major, and after ten years finds Varya at the Battle of Kursk, mortally wounded; she only has time to recognise him. He soon falls fighting the Germans and they are buried in one grave.
Why did it take so long?
Sasha carries elements of Rybakov's own life. Alexander Tvardovsky read the first part and wanted it, and Novy Mir announced it in 1966, in vain. Oktyabr announced it again in 1978 and was stopped again. He kept on writing the next parts. No one believed it would ever appear, he recalled, not even his wife.
The opening came through Gorbachev's circle. His aide Anatoly Chernyaev gave the manuscript to Alexander Yakovlev in the summer of 1985. Yakovlev hesitated, citing "a lot of sex" and the presumption that Stalin was guilty of killing Kirov. At the Politburo Yegor Ligachev strongly objected and no decision was taken. The state publishing committee reportedly wrote that it was for the journals holding the manuscript to decide. When Druzhba Narodov began running it in 1987, no one objected.
How is it judged?
It was an event of perestroika, with a huge public reaction. US President Reagan applauded Gorbachev for bringing Sakharov back and publishing Doctor Zhivago and this novel. Joseph Brodsky dismissed it as "waste paper" and asked, when reminded of its popularity, whether waste paper was so rarely popular.
Its presumption of Stalin's guilt in Kirov's murder is the novel's premise, and one of the reasons Yakovlev hesitated. It should not be read as established fact; the English Wikipedia entry itself speaks of the "supposed" circumstances.
How to find it?
The sequels are Thirty-Five and Other Years (1988), Fear (1990) and Dust and Ashes (1994). A Russian television series followed in 2004.