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.