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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."