Children of the Arbat

Blurb

Children of the Arbat is a novel by Anatoly Rybakov that recounts the era in the Soviet Union of the build-up to the Congress of the Victors, the early years of the second Five Year Plan and the circumstances of the murder of Sergey Kirov prior to the beginning of the Great Purge. It is the first book of the tetralogy, followed by the books 1935 and Other Years, Fear and Dust and Ashes.
Principally told through the story of the fictional Sasha Pankratov, a sincere and loyal Komsomol member who is exiled as a result of party intrigues, the novel is semi-autobiographical - Rybakov too was exiled in the early 1930s. The book recounts the growing hysteria of the period where simple mistakes or humour were seen as examples of sabotage or acts of wreckers. In effect the book exposes how, despite the honest intentions of Pankratov and older Bolsheviks like Kirov, Stalinism is destroying all their hopes.
The novel is also notable for its portrayal of Joseph Stalin as a scheming and paranoid figure.
The book, which was written between 1966 and 1983, was suppressed until the period known as Perestroika.