The Triumph of Anatoli Rybakov : After 20 Years, Soviet Author’s Anti-Stalin Book Bursts Into Print

When a bemedaled Red Army lieutenant named Anatoli Rybakov came home from the war in 1946 to the narrow, tree-lined streets of his old neighborhood in Moscow’s Arbat, he had already lived three lives. Now a fourth existence, the first one he might have something to say about, had begun to take shape in his mind.

First there was Rybakov the boy, the streetwise son of an assimilated Jew who grew up in the ‘20s and ‘30s in the lush intellectual humus of old Moscow’s most colorful district.

The Arbat then was the habitat of artists, actors, high Communist Party officials and the seamier denizens of Moscow--the gamblers, whores and black marketeers--who traveled in their wake. Mixed among them were blue-collar workers in their squalid communal apartments, one family to a room, three or four families sharing a tiny bathroom and a kitchen. Young Rybakov absorbed it all.

Then there was Rybakov, the enemy of the people. Arrested in 1933, when he was a 22-year-old engineering student, he lived a second life as a political exile in a desolate Siberian village because he had dared to write a prank article in his school newspaper that seemed to lampoon the party line.

Third was Rybakov the soldier. Drafted, forgiven the sin he never committed, he spent five years in combat, won a battlefield commission, took part in the storming of Berlin.

He scrawled his name on the fire-blackened walls of the Reichstag and came home, older and wiser, to find epiphany in the old apartment-house courtyard of his youth.

Friends Gone

“It had been 13 years since I left. I went straight to the house on the Arbat where I grew up,” Rybakov recalls. “My mother and father were there. But of my friends, none were left. Many died in the ‘30s, many in the war.

“I’d always wanted to be a writer. I’d kept records, diaries. But when I went back to that house, and stood in that courtyard, I understood immediately. I was already 35. I thought, ‘If I don’t get started now, I never will.’ ”

He did. In one of the stranger twists of fate that mark his life, he won the Stalin Prize for literature in 1951 for a book about, of all things, truck drivers.

But now, at 77, Anatoli Naumovich Rybakov has succeeded beyond his dreams in accomplishing the task he set for himself in the courtyard at 51 Arbat St. that day in 1946: To touch the conscience of his nation in a way no Soviet writer ever has before.

His instrument is a novel, “Children of the Arbat,” an unadorned portrait of Josef Stalin and his murderous times unlike any previously published in Soviet Union. Whether or not Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost endures, Rybakov’s long-suppressed book is already regarded as one of its major results, and one that cannot be rolled back.

Rybakov and his wife, Tatyana, who is also his primary editor, are currently touring the United States to “spread a little propaganda,” as he puts it, about the book that is the culmination of his life.

The novel, to be released officially in the United States on Wednesday, has put him in the unusual position--at least for a Soviet writer--of being acclaimed simultaneously at home and in the West for his literary courage. To say nothing of his patience. In various forms, the manuscript lay in his desk, banned from publication, for 20 years.

“Children of the Arbat” is two books laced into one. The first is an absorbing social cross section of Moscow in the ‘30s, a city still imbued with socialist zeal as it stood, unwittingly for the most part, on the brink of Stalin’s Great Terror. The hustlers and the bureaucrats, the intellects and the informers, the exiles and the jailers and the loves of Rybakov’s youth march by in a richly detailed tapestry whose texture is not so very different from today’s Soviet Union.

Most of all there is Anatoli Rybakov, or at least a very large piece of him, in the guise of the novel’s hero, the young student Sasha Pankratov, whose carefree post-adolescence in the Arbat is touched by one of those Byzantine strokes of political lightening from the Kremlin Olympus that energized the madness of the ‘30s.

And there is Stalin.

Woven through the lives of Sasha and his friends is the first portrayal of Stalin to appear in an officially approved Soviet novel that is consistent with historical knowledge of the man whose 29-year dictatorship from 1924 to 1953 probably cost the Soviet Union as many lives as World War II, and possibly more than the official wartime toll of 20 million.

Understandably, Rybakov exudes the pride of a man whose destiny is fulfilled. Seated at a table in his suite at the Dorset Hotel in New York, he picks with blunt proletarian fingers at a plate of grapes that Tatyana has put on the table with apologies there wasn’t something more substantial. He strives for modesty, but it isn’t easy.

“Children of the Arbat,” he says, is the single most explosively popular book in the 70-year history of Soviet literature. He is not exaggerating.

The book first appeared last year in the literary journal Druzhba Narodov (Friendship of the Peoples), then in a hardback edition with a print run in Russian alone that is to reach 2.4 million by the end of the year. Even this huge distribution has not slaked the demand.

Bootleg Copies Were Retyped

Thousands of copies have been run off illicitly on state-owned copying machines, which are nominally kept under lock and key and monitored by the KGB security police. Still more bootleg copies have been laboriously retyped on manual machines with thick wads of carbon paper--a samizdat technique hitherto reserved for underground literature. At 685 pages (in the English-language edition) this is a labor of love.

In major cities, the waiting lists at public libraries for “Children of the Arbat” run into the hundreds of names. In smaller towns, where the local library is allotted only one copy, librarians are checking it out to groups of readers, who gather around tables to read the book aloud.

But there is something else, Rybakov says with malicious glee, something even more satisfying. “I have achieved the highest honor I could wish in my lifetime: They are burning my book in Gori.”

Gori is the small town in the Georgian foothills of the Caucasus where the cobbler’s son Josef Dzugashvili was born, and later took the name Stalin. To many Georgians, he is still the local boy who rose to lead the nation heroically through war.

Even outside his native Georgia, many blue-collar workers continue to regard him as the Father of the People, a demigod whose iron hand brought order to a nation that has long since fallen on slipshod ways. In the provinces, many university students still laugh at Westerners who say that Stalin inflicted a holocaust on his own nation; that information, they say, is not in their textbooks.

Others, especially the better educated whose families suffered disproportionately in the ‘30s, have no doubt about Stalin but have few facts to corroborate their shadowy impressions.

In the absence of the new and truthful historical studies that Mikhail Gorbachev has promised, Soviet readers are turning to the first sources available, in the form of historical fiction--”Children of the Arbat,” followed by the film “Repentance,” by Georgian director Tengiz Abuladze, and the powerfully anti-Stalinist play by Mikhail Shatrov, “Onward, Onward, Onward.”

It was, Rybakov acknowledges, a fortunate convergence of the right book and the right times. In order for “Children of the Arbat” to be published, “my book needed perestroika, but it turns out that perestroika needed my book.”

“A people living in fear cannot develop its ability to produce,” Rybakov observes. “The essence of Stalinism was not just that it destroyed a great number of people. It also destroyed the psychological character of the country. When one man thought for everyone, everyone else ceased to think. When one man decided everything for all, everyone else forgot how to act independently.

“Under these conditions, progress is impossible and we began to fall behind. So first and foremost, perestroika means our liberation from the legacy of Stalinism.”

Rybakov’s tale, his frontal attack in this liberation struggle, begins in 1933 and ends with the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, the popular leader of the Leningrad Communist Party organization and the antithesis of Stalin. The book reflects Rybakov’s belief, in keeping with a preponderance of historical evidence published in the West, that Stalin engineered Kirov’s murder as a pretext for detonating the terror.

The point, Rybakov emphasizes, was to demystify Stalin in the eyes of Soviet readers, to reduce him to life-size. (He was 5 feet 3 inches tall.) His portrait of Stalin is an image of the banality of evil, complete with bad teeth. It is fiction, but Rybakov makes abundant use of real historical characters and real events. Less is invented here, he suggests, than one might think.

Stalin’s Dentist

One memorable passage, for instance, finds Stalin in the hands of his personal dentist, a decent and charming Jewish doctor who endures his leader’s hedgehog personality with amazing aplomb.

The dentist is real. Tatyana tracked him down. “He’s a very old man, and when we first talked to him he was terribly frightened,” she says. Now that the book is out and a great success, however, the dentist, whose name in the book is Lipman, telephoned the Rybakovs recently with a complaint.

“Now he wants to know why we didn’t use his real name in the book,” Rybakov laughs. “He’s getting letters from his colleagues who’ve read the book and tell him, ‘This is you , Lipets, isn’t it?’ ”

It may be up to the reader to come to his own conclusions about Stalin and his personal role in the purges, but, as for himself, Rybakov says, “I can find no positive human qualities in him.

“For Stalin, the single, the only question was power. He subordinated everything to his personal conception of power. There were for him no ideals. He despised people. Yet he could be extremely charming, but only to deceive his opponent.”

Stalin, in fact, occupies a relatively small portion of the novel, but the reaction of the Soviet public in countless letters to newspapers and to Rybakov himself make clear that, for most, this is electrifying material. Rybakov seems almost disappointed that so much attention is focused on this part of the book, though he finds it understandable.

“You see, a novel, if it’s a real novel, represents a whole organism unto itself. If I punch a man, he may think the worst thing about me is my fist. Really it is my heart, my brain, my soul. But he feels only the fist.

“They don’t understand that if I didn’t show Stalin against the backdrop I give him, by exploring the fate of the little people in the book like Sasha Pankratov, he--Stalin--would not have the same effect.”

Many younger readers, it appears, have become more absorbed in the fate of Sasha, the 22-year-old engineering student at the Institute of Transport who, like Rybakov at the same institute of transport engineering in 1933, runs afoul of forces that he had never perceived, let alone understood, as the consequence of an adolescent ditty in the school newspaper.

This youthful focus on the character of Sasha is important, he notes, because, through the fate of Sasha, his family and the other children of the Arbat, younger readers have a vehicle for comprehending the emotional scars that Stalinist times left on their parents and grandparents--the free-floating fear and the walls of silence that still divide generations in the Soviet Union.

This is not biography, but these are pieces of Rybakov’s own life. “Sasha Pankratov is not really Rybakov,” he says, “but I gave him events from my life.”

The vivid scenes of Sasha’s trek into exile, hundreds of miles up the wild Angara River to the tiny Siberian village of Mozgova, are Rybakov’s memories as well. Half a century later, he still finds it easier to talk about his Siberian years through Sasha’s voice than his own.

“What is life like in a Siberian village? It’s all in the book. I went through a lot, and it’s hard to bring it all back. It’s the end of the world.”

Freed from exile in 1936, but banned as an ex-convict from Moscow and other major cities, Rybakov spent the next five years before the war drifting around the Soviet Union in a succession of jobs from truck driver to stevedore to dance instructor, keeping a low profile.

“Those were terrible years, ‘37, ‘38, ‘39,” Rybakov says, and he means not so much for himself but for the Soviet Union as a whole. This was the terror in full spasm, when anyone, certainly an ex-convict, could be swept into the maw without explanation and simply disappear in the mines and logging camps of the Kolyma. “But I was young, strong, healthy. I survived.”

Sequel Due This Fall

This period in Rybakov’s life forms a sequel to “Children of the Arbat,” to be titled “1935 and Other Years.” It is scheduled for publication in the Soviet Union this fall.

For Rybakov, the war changed everything. In a way, it was his salvation. His military record won him political rehabilitation and made pursuit of a writing career possible. His first book, a children’s adventure called “The Dirk,” appeared in 1948 and has since been translated into more than 40 languages.

In 1951, Rybakov’s new-found career took an ironic turn as his second book, “The Drivers,” won the Stalin Prize for literature. It was, he notes now with great delight, distinguished by the absence of any mention of Stalin, or of heroic construction projects. It might have won him another one-way cruise up the Angara River, but Stalin read the book and, Rybakov says, “Isn’t it funny? He liked it.”

By the 1970s, deep in the conservative somnolence of the Brezhnev years, Rybakov had become an established writer, known both for his novels and his screen and television writing. He achieved a comfortable--by Soviet standards, affluent--life in the elite, forested enclave of Peredelkino outside Moscow. But, if he played by the rules, Rybakov also pressed the limits of the possible.

His 1978 novel, “Heavy Sand,” was the first to deal with the courage and resistance of Soviet Jews under the German occupation. Translated by Harold Shukman, who has also done “Children of the Arbat,” it won him praise in the West.

But all this time “Children of the Arbat” remained at the center of his life. Rybakov began working on it in the 1950s. Twice over a 20-year period it seemed as if he had won permission to publish it, only to be disappointed at the last moment.

In 1966, when what is now the first third of the book was ready, the country’s leading literary journal, Novy Mir (New World), announced its publication for 1967, but it was blocked on high. “The reason was the couple of chapters about Stalin,” Rybakov says. “So, I kept working. In 1978 ‘Heavy Sand’ came out, and I had trouble with that, too. I was already writing the second part of ‘Children of the Arbat,’ and that year the journal Oktyabr (October) announced that it would come out the next year. Again it did not happen.”

Not until 1986, under Gorbachev, did the times and the book converge. By then Rybakov had written the third part of the present book.

In the meantime, of course, some of Rybakov’s most talented colleagues, whose works were also banned at home, arranged to have them smuggled to the West and published in tamizdat-- literally, “over there.” Writers like Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Vasily Aksyonov, Vladimir Voinovich and Georgi Vladimov were hailed in the West for their courage and denounced at home for treason.

Rybakov has a few kind words for Solzhenitsyn, who remains an object of official Soviet scorn, but he also has a fundamental philosophical dispute that is no doubt fully shared by the state: There was nothing inherent in the Bolshevik Revolution itself, he insists, that led inevitably to the Stalinist catastrophe.

Courage to Wait

“I value Solzhenitsyn’s work. I accept the facts of the ‘Gulag.’ But I do not accept the conception behind it--that the October (1917) Revolution led directly to the gulag. I believe it is Stalin who led to the gulag.”

The price these writers paid was to be uprooted from their native culture and forced to emigrate. Was Rybakov’s course less courageous?

His short, sturdy frame stiffens, and he points a finger at his questioner. Tatyana, puttering with papers across the room, pauses to listen.

“I don’t know which takes more courage,” Rybakov says, measuring out his words. “To wait 20 years so that my people may read this book, and to do the work this book has done? Or whether it is more courageous to publish in the West when not many there needed it.”

He smacks his hand on the table to emphasize an underlying fact of life: “In those days, to publish a book here (in the West) meant to close the path to publication in the Soviet Union.

“Believe you me, it was very, very hard to have this manuscript in my home, in my desk. To know that it was a good manuscript. To know that it could make me famous. And to wait nonetheless.”

Homemade and smuggled copies of the works of Solzhenitsyn and other emigre writers circulate clandestinely, probably in numbers not exceeding a few thousand. Many intellectuals but few among the masses have read them.

“I am in no way taking away from the courage of these other people,” Rybakov continues. “But every man chooses his own path. The correctness of the road is confirmed by the results of the journey. Tens of millions have read this novel. It has penetrated the consciousness of millions.”

“ Molodets ,” Tatyana says quietly from across the room. “Well said.”