PRAISE FOR FAITHFUL RUSLAN
“Vladimov’s particular distinction was as a dissident of immense moral courage, and as the author of Faithful Ruslan, one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period. His life was one of constant vicissitudes, but his authority and fortitude remained firm to the end.”
—THE GUARDIAN
“[A] perfectionist whose writing took him much effort … Vladimov produced a set of works that captured the mood of the times, but whose craft will ensure they survive.
—THE INDEPENDENT
“Known as a writer of strong conscience … Mr. Vladimov’s best-known work, Faithful Ruslan, is a chilling, cynical parable of false hopes in the post-Stalin era.”
—NEW YORK TIMES
“Russia’s political reality can be best understood through Russian fiction. Today’s Russia, for instance, calls to mind Faithful Ruslan, a novella by dissident writer Georgi Vladimov.”
—THE ST. PETERSBURG TIMES (RUSSIA)
“[An] exceptionally talented writer who has been cut down in mid-career and who is being hounded by the KGB. One reason for the persecution is his celebrated novella, Faithful Ruslan, which has circulated all over the country in samizdat.”
—TIME (1980)
FAITHFUL RUSLAN
GEORGI VLADIMOV was born Georgii Nikolaievich Volosevich in 1931 in Kharkov, Ukraine. As a child, his father was killed in World War II, and his Jewish mother was sent to the gulag in one of Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges. He began using the pseudonym Vladimov when he took up journalism after graduating from law school in 1953. His first novel, The Big Mine appeared in 1961, drawing praise for its frank take on issues of Soviet life such as alcoholism. But government censors delayed his next book, Three Minutes of Silence, for years, accusing him of “perverting Soviet reality.” In response, Vladimov aligned himself with Andrei Sakharov and the dissident movement, eventually becoming director of the Moscow branch of Amnesty International—a treasonous act. His work circulated in samizdat throughout, including a story called “The Dogs,” which would eventually become the novel Faithful Ruslan. Finally published under his name in 1978 in Germany, Soviet authorities refused to let Vladimov leave the country to respond to international invitations until 1983. He thereafter remained in exile, publishing books such as The General and His Army, which won the Russian Booker in 1994. He did not return to Russia until 2000, when he was offered a residence in the official writers’ colony near Moscow. He nonetheless continued to spend most of his time abroad, and died in Frankfurt, Germany in 2003.
MICHAEL GLENNY (1927–1990) was a British intelligence officer who quit to become a salesman for Wedgewood, which first took him to the Soviet Union. He was the first to translate Bulgakov and Solzhenitsyn into English, as well as numerous dissident authors.
THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY
I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET
FAITHFUL RUSLAN
Originally published in Russian by the émigré publishers Possev Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, as Ernyi Ruslan, by Georgi Vladimov Copyright © 1978 by Possev Verlag
Translation and Foreword copyright © 1979 by Michael Glenny
Melville House Publishing
145 Plymouth Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.mhpbooks.com
eISBN: 978-1-61219-009-9
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword to the First English Edition (1979): by Michael Glenny
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
FOREWORD TO THE FIRST
ENGLISH EDITION (1979)
BY MICHAEL GLENNY
If the reading public outside the USSR has heard little of Georgi Vladimov until now, it is not from a lack of talent in this author, as this novel will show; it is due rather to the exceptional difficulty he has encountered in having his books passed by the Soviet literary censors. In a land where all media are controlled by the state and where writers must follow rules that govern not only their subject matter but even their style, Vladimov has found it harder than most other Soviet authors to get his work into print. Although his writing is remarkable for its originality, insight, honesty and ironic humor, these qualities are not enough to earn publication in the Soviet Union—in fact they can be a positive hindrance. This novel, for instance, which many Russians regard as Vladimov’s masterpiece, completed in 1974, has never been printed in the USSR.
Faithful Ruslan has an unusual history, even by Soviet standards. In the years 1963–65 Vladimov wrote a short story called simply “The Dogs”; it described how a peaceful May Day procession was attacked and broken up by a pack of former prison-camp guard dogs, who mistook the procession for a column of prisoners. The story was unsigned, and for the ten years or so in which it circulated illicitly from hand to hand in typescript, readers were so impressed by its qualities that its authorship was generally ascribed to Solzhenitsyn. During those years, however, Vladimov was not content to leave the story in its original form; as the idea continued to ferment in his mind, he changed the emphasis, expanded the story to the length of a short novel, rewrote it again and again in his careful, scrupulous fashion until it had been so transformed that it was a work of altogether different character and far greater scope. At some point in this process (only the author knows when it was) he retitled his book Faithful Ruslan. This time he did not allow it to be passed around in samizdat (“self-publishing”—the Russian term for the unofficial circulation of forbidden typescripts); instead, knowing that it could never be legally published in the Soviet Union, he made arrangements for it to be printed abroad in West Germany, whither he managed to smuggle out a copy at the end of 1974. In order to conceal the fact of its relatively recent completion, at the author’s request the date of the original story “The Dogs” (1963–65) was printed at the end of Faithful Ruslan. When this final version of the story appeared in 1975, taking up almost a complete issue of Grani (the émigré Russian literary journal published in Frankfurt-on-Main), it bore at last its author’s name.
Georgi Vladimov was born in the Ukrainian city of Kharkov in 1931. “Vladimov” is, in fact, a pseudonym; his real name, in its full form, is Georgii Nikolaievich Volosevich, but he has always published under the name of Vladimov. His father was killed at the front in World War II; his mother was imprisoned during the final surge of Stalin’s terror in 1952. Soon after graduating from the law school of Leningrad University in 1953, Vladimov began working as a journalist on a small provincial newspaper. Starting in 1954, his reviews and critical articles made their appearance in Soviet literary magazines. From 1956 to 1959 he was an editor in the prose section of the journal Novy Mir. One of his best pieces of criticism, published by Novy Mir in 1961, was a stimulating and perceptive review of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. In its July issue of the same year, Novy Mir also published Vladimov’s first
novella, called The Big Mine, notable for its crisp, direct style and the startling frankness (by Soviet standards) of its treatment of matters such as alcoholism.
This promising debut as a fiction writer was somewhat overshadowed by the worldwide sensation created when in 1962 Novy Mir printed Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which marked the emergence of a new Russian writer of towering stature and tended to eclipse all other literary topics. In more than one way, however, Solzhenitsyn’s epoch-making novella provided the stimulus for Vladimov to write the story that evolved into Faithful Ruslan. This is only partly because Vladimov followed Solzhenitsyn in taking Stalin’s infamous prison camps as his basic theme. Solzhenitsyn is rather the godfather of Vladimov’s novel in a wider sense, namely that thanks to the political skill of Tvardovsky (the editor-in-chief of Novy Mir) in getting Solzhenitsyn’s work into print, the long-standing and previously rigid taboo on the prison camps was broken. The publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich opened the sluice gates that had been holding back a pent-up torrent of prison-camp literature, and Soviet magazines and publishing houses were swamped in a tidal wave of manuscripts on this subject. Very few of them were ever published, because the shock caused by Solzhenitsyn’s novella alone was enough to make Khrushchev and the rest of the Soviet leadership regret even this concession to liberalism. After some delays and hesitation, a ban on the prison-camp theme was effectively reim-posed, although in more ambiguous and less draconian form than under Stalin.
The greater part of this flood of prison-camp literature was the work of actual survivors of the camps, written from bitter personal experience. At the same time the topic itself (and the possibility, since the appearance of Ivan Denisovich, that more of such writing might get published) also stimulated the creative imagination of writers of a generation younger than Solzhenitsyn, writers whose age had spared them from becoming the direct victims of Stalin’s terror but who had suffered from it through the murder or brutal incarceration of parents or close relatives.
One such writer was Georgi Vladimov, who started work on “The Dogs” in 1963, at the time when the shock effect of Solzhenitsyn’s revelations was at its height. It took him nearly two years to finish this short story, partly because he was simultaneously busy earning his living as a journalist and critic, but also because Vladimov is a fastidious and painstaking literary craftsman. In 1965 (the year after Khrushchev’s fall from power), he offered it for publication, but despite the support of several distinguished writers who were very impressed by it, the time had passed when a story like this could have any chance of being published in the USSR.
Indeed the mere fact of having shown such a “subversive” work to a number of editors had a dire effect on Vladimov’s career in general, and it was another four years before Tvardovsky found it possible to publish Vladimov’s next story in Novy Mir’s issue for July 1969. This is the moving, masterfully written story, entitled “Three Minutes Silence,” of a confused but honest young man in search of an identity in a society that chiefly lives by false values. It is also the last of Vladimov’s fiction to have been published in the Soviet Union; since then this gifted and original writer has been banned from print in his own country. Although he has written other works, he has been writing them—in the expressive Russian phrase—“for the desk drawer.”
After enduring this humiliating and frustrating professional ostracism for nearly eight years, the last straw for Vladimov was the moment when, having never been outside the USSR in his life, he was refused an exit visa for a meeting with his Norwegian publisher. On October 10, 1977, in a bitter, scathing letter to the Executive Board of the Union of Soviet Writers, he poured out his scorn for the members of that board, servile bureaucrats who “manage” Soviet literature under orders from the Communist Party leadership; enclosed with the letter, Vladimov sent back his membership card of the Writer’s Union.*
At the same time he announced that he had joined the Moscow branch of Amnesty International, a move regarded by the Soviet authorities as tantamount to treason.
That those same Soviet cultural bureaucrats would regard Faithful Ruslan as, if anything, even more treasonable, will come as no surprise after reading the novel; in its ironic and telling fashion it is much more than just another angle on the prison camps: functioning at more than one level of meaning, it is a very subtle yet penetrating critique of the moral squalor inherent in Soviet communism—and which, by implication, it shares with all totalitarian systems.
The eponymous “Ruslan” of Vladimov’s novel is one of the guard dogs that were (and to a lesser extent still are) employed as auxiliaries to the human guards in Soviet prison camps. Faithful Ruslan was written for a Soviet Russian audience, and Vladimov naturally assumed in his readers a prior knowledge of recent Soviet history, which he therefore did not need to spell out. This framework, of dates, events, personalities and statistics may not, however, be quite so familiar to English-speaking readers, and since many key allusions in the story will not make much sense without a certain minimum of background information, a brief outline of the relevant facts may be helpful.
Prison camps, or “corrective-labor camps” as they are officially termed, have existed in the USSR since the earliest years of Soviet rule.*
From relatively modest beginnings in 1919–20, the scope of the prison-camp system was vastly expanded during the 1930s to accommodate the ever-growing numbers of the real or imagined objectors to Stalin’s drastic policies, until by the end of that decade it probably housed some twelve million prisoners, the vast majority of them not only innocent of any crime but innocent of any form of opposition to the regime; they were merely digits in the arithmetic of a calculated rule of terror.†
At the end of World War II there was a huge new influx into the camps, when, as a deliberate act of retributive policy, Stalin imprisoned en masse all returning Soviet prisoners of war and all Soviet civilians who had been deported by force to work in Germany during the war. Thereafter until Stalin’s death in 1953, his increasingly paranoid mind created new categories of “enemies of the people” to be packed off to the camps: writers and intellectuals, Jews, Old Bolsheviks, former political refugees from Nazi Germany, religious believers, anyone having the most innocent contact with foreigners—the list was interminable.
So evil and grossly inhuman was Stalin’s system of terror that among the first priorities of his successors was to stop the flow of new prisoners, then to release the inmates and dismantle the whole prison-camp system. This, to his great credit, is what Khrushchev largely succeeded in doing after his denunciation of Stalin to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. Over the next twelve months, an estimated eight million prisoners were released from the camps, and about six million who had perished there were “posthumously rehabilitated.”*
As part of this process, the monstrous organization (known by its Russian acronym as “Gulag”) that had kept them all behind barbed wire was almost entirely liquidated.
Although Faithful Ruslan does not always keep to a straight chronological sequence, making occasional uses of flashback, the main narrative covers an actual timespan of about eight or nine months. It starts in the winter of 1956–57, when Khrushchev’s policy of closing the prison camps and freeing the prisoners is being put into effect. The story opens, in fact, on the day after all the prisoners in a particular camp have been sent home and most of the guard troops have been demobilized. The locale of the story is a prison camp somewhere amid the vast forests of Siberia; it is sited at a distance of perhaps two or three miles from a small- to medium-sized town on the Trans-Siberian Railroad, along which new prisoners were shipped into the camp in special prison trains, and the lumber, felled and cut by the prisoners as part of the corrective-labor regime, was shipped out. Temperatures in Siberia can be extreme: while very hot in the short summer, the thermometer can frequently hit −50 °C in winter. Soviet prison regulations stated that at temperatures below −40 °C pr
isoners could not be made to do outdoor work, but this rule was not always observed by prison-camp commandants.
The troops used to guard and escort the prisoners were not subordinate to the Ministry of Defense, as were the rest of the armed forces, but were under the authority of the Ministry of State Security, an immensely powerful organization that thus disposed of a very considerable private army, enjoying special privileges of pay, leave, pensions, etc. The security troops were also fortunate in that they were never sent to fight in the front line; on the other hand, a large proportion of them were obliged to endure the same extreme climatic conditions suffered by the inmates of the Siberian camps.
Within a prison camp, duties were divided between the internal guard, responsible for security inside the double-barbed-wire perimeter, and the external or escort guard, whose job it was to watch over the prisoners when they were taken to their work sites outside the camp. The latter was regarded as the harder and more responsible task; each soldier of the escort guard was a trained dog-handler, to whom was assigned a specially bred and schooled guard dog. For some years these animals were generally crossbred, mainly German shepherd crossed with various long-haired Russian hunting breeds (short-haired breeds, such as Doberman pinschers or boxers, could not survive in the Siberian climate), but in time it was found that the most suitable breed was the Kavkazskaya ovcharka or Caucasian sheepdog, so that from World War II onward only this type of dog was bred for the prison service and frontier patrolling. “Ruslan” is of this breed.
All guard troops were armed with the standard Soviet infantry close-combat weapon, the Degtaryov 9-mm submachine gun, with an air-cooled barrel and a drum-type magazine holding seventy-two rounds. The watchtowers around the camp’s perimeter were manned by the internal guard and armed with the regular Soviet Army medium machine gun, the Maxim 7.62-mm with belt feed and a fluted water-cooled barrel—a very accurate weapon with a high rate of fire. All guards were under standing orders to shoot to kill any living creature that entered the No-Go Zone between the inner and outer perimeter fences.
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