Ivan Grigoryevich has been in the Gulag for thirty years.
Released after Stalin’s death, he finds that the years of terror have imposed a collective moral slavery. He must struggle to find a place for himself in an unfamiliar world.
Vasily Grossman tells the stories of those people entwined with Ivan’s fate: his cousin Nikolay, a scientist who never let his conscience interfere with his career, Pinegin, the informer who had Ivan sent to the camps and Anna Sergeyevna, Ivan’s lover, who tells of her involvement as an activist in the Terror famine of 1932-3. Everything Flows is Vasily Grossman’s final testament, written after the Soviet authorities suppressed Life and Fate.
The Ruthless Truth of War
Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union I was invited to join a private train for its first – and, as it proved, only – excursion, from St Petersburg to Tashkent. Things in Russia had...
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