Life And Fate

[1] Published in English translation in 1972 as Forever Flowing.

[2] The Jews of the Russian Empire, who were forced to live in special zones of residence, lived in small towns, shtetls, where they made up the majority of the population.

[3] Comrade, good, bread, soup, children, cigarettes, work… sickbay, block orderly, military police, extermination camp, roll-call, roll-call square, ablutions, flight point, camp guards.

[4] Lads, tobacco, comrade.

[5] + Passage missing in the original text.

[6] ++ General A. A. Vlasov was a Red Army officer who, after being captured by the Germans in 1942, formed an army of Russian prisoners to fight against the Soviet Union.

[7] The Russian Army on the right, or west, bank of the Volga, in the city of Stalingrad itself.

[8] A political officer was attached to each unit. The lowest rank was 'political instructor', the highest 'Member of the Military Soviet' for an Army or a Front. The intermediate ranks were 'battalion commissar', 'regimental commissar', etc. There was frequently friction between these political officers and the corresponding commanding officers.

[9] P. F. Yudin was one of Stalin's favourite hack philosophers.

[10] Based in the Kremlin, the Stavka was the Soviet equivalent of GHQ and was responsible for the strategic direction of the war.

[11] Kolkhoz: a collective farm.

[12] Obkom: the Party committee of an oblast or province.

[13] Nomenklatura: the register kept by the Party organs of persons professionally and politically eligible for posts of responsibility.

[14] An article condemning certain 'excesses' committed during collectivization -published when the famine resulting from the initial disasters threatened to get out of hand.

[15] This was in fact a death-sentence.

[16] Donskoy, Suvorov and Ushakov are Russian military heroes.

[17] Zemstvo: a local government institution.

[18] Byedniy was a mediocre propagandist poet at the time of the Revolution.

[19] Fet was a lyric poet of the late nineteenth century, a precursor of the Symbolists.

[20] Dobrolyubov (1836-61) and Chernyshevsky (1828-89) were among the ancestors of the Russian revolutionaries.

[21] Komsomol: the Communist Youth League.

[22] Dalstroy: the Far Eastern Construction Trust, i.e. the network of prison camps that covered thousands of miles of the far North-East of the Soviet Union.

[23] A barrack in a prison camp inhabited (solely or mainly) by professional criminals.

[24] One of the ultra-reactionary and anti-Semitic organizations responsible for the pogroms at the beginning of the century.

[25] Jug, plywood, puddle, sour milk, duckweed, scarecrow, lazy, kitten.

[26] A collection of poems by the Ukrainian poet T. Chevtchenko.

[27] Ulrich was President of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court. He presided at several of the Great Purge Trials. N.I. Yezhov was People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, 1936-1938.

[28] Between 1923 and 1934 the Soviet security service was known as the OGPU (United State Political Administration).

[29] The Communist children's organization.

[30] A quotation from a poem by Heine.

[31] From a short lyric of Pushkin's.

[32] An anonymous twelfth-century epic poem.

[33] An allusion to Gogol's play, The Inspector: the governor tries to make out that a widow, whom he has had whipped, has in fact whipped herself.

[34] The Tsarist Secret Police.

[35] 'This will make your voice beautiful!'

[36] 'Caps off!'

[37] A quotation from a famous song about the Cossack chieftain, Stenka Razin.

[38] Cossack chieftain.

[39] Khrushchev.

[40] I.e. prisoners still capable of a full day's work.

[41] Common criminals who have broken the underworld code.

[42] A revolutionary organization of the nineteenth century.

[43] A light biplane.

[44] The Russian word khren is used in an expression meaning 'old sod'.

[45] A minister under Alexander I. Here he epitomises a narrow-minded and rigid bureaucracy.

[46] The subject of a famous story by Gogol.

[47] Dentist.

[48] An allusion to a passage in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera. Viktor is referring to the political authorities, perhaps to Stalin himself.

[49] A Tsarist political prison.

[50] A traditional custom: if guests at a wedding party shout, 'Bitter', then the bride and groom have to kiss.

[51] The famous writer was Boris Pasternak, his comrade Osip Mandelstam.

[52] 'Tell me please, what is Makhorka?' (Makhorka is a coarse Russian tobacco.)

[53] A poem in celebration of the wives of the Decembrist conspirators, who followed their exiled husbands to Siberia.

[54] New Economic Policy: a period (192.1-4) of relative liberalization.