The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia

* The one really notable exception is Viktor Nekrasov’s In the Trenches of Stalingrad (1946), a vivid re-creation of the ordinary soldiers’ war which avoids the usual clichés about the wise leadership of the Party. Perhaps surprisingly, it won the Stalin Prize in 1946.

^† Four works of fiction in this category: Simonov’s The Living and the Dead; Nekrasov’s The Second Night (1960); Okudzhava’s Good Luck, Schoolboy (1961); and Vasil Bykau’s The Dead Feel No Pain (1965).