Everything Flows (29 page)

Authors: Vasily Grossman

BOOK: Everything Flows

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Sazonov, Yegor Sergeyevich (1879–1910): A member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. In 1904 he assassinated Plehve, the minister of the interior. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he poisoned himself in protest against prison conditions.

Scriabin, Alexandr Nikolaevich (1872–1915): A Russian composer and pianist. His vision of art was close to that of the Russian symbolist poets.

Semyonov, Nikolay Nikolaevich (1896–1986): A Soviet physical chemist, awarded the 1956 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

Shcherbakov, Aleksandr Sergeyevich (1901–1945): A Soviet statesman, military leader, and politician.

Shchors, Nikolay Aleksandrovich (1895–1919): A talented Ukrainian military commander, renowned for his personal courage during the Russian Civil War. Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s film,
Shchors
, was awarded the State Prize of the Soviet Union in 1939.

Shevchenko, Taras Hryhorovych (1814–1861): A Ukrainian poet and artist, and the founder of modern Ukrainian literature.

Shostakovich, Dmitry Dmitrievich (1906–1975): The greatest Soviet composer.

Skuratov, Malyuta (d. 1573): One of the most brutal henchmen of Ivan the Terrible.

Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR): Founded in 1901–1902, this important political party inherited the mantle of the nineteenth-century populists. Like the earlier People’s Will, the party’s left wing, the Left SRs, believed in terrorism. The SRs were the largest party in the Constituent Assembly and enjoyed widespread support among the peasantry.

Stakhanov, Aleksey Grigoryevich (1906–1977): A Soviet miner who was reported, in September 1935, to have mined 227 tons of coal in a single shift. Stakhanov’s record set an example throughout the country and gave birth to the Stakhanovite movement; workers who exceeded production targets became known as Stakhanovites.

Stalin, Iosif (né Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, 1878–1953): General secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s Central Committee from 1922 until his death. During the 1920s and early 1930s he gradually consolidated power until he became a dictator.

In a series of five-year plans, Stalin forced through a program of rapid industrialization. His policy of Total Collectivization (1929–1931) led to millions of peasants, derogatorily referred to as kulaks, being starved or murdered. In the late 1930s, Stalin launched what has become known as the “Great Terror.” Like many others, Grossman sees this as having been directed against the Soviet elite and, above all against the Party elite, the Old Bolsheviks. It does, however, need to be emphasized that members of
any
social or national group which might conceivably have threatened Stalin were resettled, sent to the Gulag or executed; over 90% of the nearly 700,000 executions carried out in 1937 and 1938 were of kulaks and members of national minorities.

Stalin’s refusal to heed warnings of a German invasion in 1941 led to a series of catastrophic defeats. Beginning in 1942, however, the Red Army recovered and, under Stalin’s leadership, played a major role in the defeat of Nazi Germany. The Soviet Union went on to become one of just two superpowers in the postwar era.

Sudeikin, Georgy Porfiryevich (1850–1883): Head of the Russian secret police, or the Third Section. He ran an important double agent, Sergey Degaev, who eventually assassinated him (see entry on Degaev). It has been suggested that Sudeikin’s ultimate aim had been to remove the Tsar and run the country himself, from the Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Timashuk, Lydia Fedoseyevna (1898–1983): One of the physicians attending Andrey Zhdanov during his final illness. Making out that the treatment administered by the heart specialists had been inadequate, she denounced them to the secret police. No attention was paid to her report at the time; after the
Pravda
article about the Killer Doctors, however, Lydia Timashuk was awarded the Order of Lenin.

Tolstoy, Aleksey Nikolaevich (1883–1945): An extremely successful Russian writer, nicknamed the Comrade Count, who wrote in many genres but specialized in science fiction and historical novels. In his long historical novel
Peter the First
, he likens Stalin to Peter the Great. As well as being a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy, he is the grandfather of the contemporary writer Tatyana Tolstaya.

Trigoni, Mikhail Nikolaevich (1850–1917): A member of the revolutionary terrorist organization the People’s Will.

Trotsky, Leon (né Lev Davidovich Bronstein, 1879–1940): After Lenin, the most important of the leaders of the October Revolution; founder and first commander of the Red Army. After leading the Left Deviation against Stalin, Trotsky was deported from the Soviet Union in 1929. He spent his last years in Mexico, where he was assassinated by one of Stalin’s agents in 1940. Of all the Old Bolsheviks, Trotsky was the finest orator and the finest writer.

Vareikis, Iosif Mikhailovich (1894–1939): Old Bolshevik, who was executed in 1939.

Vinogradova, Evdokiya Viktorovna (1914–1962): A weaver who, in 1935, set new production records in the textile industry; the female equivalent of Stakhanov.

Virchow, Rudolf
(1821–1902): A German doctor and public health activist, known as the father of pathology.

Vovsi, Miron Semyonovich (1897–1960): One of the most eminent Soviet doctors, arrested at the time of the Doctors’ Plot but released after Stalin’s death. First cousin of the actor Solomon Mikhoels.

Vyshinsky, Andrey Yanuaryevich (1883–1954): A lawyer and diplomat, notorious for his vicious speeches as chief prosecutor during the Moscow Trials.

Weissman, Friedrich Leopold August (1834–1914): An important German biologist and evolutionary theorist, opposed to Lamarck’s belief in the inheritance of acquired characteristics.

Wrangel, Baron Pyotr Nikolaevich (1878–1928): Commander in chief of the White Army in the Crimea in the later stages of the Civil War.

Yagoda, Genrikh Grigoryevich (1891–1938): Head of the NKVD from 1934 to 1936. Arrested in 1937, tried at the last of the Moscow Trials in March 1938, and shot soon afterward.

Yezhov, Nikolai Ivanovich (1895–1940): Head of the NKVD during the Great Purge, from September 1936 until November 1938. During this period roughly half of the Soviet political and military establishment was imprisoned or shot. Arrested in 1939, Yezhov was shot in 1940.

Yudenich, Nikolay Nikolaevich (1862–1933): A leader of the White forces in northwestern Russia during the civil war.

Zavenyagin, Avraamy Pavlovich (1901–1956): An NKVD colonel general. From 1938 he was in charge of the labor camps of Norilsk. In May 1945, he was appointed head of a team sent to Germany to search for scientists working in the area of nuclear technology.

Zhdanov, Andrey Aleksandrovich (1896–1948): An important Soviet politician, in charge of Soviet cultural policy from 1946 until his death. He is notorious above all for his attacks on Anna Akhmatova and Mikhail Zoshchenko in 1946.

Zhelyabov, Andrey Ivanovich (1851–1881): A Russian revolutionary and a member of the executive committee of the People’s Will. One of the organizers of the assassination, on March 1, 1881, of Tsar Alexander II. Although he was arrested, by chance, a few days before the assassination, he demanded that his case be considered with that of the other conspirators. He was executed along with them.

Zinoviev, Grigory Yevseyevich (1883–1936): A prominent Old Bolshevik. During Lenin’s illness, Zinoviev, his close associate Kamenev, and Stalin formed a ruling troika in the Communist Party, successfully marginalizing Leon Trotsky. In early 1925 their troika began to crumble. In late 1925, Stalin, in alliance with Bukharin, succeeded in removing Kamenev and Zinoviev from real power.

Zinoviev and Kamenev then formed a United Opposition along with Trotsky. Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Trotsky were expelled from the Communist Party in late 1927. After twice being readmitted to the party only to be re-expelled, Zinoviev and Kamenev were arrested and sentenced to prison in December 1934. In August 1936, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and fourteen others were tried again in the first of the Moscow Trials. Zinoviev was executed in August 1936.

Bibliography

Anne Applebaum,
Gulag: A History
(New York: Doubleday, 2003)

Robert Conquest,
The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1986)

Sheila Fitzpatrick,
Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian Village After Collectivization
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)

Loren R. Graham,
The Ghost of the Executed Engineer: Technology and the Fall of the Soviet Union
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996)

———,
Science in Russia and the Soviet Union: A Short History
(Cambridge University Press, 1993)

Stephen Kotkin,
Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995)

Catherine Merridale,
Night of Stone: Death and Memory in Russia
(New York: Viking, 2001)

Richard Pipes,
The Degaev Affair: Terror and Treason in Tsarist Russia
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003)

Donald Rayfield,
Stalin and His Hangmen
(New York: Random House, 2004)

John Scott,
Behind the Urals: An American Worker in Russia’s City of Steel
(Indiana University Press, 1989)

Simeon Vilensky, editor,
Till My Tale Is Told: Women’s Memoirs of the Gulag
(London: Virago, 1999)

Lynne Viola,
The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

Acknowledgments

I am deeply grateful to all the following: Denis Akhapkin, Sergey Bunaev, Michael Berry, Marina Brodskaya, Bob Davies, Marya Dmytrieva, John Dunn, David Fel'dman, John and Carol Garrard, Katia Grigoruk, Anthony Graybosch, Fydor Guber, Anna Gunin, Gasan Gusejnov, Jochen Hellbeck, Alina Israeli, Ekaterina Korotkova-Grossman, Mikhail Lipyanskiy, Olga Meerson, Mark Miller, Anna Muza, Katarina Peitlova, Natasha Perova, Joe Roeber, Tim Sergay, Peter Stabler, Paul Vaughan, Lyuba Vinogradova, Sarah Young and also to other members of the
SEELANGS e-mail discussion group and to my translation students at Queen Mary, University of London. The original manuscript of
Vse techet
now forms part of the Sakharov Collection in the archives of Harvard University. It was donated by Grossman’s biographer John Garrard; he himself received it from Grossman’s last love, Yekaterina Vasilievna Zabolotskaya, the prototype of Marya Ivanovna from
Life and Fate
.

R.C.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

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www.nyrb.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Grossman, Vasilii Semenovich.

[Vse techet. English]

Everything flows / by Vasily Grossman ; introduction by Robert Chandler ; translation by Robert Chandler, Elizabeth Chandler, and Anna Aslanyan.

p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

1. Soviet Union—Fiction. I. Chandler, Robert, 1953– II. Chandler, Elizabeth. III. Aslanyan, Anna. IV. Title.

PG3476.G7V813 2009