World: Stalinsville on the Styx

Private Vaslly Terkin was the eternal Sad Sacha, and his fictional military exploits poked sly fun at Soviet officerdom throughout World War II. Russians complained mightily when his creator, Poet Aleksandr Trifonovich Tvardovsky, failed to bring him home from the wars. Last week, to their delight, Vasily was back—with a difference.

The soldier’s return was chronicled in a subtle, stylish new poem by Tvardovsky that was spread across two pages of Izvestia under a warmly approving introduction by Editor Aleksei Adzhubei, Khrushchev’s son-in-law. In Stalin’s day, for all his buffoonery, Terkin ultimately had to symbolize “the ideal Soviet soldier”; in his latest adventure, he is a cockily irreverent figure who gets killed in battle and goes to a “nether world” that turns out to be a sort of Stalinsville on the Styx.

Hell, Terkin finds, is like the Moscow subway, “only lower.” It is run by a pampered army of bureaucrats, who spend their days playing dominoes and yelling at the inmates to keep out of their way. A model of Communist planning, the nether world has menus but no food, steam baths without steam, hotels without beds. There is even a magazine editor who “sweats all over” as he “puts in quotes and takes them out again and reads each page from top to bottom and from bottom to top.” Says one Big Brotherly ghost: “You don’t have to talk, you don’t have to think at all.” Terkin finally manages to escape and wakes up in a hospital on earth, where doctors confidently predict that he will live to be 100.

The moral of Terkin’s trip, Tvardovsky suggests, is that all Russians share the blame for Stalin because they resigned themselves to his excesses instead of resisting them. However, the poet also urges Russians to stop harping on Stalinism, which has been Khrushchev’s line of late. Terkin’s resurrection was a sign that Khrushchev had decided to soften a campaign against controversial writing that has been going on since December. In fact, Editor Adzhubei noted reassuringly, Nikita liked the poem and laughed loudly when it was read to him before publication.