Everything Flows

How hard it must be to write about what was wrong and evil with Lenin and Stalin. Where do you start? When the whole system is a lie that leaves even the believers exploited, enslaved and likely dead how do you try to sound rational in your rebuke? Vasily Grossman does it through the voices of the people caught up in the maelstrom of the USSR. The 1960 novel "Everything Flows" is so superb in putting flesh and bones to all parties that conspired to create the truly horrible dystopia and those who suffered from it. Thru imaginary but realistic first person accounts, explanations, excuses, denials and confessions he does more in 200 pages than most of the millions of pages that document the sad 20th century history of the Soviet Union. Ivan Grigoryevich is released after nearly 30 continues years in prisons and work camps. He is used largely as a straw man to draw out the thoughts and words of the characters in Grossman's 1950's Soviet Union. Stalin has died. The peak in the purging and enslavement has passed. Many political prisoners are now returning to uncertain futures after years of destitution in Siberia. Grossman uses this unique moment of slight liberation in to make the characters reflect on their own actions or observations. Thru their experiences he obliderates even the faintest illusion that life in the Soviet Union was anything but cold, hostile and insufferable. Those not broken physically or emotionally have acquiesced, collaborated, compromised or stood silent. The problem is that that no one can make sense of it all. It's too big and in 1960 it was still real and present. Grossman spends about a quarter of the book in a sidebar considering the nature of enslavement and freedom in Russia for the past 1000 years as he explains the betrayals of Stalin and particularly Lenin. While it's worthwhile and painful it is not rooted in the story which is already so good and as such it slows what is otherwise electrifying and tense. The description of the Ukraine famine of 1930 alone is worth the price of the book. This is well worth reading however in the context of when it was written and who Vasily Grossman was it's a treasure.

I shared all this with my own people There, where misfortune had abandoned us." Anna Akhmatova's Requiem If Life and Fate (New York Review Books Classics) may rightfully be seen as Vasily Grossman's masterpiece, his Everything Flows may rightfully be seen as his testament, a requiem if you will not only for his own life but for the lives of those who lived in his time and place. "Everything Flows" tells a simple, yet emotionally deep and politically nuanced tale. The story begins with the 1957 return to Moscow of Ivan Grigoryevich after 30 years of forced labor in the Gulag. 1957 marked the year, following Khrushchev's denunciation of the excesses of Stalin, in which the tide of prisoners returning from the Gulag reached its peak. He arrives at the Moscow flat of his cousin Nikolay. Nikolay, a scientist with less than stellar skills, has reached some measure of success at the laboratory through dint of being a survivor. The meeting in the flat is entirely unsatisfactory for both parties. Grossman paints a vivid picture of Nikolay, more than a bit jealous that Ivan's light had always shone brighter than his own prior to Ivan's arrest. Nikolay suffers from the guilt of one who was not arrested and who is painfully aware of the choices he made to keep from being arrested. It seems clear that Ivan represents a mirror into which Nikolay can see only his own hollow reflection. Ivan leaves Moscow for his old city of Leningrad, the place where he was first arrested in 1927. By chance, he runs into the person, Pinegin, whose denunciation placed him in jail in the first place. Once again, Ivan is a mirror and Pinegin is horrified at what he is faced with, what he has buried for thirty years. Ironically, and to great effect, we see Pinegin's horror recede once he settles down to a sumptuous lunch at a restaurant reserved for foreigners and party officials. Ivan does not know about the denunciation and Grossman here embarks on a discourse on the different types and forms of denunciation available to the Soviet citizen. It is a remarkable discourse that shows how many different ways there are to participate in a purge and how many ways there are to legitimize ones participation and/or acquiescence. From Leningrad Ivan travels to a southern industrial city where he finds work and eventually finds a deep and satisfying love in the person of his landlady Anna. The centerpiece of that relationship is the brutal honesty involved; Anna spends a night detailing her role in the pointless, needless famine that swept the Ukraine in 1932-1933. It is an account made even more chilling by the straightforward, confessional nature of its telling. But it is also redemptive and shines a light on what might be called Grossman's vision that love and freedom are two goals, not mutually exclusive, that an honest accounting of our lives forms the essence of our shared humanity. The above summary does not do justice to the power of Grossman's prose or to the literary and political importance of the work. Since the death of Stalin, the Soviet line had remained relatively firm - Stalin's excesses were the product of a disturbed mind that represented a horrible deviation from the theory and principles of Leninism. The USSR's best path was the one that returned it to the path created by Lenin. Khrushchev first enunciated this line. Even Gorbachev's perestroika was based on the theory that a return to first-principles, i.e. Leninism, would save the USSR from destruction. Grossman, prophetically, did not buy into this line and Everything Flows'last chapters are notable for a remarkable attack not only on Stalin but on Lenin and Lenin's anti-democratic tendencies that had more in common with Ivan the Terrible than the principles of revolutionary democracy. "All the triumphs of Party and State were bound up with the name of Lenin. But all the cruelty inflicted on the nation also lay - tragically - on Lenin's shoulders." Grossman may have been the first to make this leap and he paid the price for making that leap. (This involves the suppression of his Life & Fate and Everything Flows.) Grossman's explicit claim that Stalin was not a deviationist from Leninism but its natural-born progeny was profoundly subversive and there is no doubt in my mind that it was this difference that explains why, under Khruschev's 'thaw', that One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich was publishe while Life and Fate and Everything Flows was banned. Despite the horrors set out, quietly and without excess rhetoric, Grossman returns to a somewhat optimistic vision of mans search for freedom: "No matter how mighty the empire, all this is only mist and fog and, as such, will be blown away. Only one true force remains; only one true force continues to evolve and live; and this force is liberty. To a man, to live means to be free." Robert Chandler's translation of Everything Flows is exquisite. He brings the same clarity and emotional investment in Grossman's work that he brought to his prize-winning translations of Platonov and Hamid Ismailov's The Railway . In short, Everything Flows is a treasure and I cannot recommend this book highly enough. L. Fleisig

This is one of my favorite books about the soviet era. I have read both of Vasily Grossman's major works, and I felt that this one is easier to read than Life and Fate. This is actually more like an Alexandr Solzhenitsyn book.

I just finished "Everything Flows." It is one of literature's great gifts, one of the most insightful and moving books I have ever read. In a way, it is both uplifting and humbling at the same time. I just cannot say enough about the "testament" that this book is. Through Grossman's work, we, in some small way, can bear witness to an entire, tragic era. I will not repeat the details of Leonard Fleisig's outstanding and astute review of "Everything Flows," but simply add that this short book is a novella with connected essays that somehow reveals both the nature of the individual characters and of a whole society under siege. It is beautifully written and translated, and with great economy of style, Ivan and the other characters come alive and we seem to enter their inner beings. I have read a great deal about the Soviet experience, including Grossman's "Life and Fate" and Simon Sebag Montefiore's biography of Stalin and Stephen Cohen's one on Bukharin as well as the wonderful novels of Victor Serge. I highly recommend them all, but if you have to read one book about the Soviet tragedy, read "Everything Flows." I am so grateful to the New York Review of Books for retrieving so many lost treasures from the past.

History at a Historical best !

For decades I'd heard of "the famine in the Ukraine" and that it was inflicted by Joseph Stalin's Soviet reign of terror. But I never understood what happened till I read Everything Flows. To this day, the Soviet mass murder of millions by seizing and withholding food remains one of the most under-reported crimes against humanity. In Everything Flows, Russian novelist Vasily Grossman and British editor/translator Robert Chandler describe why and how millions of human beings suffered a slow agonizing death under the eyes of Soviet authorities. It stemmed from Stalin's campaign against the peasants in the European Soviet Union, especially in the Ukraine. The seeds of disaster were sown in the winter of 1929-30 when millions of the more prosperous peasants were dispossessed and either exiled or killed. The exiled were the lucky ones. The peasants, particularly in the Ukraine, were seen as opponents of Stalin's policy of collectivization -- where peasants lost all ownership of the food they produced. No one would dare tell the authorities in Moscow that collectivization was a failure -- that agricultural production plummeted after the most prosperous peasants were thrown off their land. As a result, production quotas were set unrealistically high, then brutally enforced. Until an area filled its quota, the peasants weren't allowed to keep any food they'd produced, even as they starved. And the quotas were never filled. Regional bosses told Stalin what he wanted to hear rather than the truth. The doomed areas were effectively sealed off. No one -- least of all the foreign press -- was allowed to see the stricken villages. Train windows were covered to hide the starving begging by the tracks. Buttressed by Chandler's research and footnotes, this is the story told by one of Grossman's characters in the most compelling chapter of Everything Flows. During the Second World War Grossman was a popular Soviet war correspondent. His earlier novel, Life and Fate, which was centred around the battle of Stalingrad, has been hailed as the War and Peace of the 20th century. Grossman continued revising and polishing Everything Flows until his death from cancer in 1964. It's an unusual novel -- part fiction, part essay and part history. Neither book was published in Russia till just before the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991. Chandler, who also translated Life and Fate, worked with his wife Elizabeth and Anna Aslanyan on Everything Flows. This book is much more than a translation of the novel. His five-page "note on collectivization and the terror famine" provides an excellent historical companion to Grossman's novel. The 14 pages of notes are invaluable for anyone who didn't live in the Soviet Union or study Russian literature and history. Chandler also included an introduction to the novel, a two-page chronology of Russian political history since the reign of Ivan the Terrible and a 19-page mini-encyclopedia of people and organizations related to the historical events. The translation of Everything Flows is beautifully written. Chandler’s contributions complement Grossman's novel to make this book as fine a work of journalism as you'll find anywhere. The wider theme of Everything Flows is the evil of totalitarianism. We’re also shown the prison camp system where millions of Soviet citizens were enslaved and died of hardship and gross neglect. Like Life and Fate, Everything Flows is a chilling real-life account of what can happen when political and individual freedoms are abolished. As such, both books are timely reading in the 21th century as millions of voters around the world have embraced autocrats who have contempt for human rights and the rule of law.

It would be a mistake for anyone who has read 'Life and Fate' to expect something similar from this book, but don't be put off. It is worth reading for the chapter on the famine alone. The rest of the book is slight, and some of the philosophical writing is distinctly sub-Dostoevsky. Grossman didn't write much so you have to read it anyway.

The "hero" of this novel returns to the big cities of Russia after being freed from the Goulag in the 1950s. He makes the rounds of some of his old friends, who had all accomodated themselves to the regime. They feel embarrassed at the way they had behaved or gone along with the denunciations of friends and colleagues. The "hero" eventually finds a job working in a factory. He falls in love with a kind, simple woman, who shares with him her own shame at working with the regime and being partly responsible for the killing of the Koulaks in the Ukraine. Their joy together does not last long. The end of the novel turns into a description of the last days of Stalinism, in an attempt to understand why people participate actively in a totalitarian system, and a disquisition on the importance of freedom.

Traveled to Russia and have a interest in the history. It's how a country can stay locked in a time period for so long

Very well written about such a violent period in the history of Russia during the rein of Lenon and Stalin