Bitter Waters: Life and Work in Stalin's Russia

Andreev-Khomiakov is Ivan Denisovich with a knack for burlesque, a Chaplinesque survivor of the Gulag trying to make his way in the irrational Soviet system. Although his book, originally published in Germany in 1954, would have been revelatory to American readers had it been translated then, its perspective on the daily life of Comrade Everyman in lockstep shows us the sprouting of corruption as concomitant to survival in the U.S.S.R. When Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Gulag in 1935--he never reveals his ""crime""--he settled in the provinces and became the planning director of lumber mills run by Neposedov, CP member, technocrat and altogether good fellow. The brilliantly drawn character of Neposedov becomes emblematic of the then upwardly mobile Soviet functionary: a wheeler-dealer in procuring unobtainable materiel for his factories, a believer in the efficacy of the managed economy, a genius at surpassing the Five-Year Plan's production targets for his industry by paying his workers over scale, thereby bankrupting his enterprises. Readers will find the Andreev-Khomiakov/Neposedov team irresistible and feel bereft as the two go their separate ways when the author moves to Moscow to work in the bureaucracy. En route he makes observations about his society that prove prescient. We part Andreev-Khomiakov's company in 1941 as he is evacuated from wartime Moscow--and learn from an epilogue that he became a POW and later settled in Germany and eventually in the U.S., where he died in 1984. (Sept.)