Stalin's Nose

Once again, our publishing house releases a book addressed to schoolchildren about the events of the Great Terror era.

It was written (and illustrated) by Evgeny Yelchin. He was born in Leningrad in 1956, but emigrated to America in 1983. The author's personal and family experience is embodied in "Stalin's Nose," but one should not look for autobiographical traits in it. Rather, if you're going to search, it should be for all of us, as well as our grandmothers and grandfathers. Our common past, phantasmagorically thickened, but nonetheless recognizable, emerges in this book along with all its vanished and still unresolved features.

"Stalin's Nose" is just one day in the life of an ordinary Soviet schoolboy, Sasha Zaychik. But during this day, Sasha will witness the arrest of his beloved father, an NKVD officer, rehearse the role of a squad standard-bearer, become the son of an enemy of the people, break a bust of Comrade Stalin, cause a real commotion at school, provoke the arrest of a teacher, and become the target of recruitment by an NKVD agent.

On this day, Sasha Zaychik's world rapidly collapsed: all his notions of good and evil, stability and justice of the world order crumbled to dust. It turned out that behind the official phrases from newspaper headlines about "enemies of the people" lie real, close individuals. And you, once considered a role model, become an outcast, a person whose face is obscured by ink on a group school photo.

At the end of the book, standing in the backyards of the famous NKVD building on Lubyanka, in an almost endless line of relatives of the arrested, the hero confronts the non-poster-like, human feelings of people whose loved ones are in trouble, and finally, finds hope.