****½ stars in a cruel world

Everything Flow is a five star book but with One day in the live of Ivan Denisovich, The House of the Dead and Darkness at Noon as my constant points of reference, I just cant. Forget your books of history, here Grossman speaks the powerful, all be it opinionated, truth of Russia's thousand year culture of non-freedom. Through the recollections of the recently released Ivan we hear how both Lenin and Stalin continued this tradition. They are both European Marxists and Asian despots.The peoples revolution may have began in February 1917 but any liberal and bourgeois ideas of freedom were dead long before Lenin's good friend Gorky proclaimed kulaks as the enemy. Ivan the Terrible may have had the oprichniki enforcing his will on black horses clad with a dog's head and broom (a reminder of their duty to bite the enemy and sweep away treason), but Stalin had the gulag, Stalin had the terror famine, purges and Chekin and Stalin had the State to command at a whim.