CBR15Passport Different Genres: juvenile fiction
Eugene Yelchin is a talented illustrator and writer. I first became aware of his work through the brilliant The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge, and then last year I read and reviewed his illustrated account of his childhood, The Genius Under the Table. Special thanks to Black Raven for recommending that book and for giving Breaking Stalin’s Nose to me for the holiday exchange. Yelchin was born and raised in the Soviet Union and left in the 1980s. While he would not have been alive during the time period in which this book is set, his parents and grandparents would have been. At the end of this novel Yelchin writes about the kind of pressure he faced as an adult in the 1980s, after Stalin was long gone. This personal experience helped him imagine what it might have been like for a child to experience the Stalinist oppression first hand. I spent a decade of my life researching the history of the Soviet Union. I consider myself fairly well informed about the purges, and I can say that this novel illustrates powerfully, in only 150 pages, the fear that pervaded all aspects of daily life for Russians. Anyone could denounce you as an enemy, and people were encouraged to “be vigilant” where their neighbors were concerned. Given the communal living arrangements, little privacy was available, so everyone knew everyone else’s business. Being Jewish or non-Russian made one an object of suspicion, easily marked as a traitor to Stalin and Communism. If accused, there would be no trial, certainly no need for evidence. The guilty verdict was a given and the punishment would be imprisonment if you were lucky, a firing squad if you were not. No one was safe, not even Stalin’s generals or the members of his secret police.
This illustrated novel is set in Moscow during the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. Zaichek is a 10-year-old boy living in a communal apartment with his father, a member of Stalin’s secret police. Zaichek believes that Stalin is the greatest leader in the world and writes an effusive letter to the man hoping that his father, once personally recognized by Stalin for his diligence in rooting out enemies of the state, will be able to get it into the leader’s hands. Zaichek is about to become a member of the Pioneers — the exclusive communist club for children — and he is excited and proud. Over the course of 24 hours, however, his whole world will be turned upside down and he will be forever changed.
On the eve of Zaichek’s induction into the Pioneers, the black cars of the secret police pull up to his building and his own father, denounced by a neighbor, is arrested. No sooner is Zaichek’s father taken away than the neighbors take over the apartment, throwing everything out and making Zaichek a homeless orphan. They have no pity for him, and his own aunt is afraid to help him for fear that it will lead to her own persecution. Zaichek believes that it is all a misunderstanding and that once Stalin knows, his dad will be released, but at school the next day, several things happen to expose the lie. A couple of his classmates have had the experience of their parents being denounced, imprisoned and executed without trial. As children of “enemies,” they are mocked and abused by the other children and by the teachers. Zaichek still believes that only truly guilty people face Soviet justice and that the mistake regarding his father will be rectified, but an accident unleashes a series of events that put Zaichek and other children in grave danger. He has to examine his conscience and question his beliefs. What happens to Zaichek is a microcosm of the Russian/Soviet world where there are no simple mistakes or honest accidents, only sabotage and disloyalty. Zaichek begins to see how easy it is to agree to do terrible things to save oneself, how the system that he believed in is corrupt and completely lacking in justice or empathy.
The message of Breaking Stalin’s Nose is both timely and chilling. Oppressors count on people doing nothing to stop them. They thrive on people feeling powerless, on the apathy or active support of those who think that the people who become victims of the state are in fact enemies of the state. Such people fail to see until too late that that oppression will soon be directed their way. At one point Zaichek overhears an instructor giving a subversive lesson to his students on Gogol’s famous short story, “The Nose”:
…when we blindly believe in someone else’s idea of what is right or wrong for us as individuals, sooner or later our refusal to make our own choices could lead to the collapse of the entire political system. An entire country. The world, even.
It is deeply disturbing to read about a world where truth and justice have no meaning and where even children can be rounded up as criminals. Even more disturbing is the evidence that we in the US are doing some of the very same things that Stalinist thugs did in the 1930s. Black children are routinely treated as adults and criminalized for behavior that is understandable and forgiven of white children. It seems to me that Black people in general are viewed as “enemies” by right wing extremists, as are people of Asian, Latin and Hispanic descent. In Florida, school libraries are now subject to a law requiring some sort of state validation/censorship of all books; school administrators who allow books on shelves without government approval first will be charged with a felony. And we know there are people cheering for all of this from the sidelines, people who “blindly believe in someone else’s idea of what is right or wrong.” We need to be loud and angry about this while we still can.
