The Scared Generation: The Manhunt / The Old Arbat

Westerners often ask why Russians put up with bureaucratic oppression, violations of human rights, etc. Why didn't they protest? The two works in this book partly provide the answer depicting as they do the atmosphere of invisible oppression and all-pervading fear in which the sixties generation grew up.In Vasil Bykov's powerful short novel The Manhunt, a dispossessed farmer is betrayed by his son in the collectivized countryside of the 1930s. He is exiled to Siberia but runs away and finally prefers death to infamy.Set in Moscow in the 1950s, Boris Yampolsky's classic, The Old Arbat, focuses on one day in the life of an innocent person persecuted by the KGB. He was fearless during WWII but in the Stalinist atmosphere of witch-hunting and political intolerance, he is paralyzed by uncontrollable terror. Yet at some point his hopelessness produces an inner freedom that gives the hunted man the strength to resist.