![]() Set in the immediate aftermath of Stalin’s death, Faithful Ruslan follows the journey of a prison camp guard dog, set free from service and abandoned by a master who couldn’t bring himself to put the creature out of its misery. ![]() But it’s not only prisoners who are lost in the new world order: his description of the “walking dead” could just as readily be applied to the soldiers that guarded them, now living in fear of repercussions for acts they committed while simply “following orders”. “They’ll have said goodbye to me years ago,” he explains, referring to his decades held in captivity by both Germans and Russians. ![]() These days, the Russian Revolution, Communism and the Cold War often crop up on the school curriculum, so amongst those who take History at exam level, at least, there’s a broad familiarity with the basics of the Soviet era and Stalin as a dictatorial figure.īut how many of us in this country have given much thought to what happened to the country at the end of all this, thrown into political disarray and with vast numbers of displaced people unable or unwilling to slip back into the lives they led before? For the “Shabby Man”, a freed gulag inmate in Georgi Vladimov’s Faithful Ruslan, it seems impossible to return home to his family in Moscow. ![]()
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