You can't exactly call Vassily Grossman's Everything Flows a novel. It contains some fiction, some history, some biography, and some outraged polemic. On the novelistic side, nothing really happens to speak of. Shortly after Stalin's death, a man, Ivan Grigoryevich, returns to Moscow at the age of fifty from having spent the last thirty years of his life as a zek (political prisoner) in a Soviet gulag. He returns to find that much has changed. The action of the story goes no further than train rides, walks, and reminiscences, both his and those of others. But from the reminiscences emerges a horrific, previously untold history that rivals anything said of the Nazis. Those whom Ivan meets did not, with one exception, witness the gulags. Rather, the horror that haunts their lives comes from never forgetting how they had managed to keep themselves outside, holding their quasi-normal lives intact. All who had remained "free" in Soviet society had done so by denouncing friends or relatives, by acquiescing to purges, by accepting obvious lies, and by refusing to admit the price their complicity exacted from other living, bleeding, suffering humans. On every face, Ivan sees either the agony of the crucified or the guilt of a Judas.

So Everything Flows describes one state-sponsored atrocity after another through memories of various characters, before concluding with fifty-pages of Ivan's outraged notes about the Soviet State, Lenin, Stalin, and the Russian people's preference of slavery over freedom throughout its last millennium. In the first few chapters, Ivan's cousin, Nikolay Andreyevich, reflects on his own unquestioning, complicit role in the state's now-obvious systematic efforts to eliminate Jews from all positions of power or trust: The spreading of rumors about murderous Jewish doctors, the confessions extracted by torture, the staged demonstrations of public fury. As Nikolay recalled, "his entire life had been a single act of obedience, with not one moment of refusing to obey." Obedience had, incidentally, worked out well for him, as a scientist, when, one by one, his competitors, Jewish or otherwise, peer reviewers, and other obstacles to his career slipped quietly out of the picture.

We learn of conditions inside the gulags. We learn of the enforced famine that killed millions--yes, millions--of villagers across the Ukraine during a bumper wheat harvest in 1932-3. We learn of the arrest, imprisonment, and execution of over a million Kulaks (moderately well-off peasants) who resisted or might have resisted the collectivization of farms. We learn how the Stalinist purges rounded up first the dissenters, then their families, then those who were likely to become dissenters, and their relatives, as Stalin cast his net wider and wider. We learned how eventually the camps had become so overrun by innocents that prisoners who had actually done something became objects of intense curiosity among the other zeks and the guards.

Such outrages against human dignity could have taken place, in part, only because of their sheer inconceivability. Once the Allies had put the Nazis in their place, we reassure ourselves, that one-time aberration of Western History had gone away and could never recur. But no, Grossman's account brings home to us that the same mechanism of evil--a supremely confident authority married to a trusting populace who hesitated to ask inconvenient questions--will inevitably produce wholesale slaughter, secret genocides, the systematic extermination of a people. No one, according to Grossman, wanted to hurt anyone. No person wanted to hurt another person. But yet "the state" purged itself of the class of its enemies, like one purely abstract titan fighting off another, through historic actions of pure evil, carried out at the micro-level by good, decent people, who merely accompanied the crowd, anonymously, as obedient, innocent, individually harmless agents. When trains would pass through Ukrainian villages and filthy peasant women would hold up their dead or starving children to the passengers and plead for crumbs, who on those trains could think of themselves as a murderer just because he looked away in disgust from such ugliness? Or, better yet, what porter on a similar train, wishing only to shelter the passengers from such terrible sights, would think it genocide to simply close the window shades before the train reaches these villages? But when everyone turns away from thousands of starving villages dotted across a countryside, millions inevitably die, one human at a time.

I have very little knowledge of the history of the gulags--or for that matter of modern Russia. I've read A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, but beyond that, I have nothing but general background knowledge of the sort one would pick up in conversation. So I found Grossman's take on the camps and on other shameful events in the history of the early Soviet Union a much-needed lesson. This new edition, translated by Robert Chandler, contains much useful information for people like me. I found myself frequently consulting the numerous substantive footnotes, the informative glossary, and the timeline as I read. Grossman makes frequent mention of background events that he takes everyone to know about already, and in some cases, the full impact of a throwaway line didn't hit home until I had researched the reference. ( )

Everything Flows contains the bare bones of a plot. Ivan, imprisoned in Soviet work camps for decades, returns to Soviet society to confront the confused guilty response of his remaining family, former colleagues and friends. While this scenario yields some deftly drawn vignettes - a contentious dinner with a nephew and his wife, a heartrendingly short lived relationship with a widow and her son, and a final visit to Ivan's childhood home - the main thrust of the plot is to provide Grossman the opportunity to ruminate on a variety of social, political,& historical aspects of the Gulag and the system that supported it. He considers the questions of the continuity of Russian history, women in the work camps, and what can be expected of ordinary people living in a system that demands their acquiescence and co-operation in supporting terror. This approach dovetails with what I considered the strength of Grossman's Life & Fate where I found the many vivid vignettes were stronger individually than their contribution to making the overall plot compelling . I suspect this approach owes much to Grossman's career as a journalist.
This is an excellent book. I preferred it to its more celebrated predecessor ( )

Very enjoyable short novel with lots of historical facts. Now I want to read "Life and Fate".

I love this paragraph that comes near the beginning of Chapter 6:

"He visited the Hermitage - to find that it left him cold and bored. How could all those paintings have remained as beautiful as ever while he was being transformed into an old man, an old man from the camps? Why had they not changed? Why had the faces of the marvelous Madonnas not aged? Why had their eyes not been blinded by tears? Maybe their immutability - their eternity - was not a strength but a weakness? Perhaps this was how art betrays the human beings that have engendered it?"

The plot of 'Everything Flows' Vasily Grossman's last novel centers around one Ivan Grigoryevich finally returning to the real world after 30 years in Stalin's labor camps. Stalin is dead and the thaw has begun but all the same the world he returns to is much different from the one he left. In all those intervening years his girl has left him and married another man and raised a family. Those friends and relatives who were able to remain outside did so by compromising themselves in one way or another. The person he felt closest to his first cousin Nikolay Andreyevich is among them and there is an alienation between them in the way they see the world now. Ivan Grigoryevich thinks it better to go and find his own path--one that fits his own terms.

He is left to think: 'Who is guilty? Who will be held responsible?' He finds a place to live in a boarding house run by an Anna Sergeyevna. Anna had been a communist part functionary in the Ukraine during the time of an enforced famine that devastated the entire region--estimated at 7 million dead from starvation. Anna tells Ivan all about it in a straightforward manner. She does not gloss over her own part in the tragedy but it is why she left her own career in the party behind. She is sick now--dying from cancer. She helps him get a job in a metal shop and they form a friendship.

Much of the rest of the book is a meditation on the past and the present. Through Ivan Grossman presents questions to the readers about the nature of those who would denounce others to save themselves and/or defend the state. As well there is a very sharply rendered analysis of Lenin's and Stalin's role in Russian history. Grossman sees them both as products of that Russian history and culture. He points out that Russia even when bent on westernization beginning with the reign of Peter the Great in the 17th and 18th centuries had its own unique ways of doing that. Whereas European societies at that time were moving towards greater freedoms for their peoples Russian society moved towards enslavement of their peasants. That time and again afterwards it continued along the same course and that the Lenin/Stalin dictatorship was only more of the same in that respect. He makes numerous other analyses of the will to power of both dictators. It strikes me that his Lenin analysis is the sharper but both gave us a lot to think about.

Kind of a novel and kind of not 'Everything Flows' is nonetheless an excellent work--insightfully covering a long range of Russian history in a relatively short space--208 pages + footnotes + some biographical information. To be honest I'm probably in the minority but I prefer it to his more famous 'Life and Fate'. I think this one in any case is more sharply focused. Anyway I'd highly recommend it. ( )

This is a powerful work and as good a summary of the dark side of Russian history as I've read; in 200 pages it provides unforgettable vignettes of the various kinds of suffering imposed by the rulers of the Soviet Union, as well as sometimes lengthy historical analyses. If I encounter anyone who (after all this time and all the information that's come out) still doubts the horror of what Lenin and Stalin created, I will give them this book and hope they are open to what it has to say. The account of the Ukrainian famine of the early '30s, to take just one example, is crushing and convincing.

However, it presents itself as a novel, and it's really not. It starts out as one, with a 50-year-old protagonist, Ivan Grigorevich, returning to Moscow from the east Siberian Gulag and meeting his well-off cousin, but it quickly becomes a series of musings by Ivan about the course of history, and for long stretches Ivan himself is forgotten and Grossman pours out his rage at what was done (tempered by his understanding of the human beings who did it) and reaffirms his belief in the ultimate value of freedom. This is not meant as a criticism, simply as a warning to anyone who might go into it expecting a traditional novel with a plot. This is not that, but it's something valuable in its own right. ( )