Breaking Stalin's Nose

I am grateful to live in a country that is not ravaged by war or oppressed by a dictator or stifled by lack of freedom. Learning about countries that are not blessed with these privileges fills me with sadness and anger. But it fascinates me to read about them.  I gobble up every book or movie about the Holocaust and the U.S. Civil Rights movement. I cry and become indignant and immediately want to spend all my time fighting injustice. Fighting injustice, after all, is in my blood (Mom!).

Given my interest with injustice, it is surprising that Breaking Stalin’s Nose was my first novel set in Russia under Stalin’s reign. The author, Eugene Yelchin, grew up in post-Stalin Russia and experienced the aftermath of Stalin’s sociopathy, but he claims that few people in his generation even know what happened under Stalin and that the government has maintained (to a large extent) the secrecy of his crimes. Despite the silence, Yelchin says that the Russian people had lived in fear for so long that they passed it on to successive generations. This book about a young boy living in Stalinist Russia is Yelchin’s confrontation of that fear. The book was short, but communicated well the deception and bullying of the government through the eyes of a naïve boy. I was startled by its rather abrupt resolution (one minute you think the boy will be imprisoned or executed and on the next page he has escaped and is informally adopted by a nice woman), but otherwise the book made me think  about my freedom and be grateful.