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Overview
One dusty summer day in 1935, a young writer named Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Siberian labor camp where he had spent the last eight years of his life. His total assets amounted to 25 rubles, a loaf of bread, five dried herrings, and the papers identifying him as a convicted “enemy of the people.” From this hard-pressed beginning, Andreev-Khomiakov would eventually work his way into a series of jobs that would allow him to travel and see more of ordinary life and work in the Soviet Union of the 1930s than most of his fellow Soviet citizens would ever have dreamed possible. Capitalizing on this rare opportunity, Bitter Waters is Andreev-Khomiakov’s eyewitness account of those tumultuous years, a time when titanic forces were shaping the course of Russian history.Later to become a successful writer and editor in the Russian émigré community in the 1950s and 1960s, Andreev-Khomiakov brilliantly uses this memoir to explore many aspects of Stalinist society. Forced collectivization, Five Year Plans, purges, and the questionable achievements of “shock worker brigades” are only part of this story. Andreev-Khomiakov exposes the Soviet economy as little more than a web of corruption, a system that largely functioned through bribery, barter, and brute force—and that fell into temporary chaos when the German army suddenly invaded in 1941.Bitter Waters may be most valuable for what it reveals about Russian society during the tumultuous 1930s. From remote provincial centers and rural areas, to the best and worst of Moscow and Leningrad, Andreev-Khomiakov’s series of deftly drawn sketches of people, places, and events provide a unique window on the hard daily lives of the people who built Stalin’s Soviet Union.Synopsis
Bitter Waters is Gennady Andreev-Khomiakov’s eyewitness account of life in the Soviet Union during the tumultuous 1930s, a time when titanic forces were shaping the course of Russian history. Forced collectivization, Five Year Plans, purges, and the phony achievements of “shock worker brigades” are only part of this story. Using this memoir of his youth to explore every aspect of Stalinist society, Andreev-Khomiakov exposes the Soviet economy to be little more than a web of corruption—a system that only functioned through bribery, barter, and brute force.
Publishers Weekly
Andreev-Khomiakov is Ivan Denisovich with a knack for burlesque, a Chaplinesque survivor of the Gulag trying to make his way in the irrational Soviet system. Although his book, originally published in Germany in 1954, would have been revelatory to American readers had it been translated then, its perspective on the daily life of Comrade Everyman in lockstep shows us the sprouting of corruption as concomitant to survival in the U.S.S.R. When Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Gulag in 1935he never reveals his "crime"he settled in the provinces and became the planning director of lumber mills run by Neposedov, CP member, technocrat and altogether good fellow. The brilliantly drawn character of Neposedov becomes emblematic of the then upwardly mobile Soviet functionary: a wheeler-dealer in procuring unobtainable materiel for his factories, a believer in the efficacy of the managed economy, a genius at surpassing the Five-Year Plan's production targets for his industry by paying his workers over scale, thereby bankrupting his enterprises. Readers will find the Andreev-Khomiakov/Neposedov team irresistible and feel bereft as the two go their separate ways when the author moves to Moscow to work in the bureaucracy. En route he makes observations about his society that prove prescient. We part Andreev-Khomiakov's company in 1941 as he is evacuated from wartime Moscowand learn from an epilogue that he became a POW and later settled in Germany and eventually in the U.S., where he died in 1984. (Sept.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
Andreev-Khomiakov is Ivan Denisovich with a knack for burlesque, a Chaplinesque survivor of the Gulag trying to make his way in the irrational Soviet system. Although his book, originally published in Germany in 1954, would have been revelatory to American readers had it been translated then, its perspective on the daily life of Comrade Everyman in lockstep shows us the sprouting of corruption as concomitant to survival in the U.S.S.R. When Andreev-Khomiakov was released from the Gulag in 1935he never reveals his "crime"he settled in the provinces and became the planning director of lumber mills run by Neposedov, CP member, technocrat and altogether good fellow. The brilliantly drawn character of Neposedov becomes emblematic of the then upwardly mobile Soviet functionary: a wheeler-dealer in procuring unobtainable materiel for his factories, a believer in the efficacy of the managed economy, a genius at surpassing the Five-Year Plan's production targets for his industry by paying his workers over scale, thereby bankrupting his enterprises. Readers will find the Andreev-Khomiakov/Neposedov team irresistible and feel bereft as the two go their separate ways when the author moves to Moscow to work in the bureaucracy. En route he makes observations about his society that prove prescient. We part Andreev-Khomiakov's company in 1941 as he is evacuated from wartime Moscowand learn from an epilogue that he became a POW and later settled in Germany and eventually in the U.S., where he died in 1984. (Sept.)Library Journal
In this new translation of a 1954 memoir, migr writer and editor Andreev-Khomiakov describes his experiences in Soviet Russia following his release from prison in 1935 until shortly after the invasion of the Soviet Union by Germany in 1941. Unable to continue as a writer, the author worked in several sawmills; thus, the focus of his writing is on entrepreneurial operations in the timber industry and provincial life in general. Some of his comments, for example, that the purges of the 1930s were hardly felt in his provincial town, contradict what is typically believed about Soviet history. He eventually served in the Red Army and was captured by the Germans. He never returned to the Soviet Union but emigrated to the United States, where he died in 1984. A good source about prewar Stalinist Russia, with entertaining descriptions of the author's co-workers; for academic and public libraries.Michael Neubert, Library of CongressKirkus Reviews
A memoir of life in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930s that tells us more of how the system worked—and how shrewd workers outwitted it—than a dozen monographs.Sentenced in 1927 to ten years in the Gulag for "counter-revolutionary activities," Andreev-Khomiakov, a staffer at a provincial newspaper and a writer of short stories, was released two years early, in 1935, but forbidden to stay in 41 cities or within 200 kilometers of the Soviet border. He was fortunate enough to land in the forest industry, in charge of planning for one Neposedov, a man of splendid enthusiasms and a manipulative cunning that enabled him to sidestep much of the prescribed constipation of the Soviet system. It was impossible to attain the goals demanded of the system honestly, and Andreev captures the shifts and evasions, the bribery and falsification required actually to do the job, otherwise described by the authorities as "manifesting a healthy initiative." And he describes, too, the delight of the workers when, Neposedov having obtained appropriate machinery by arcane strategems, they actually could do their work and be paid a fair wage for it. Soon the factory is exceeding its production targets by 30 percent and more. It can't last, of course, and in 1938 they are notified by the Peoples' Commissariat of Forestry that it will cease delivering timber. Neposedov tries everything, but it is the end. The whole process has ruined the forests and the lives of those working in the industry, despite, Andreev remarks, " `all-hands efforts,' `all-out offensives,' `mobilizations,' `mechanization,' and of course . . . sacrificing millions of people." The final irony comes with the outbreak of WW II, when Andreev joins with his coworkers at the head office in Moscow in throwing out into the courtyard the thousands of files carefully itemizing every detail of the grand design.
Andreev's humor, vitality, and mordant observations illuminate what might, in lesser hands, be a depressing chronicle.