....The Truth That Killed by Georgi Markov, the Bulgarian who was assassinated. I have written here before about I Chose Freedom by Victor Kravchenko which includes a fine, but necessarily grim, first-hand account of the collectivisation of farms. Goerge Orwell's Animal Farm is superb. Those who read it should, of course, be informed that it was a satire on communism under Stalin. Now I see in the obituary column of the Daily Telegraph mention of a book that clearly is worth looking at, though I have yet to do so myself. It is The Yawning Heights by Alexander Zinoviev. Perhaps visitors to this site will be able to suggest other books to read on communism and its effects 'lest we forget'.

This is from the obituary:

A Professor of Logic at Moscow State University, Zinoviev had already acquired a troublesome reputation by the time he wrote The Yawning Heights, the allegorical satire that was to lead him into exile. Published in Russian in Lausanne in 1976, it portrayed the Soviet Union as Ibansk ("f***town"), where the inhabitants obey the Soviet imperative that only mediocrity shall prosper; that those who stand out should be cut down, and that moral worth must be persecuted.

The town is ruled by The Boss (Stalin), who rose to the top only because he was a complete nonentity. He is displaced by Hog (Krushchev), who repudiates the boss only in order to hold on to power. The leaders are decorated for being leaders, then decorated again for being decorated. The only reason there is no unemployment is that people are engaged in an imitation of work; everything is deliberately kept inefficient.

In one episode, flying instructors who are not allowed to fail anyone take on a trainee with slow reflexes and get him through by giving him his orders well in advance. Sent to the front, he does not drop his bombs until he gets back to base. "Life in Ibansk has improved noticeably," Zinoviev wrote. "Here are the facts. Only smoked sausage has disappeared. The other kind has remained. The price of meat has not risen by five times, as was expected, but only by three and a half." Few protest because nearly all are involved in sustaining the lies on which Ibansk is built. Soviet society, Zinoviev seemed to suggest, had not fallen short of its own ideals. It embodied them.

The Yawning Heights created a greater stir among Russians in the Soviet Union (where it was circulated on the samizdat network) and in the West than anything written by Solzhenitsyn; and it presented the Soviet authorities with something of a dilemma. If they prosecuted Zinoviev it would have been a tacit admission that Ibansk depicted the Soviet Union. But to leave him alone would be to admit that they were powerless to react to the bitterest satirical attack on the system to appear in Russian. They therefore compromised by "persuading" Zinoviev's colleagues to dismiss him from his university post and strip him of his membership of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, his war-time medals and all his degrees and titles.

He was finally expelled from the Soviet Union ( for "behaviour damaging to Soviet prestige") after his next novel, Radiant Future, satirising Leonid Brezhnev, was published in the West in 1978.

The full obituary is here.