His first novel, The Great Ore (1961), although on a typically Soviet industrial theme, attracted widespread praise for its unconventional treatment of the individualistic main character. His mother had already fallen foul of the official anti-semitic campaign, and Vladimov himself felt under threat. His life was one of constant vicissitudes, but his authority and fortitude remained firm to the end.īorn Georgi Volosevich in Kharkov, Ukraine, of a Jewish mother and a father of mixed Polish and Belarusian origin, Vladimov studied at the Suvorov Military Academy and Leningrad University, graduating in law in 1953. Vladimov's particular distinction was as a dissident of immense moral courage, and as the author of Faithful Ruslan, one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period. By the end of the 1970s, however, they had become disillusioned, and many, including Vladimov, had emigrated from the Soviet Union. Georgi Vladimov, who has died aged 72, was one of the promising young writers seen as representing new hope for Russian literature in the de-Stalinisation thaw of the 1950s and early 1960s. Fashioned from the perceptions of an uncomprehending animal, Vladimov’s insistently ironic indictment of the gulag spirals to encompass all of Man’s inexplicable cruelty. The novel circulated in samizdat for more than a decade, often attributed to Solzhenitsyn, before its publication in the West led to Vladimov’s harassment and exile.Ī starving stray, tortured and abandoned by the godlike “Master” whom he has unconditionally loved, Ruslan and his cadre of fellow guard dogs dutifully wait for the arrival of new prisoners-but the unexpected arrival of a work party provokes a climactic bloodletting. Dissident, he said, is a word that “they force on you.” His mother, a victim of Stalin’s anti-Semitic policy, had been interred for two years in one of the camps from which Vladimov derived the wrenching detail of Faithful Ruslan. “Every writer who writes anything in this country is made to feel he has committed a crime,” Georgi Vladimov said.

Set in a remote Siberian depot immediately following the demolition of one of the gulag’s notorious camps and the emancipation of its prisoners, Faithful Ruslan is an embittered cri de coeur from a writer whose circumstances obliged him to resist the violence of arbitrary power.

Unavailable for twenty years, this harrowing allegory of obedience to authority is esteemed as “one of the defining literary texts of the post-Stalin period.” ( The Guardian)

Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov