In 1936-1937, young workers, peasants, miners, all communists, embarked on a journey to the USSR, to the workers’ homeland, where the little father of the people, Stalin, governed. At least, that’s the refrain served by propaganda to the comrades.
None of them questioned this almost religious truth of communist Russia. Then on this train, The Red Arrow, pride of the USSR, they find themselves stuck between Leningrad and Moscow, in a lost countryside where they must survive in the snow and cold. There is the political commissar, the regime’s guardian angel.
The ballet corps of the opera went to perform at the Bolshoi. Pierre is shaken in his convictions, his faith, by Maïa, a young dancer. Love, truths revealed by this young girl? Pierre is no longer the same; doubt invades him and shakes his political beliefs.
Then… The novel continues, Moscow and the return journey which, for the young man, doesn’t happen in his mind. Somehow he remains in Russia. How to overcome this moral turmoil in his faith? 1936, the Spanish Civil War.
A magnificent novel that retraces the blindness of an ideology which, during this period of the popular front, shaped men, stripping them of any critical sense and free will: the party had spoken! the party knew! the party was their reason to live, hope, and think.
Thierry Jan
