Stalin: The Flight of Our Youth

Alexander Zinoviev is a prominent Russian writer, sociologist, philosopher, and publicist. In his forthcoming book, he offers a thorough interpretation of the Stalin era and of the figure of Stalin. The author explains the idea this way: the title is borrowed from a line of a song that was sung in those years in the Soviet Union (“Stalin is our glory and fighting flight…”). Zinoviev recalls that he sang it and didn’t perceive it as fake—he felt something else in it: a consuming hurricane of a great history. In the book, he seeks to explain how this historical whirlwind was understood and experienced by some people of his generation who found themselves inside the events—and what Stalinism meant for them. In the A4 PDF format, the publisher’s layout is preserved.