📚 Faithful Ruslan

Finished reading Faithful Ruslan by Georgi Vladimov. Published in 1975 in West Germany, it is the story of the closure of a Soviet prison camp in the late 1950s, told from the perspective of one of the camp’s guard dogs. The foreword to the first English edition, written by Michael Glenny, gives just the right amount of context. I went back and re-read the foreword after finishing the book in order to understand the events and characters a little better.

At the end of World War II, Stalin imprisoned all returning Soviet prisoners of war as well as civilians who had been deported to work in Germany during the war. Most hadn’t committed any crimes. In the year after the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956, “an estimated eight million prisoners were released from the camps, and about six million who had perished there were ‘posthumously rehabilitated.’” The camps were brutal; Glenny says:

Soviet prison regulations stated that at temperatures below −40 °C prisoners could not be made to do outdoor work, but this rule was not always observed by prison-camp commandants.

However, the book doesn’t focus much on the experience of the prisoners beyond the picture you create in your mind through the eyes of the dog.

The closure of the camp is confusing to Ruslan and his colleagues, animals who had spent their whole lives in the service of the Soviet guards. The story follows his life after the camp lets the dogs go.

It’s an excellent novella and you really feel that you are inside Ruslan’s head.