OPINION: A fictional look at the fantasy — and reality — of life under totalitarianism

Truth is stranger than fiction. Or so we are told. But there are moments when fiction is stranger than truth -- and on occasion, it is difficult to tell the difference between them.

Vassily Aksyonov’s novel “The Burn” is autobiographical fiction. In the book, Aksyonov (1932-2009) writes about the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet Union, but often his story gives way to hallucinatory nightmare.

During the 1930s, the Soviet security forces arrested his parents as dissident Troskyites and sent Aksyonov to an orphanage. The parents were shipped to Magadan in the Soviet far east, where for years they were political prisoners in varying forms of confinement.

Magadan, a city of more than 90,000, is well known to many Daily News readers. After Mikhail Gorbachev opened the Soviet far east to commerce and travel some 30 years ago, Magadan residents and Alaskans went back and forth in an exploratory and at times celebratory mood. In 1991, Magadan and Anchorage became sister cities. Young men and women of Magadan came to study in Anchorage. Some stayed.

After a few years in the orphanage, Aksyonov was reunited with his mother and allowed to live with her in Magadan. He describes Magadan of the early 1950s this way:

“The center of Magadan ... looked thoroughly respectable and, indeed, by the standards of the time, quite splendid; there were five-story buildings at the intersection of Stalin Prospect and Kolyma Highway, grocery stores, a pharmacy, a movie theater built by Japanese prisoners of war, a school built with large square windows, the large villa belongs to the boss of Dalstroy - the Far Eastern Construction Company - General Nikishov...”

The Gornyak Movie Theater was especially important to Aksyonov the boy as it brought his imagination to life -- particularly John Wayne in “Stagecoach,” a pirated version with an introductory text explaining that Soviet viewers would see American Indians valiantly struggling against white colonizers. John Wayne was, in this telling, a villain.

“It didn’t matter that the audience’s sympathies were inevitably enlisted against the freedom-loving Indians who peppered the little stagecoach with arrows, and they applauded the white colonizer, the Ringo Kid, who jumped from the roof of the coach onto the back of a horse and then at a gallop brought down two Apache warriors with his Winchester.

“What was important was that the outward forms of propaganda were observed, and the spectator, willy-nilly, was supposed to have been given yet another dose of serum labeled ‘struggle for national liberation.’

“For the seventh time, (the boy) had come to see how the Ringo Kid walked across the screen, how he sauntered with his long legs in those amazing cowboy pants, with those metal rivets, how he wiped the dust from his face, how he caught in the air the Winchester thrown to him by the sheriff, how he showed his white teeth in a slow, cautious smile, how he kissed a woman ....

“A hero of incredible valor and boldness who would not think twice about giving his life for freedom! The Ringo Kid inspired the boy with self-assurance; he imagined seeing his tall figure on the streets of Magadan, and naturally, as he came out of the theater, he felt a little like the Ringo Kid himself.”

Askyonov, recast in the novel as young Tolya, has spent the afternoon in a fantasy, but he soon returns to the reality of the Soviet world. In the morning, on his way to school, he meets prisoners in chains shuffling along to work camps under armed guard.

Before long, Tolya’s mother is rearrested and the two are separated again. The state security officer who comes to their house makes the arrest with efficient nastiness, mocking mother and boy. Before this hairy brute, Tolya is no longer the Ringo Kid but a helpless Soviet child in the hands of an all-powerful police state.

“His mother was being taken away to an unknown place, for an unknown reason, and for an unknown length of time,” Aksyonov writes. This is the essence of a totalitarian government’s power over its people.

The hairy state security officer appears later in the novel to sexually assault his grown daughter before giving her away in marriage to a member of the Soviet elite, a cosmonaut destined to circle the earth.

Conventional morality is a failure in Soviet Russia, and there is no social stability. What is permitted one day is banned the next and vice versa. People live in fantasy, particularly the fantasy of escape -- to Paris, London, Rome for Muscovites and to Japan and Alaska for those in the far east. One Askyonov character actually escapes to Fairbanks where he winds up in a fictional navy hospital.

Throughout the novel, many characters are routinely drunk. The pain of Soviet life must be dulled. If you are hung over on Tuesday and do not remember Monday, so much the better.

A reader of “The Burn” can be forgiven for confusing fact and fiction -- just as the characters do.

Michael Carey is an occasional columnist and the former editorial page editor of the Anchorage Daily News.

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