Review of IN STALIN’S SHADOW by Ian Cummins in “The Age”, April 8 1989

[…] The contemporary Ukrainian writer Anatoly Dimarov’s collection of stories, In Stalin’s Shadow, concentrates more directly on the Stalin era. These often grim tales of rural collectivization, famine, the destruction of family relationships, and the loss of a traditional way of life are ultimately very powerful […]. Here, too, consideration of Stalinist repression prompts one central character to ask: “Did our parents start the revolution for this?”

Two of the four stories in this collection were written, like Anatoli Rybakov’s better-known Children of the Arbat, in the 1960s. Their appearance in the 1980s, when the author was on the editorial boards of several Ukrainian literary journals, appears to represent another of the fruits of glasnost.