SOURCE: "War and Peace, Part II," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 7, 1994, pp. 1, 11.

Hochschild is a nonfiction writer whose works include The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin. In the review below, he asserts that the model for Aksyonov's Generations of Winter is Tolstoy's War and Peace and praises Aksyonov's realistic descriptions, calling the novel "absorbing" and claiming that "everything rings true."

Near the end of her memoirs of Stalin's gulag, the writer Eugenia Ginzburg describes an extraordinary scene. She had just finished many years' imprisonment in Kolyma—the harshest, coldest, most feared region of the vast labor camp system, in the far northeast corner of Siberia, not far from Alaska. Like most newly released prisoners, Ginzburg had to remain in internal exile for some years more. Her husband also had vanished into the gulag, and, while she was in prison, one of her two sons had died...