Stalin’s Door by John St. Clair

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Mind you, when I started to read ‘Stalin’s Door,’ I thought for a minute I had left some window open for freezing winter gale. Seriously, such is the air around this historical fiction that you are probably grateful not to have lived in 1930’s Soviet Union. For me reading the story was a reminiscent of watching my favorite team and favorite players in the rink slowly and irrevocably losing the crucial game but being mesmerized, I had to watch it unfold. It may be a rotten analogy between sports and the Great Terror, or The Great Purge, but the meticulousness with which the story has been built, keeps you reading it. When you start biting your fingernails and clenching your fists urging for some benign turn of events, the story may come and slap you on the fingers with teacher’s pointer. The cold take of the system over its subjects freezes you down to the bone, not to talk about the environments described. Still, there are warm moments, warm things around. And that crucial point which tells you that no bureaucratic meat grinder can take away all bits of humanity, in the end something is still left.
Mr. St. Clair has done careful and meticulous work and turned the numbers, the places, the names, the laws and rules into a clear, riveting story which keeps its grip. Oh, and don’t worry, there are explanatory sections included at the start and end.



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