El fiel Ruslan

Ruslan, a guard dog in a remote Siberian gulag labor camp, doesn’t understand why, seemingly overnight, the camp’s prisoners are set free and the guards, whom Ruslan and his fellow guard dogs love unconditionally, have left their canine companions to their fate. Told from Ruslan’s point of view, this powerful novel portrays the chilling cruelty of the Soviet system—a system that condemned Georgi Vladimov’s own mother, a victim of anti-Semitic Stalinist purges, to two years in a labor camp—focusing on the period immediately after Nikita Khrushchev’s reforms allowed for the emancipation of thousands of prisoners. An early version of this story was circulated widely in the Soviet Union as a samizdat publication before Vladimov published the full novel in Germany in 1974.