Back in the USSR

The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin By Vladimir Voinovich Farrar, 316 pp., $10 Summer 1941, as Hitler’s armies are poised to invade Russia, a small Red Army plane of no particular military value makes a forced landing in a field. The pilot—after first being mistaken, by a nervous local chairman, for a representative of the Maximum Responsibility Committee of Inspection—is eventually returned to his base. But, needless to say, a Red Army plane, even an obsolete percale-covered one-seater with a conked engine, cannot be allowed to rest unguarded near a pig sty.

Miles away, upon receipt of appropriate recommendations from his aides, the air battalion commander responsible for the plane issues the following directive: “Having heard and carefully considered all the hogwash which each of you, according to his ability, has proposed [snaps Lieutenant Colonel Opalikov], I have come to the conclusion that we will leave the plane where it is until a motor can be brought there. In the meantime, a guard will be posted. . . . Some loafer, anyone. Let him snooze by the plane just so long as there’s somebody in charge there.”

VG

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Victor Gold

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Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The Life and Extraordinary Adventures of Private Ivan Chonkin By Vladimir Voinovich Farrar, 316 pp., $10 Summer 1941, as Hitler’s armies are poised to invade Russia, a small Red Army plane of no particular military value makes a forced landing in a field. The pilot—after first being mistaken, by a nervous local chairman, for a representative of the Maximum Responsibility Committee of Inspection—is eventually returned to his base. But, needless to say, a Red Army plane, even an obsolete percale-covered one-seater with a conked engine, cannot be allowed to rest unguarded near a pig sty.

Miles away, upon receipt of appropriate recommendations from his aides, the air battalion commander responsible for the plane issues the following directive: “Having heard and carefully considered all the hogwash which each of you, according to his ability, has proposed [snaps Lieutenant Colonel Opalikov], I have come to the conclusion that we will leave the plane where it is until a motor can be brought there. In the meantime, a guard will be posted. . . . Some loafer, anyone. Let him snooze by the plane just so long as there’s somebody in charge there.”