Review: "A Train to Moscow" by Elena Gorokhova

A Train to Moscow by Elena Gorokhova
Published March 2022 via Lake Union Publishing
★★★★

Sasha dreams of the stage, of Moscow, of getting out of her small Soviet town. Moscow represents much of what she does not have—money and opportunity and independence. No matter how much her family loves her, they will never understand her drive to leave, to act. They would rather she stayed local, trod a more acceptable path that thousands have trod before.

Sasha lives a life underscored by violence: there are the men in her town who never came back from fighting the Germans, and there are the men who did come back but never truly recovered. There are unexploded shells and other dangers waiting for children playing in the woods. And there is of course the knowledge that the state is watching—it is always watching. The father of one of her friends is one of those who returned, but not happily, and one of the things I'm most fascinated by is his son's reaction to his father's stories of the Soviet camps: "How could I believe him? This was the stuff of Auschwitz, not our own Vorkuta or Magadan" (85). It's not the primary point of the book, but it's what I kept returning to: Over and over again, people believe only the part of the story that aligns with what they already believe to be true.

This is not, as far as I can tell, an autobiographical story, but Gorokhova's website suggests that there are heavily autobiographical elements—her mother was a doctor, her sister was an actress, Gorokhova dreamed of things other than the opportunities she was presented with. I'd quite like to read A Mountain of Crumbs now.