Anatoly Rybakov, 87; Russian Novelist

Anatoly Rybakov, the Russian novelist whose works served as a bridge between the Stalinist and glasnost eras in the Soviet Union, is dead.

His death in New York City on Wednesday was reported by his wife, Tatyana Rybakova, who said he was 87 and had died in his sleep of a lingering heart and bronchial condition.

“Anatoly had a bad heart for many years. And he had bad lungs. That came from the war. There was a time when he lay in the snow at the front for two whole days and nights,” she told the Associated Press.

Rybakov was once exiled for his anti-Stalinist views. His long-suppressed epic, “Children of the Arbat,” was released in the U.S. in 1988 after the glasnost policies of Mikhail Gorbachev were established. The book was praised internationally for its meticulous tracing of a dozen families whose destinies were seen as metaphors for the millions who perished at the hands of Josef Stalin.

The Russian television network NTV called Rybakov “the last revolutionary romantic of the Soviet epoch.” It said his body would be cremated and returned to Russia in early January.

When “Arbat” was at last published in the Soviet Union, in the journal “Friendship of the Peoples,” the magazine’s circulation soared from 150,000 to 800,000.

Additionally, countless thousands of copies were run off on state-owned copy machines which normally were kept under lock and key by the KGB.

Los Angeles Times correspondent Robert Gillette found the book “the first portrayal of Stalin to appear in an officially approved Soviet novel that is consistent with historical knowledge of the man whose 29-year-dictatorship . . . probably cost the Soviet Union as many lives as World War II.”

Although many critics found the work stodgy and lacking the lyricism of most of the popular Russian romantics, it was seen as the first evidence that Gorbachev was willing to move far beyond Soviet orthodoxy.

Rybakov was born in 1911 in Chernigov in Ukraine, and moved with his family to Moscow at age 8, just as the communist revolution was taking hold in Russia.

In a 1997 interview, he told NTV that he was a factory worker when he was arrested in 1933 for “counterrevolutionary propaganda.” He spent three years in exile and was then denied permission to live in large cities.

After serving in World War II, he turned to writing and was soon in trouble again, for criticizing Stalinist policies. In the post-Stalinist thaw in 1960, he was “rehabilitated” again.

“I considered that I had to write stories about the people I had met, with whom I’d worked, the history of my books--just in case I up and die,” Rybakov told NTV.

In addition to “Children of the Arbat,” he wrote a sequel, “Dust and Ashes,” as well as “Heavy Sand,” a novel seen by one critic as “surging with the richness of small-town life.”

In 1989, Rybakov was elected to head the Soviet Union’s first branch of PEN, an international literary organization, and for the past several years had traveled frequently between the United States and his homeland.