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Aug 26, 2017baldand rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
We are all familiar with the Hollywood Second World War films, where a bunch of grunts of different ethnicities and faiths are wielded into a cohesive unit. Think, for instance, of ("The Thin Red Line". Oddly, Solzhenitsyn's masterpiece in some ways conforms to this genre. His hero, Ivan, is in fact, a Red Army soldier, perversely serving a 10-year term for succeeding in escaping Nazi captivity. His unit is multi-ethnic, containing a Western Ukrainian, an Estonian, a Balt, someone of mixed Greek, Jewish and other ethnicity, and a Russian Baptist, Alyosha, stands out from the other ethnic Russians given Russia's Orthodox traditions. As in the Hollywood movies, the unit is held together by a brave, strong-willed unit leader. Where it differs from Hollywood is that the unit is not bent on defeating the Japanese or the Germans, but simply on surviving the brutality of the camps.