One Man In The Universe

About the Book

Boris Stepanov, a child of the Revolution, is born to an avid Leninist and communist idealist in the village of Nadezhdinsk in Western Russia. His childhood is impoverished but happy until Stalin comes into power and the Stepanov home is absorbed as a collective farm. Although Boris’s father, old Vladimir Stepanov, defends Stalin, he is caught in a web of local intrigue and mysteriously disappears one night, which shatters Boris and his family.

A year after Vladimir’s disappearance, Boris marries: He sires two children and gradually his life improves. When Hitler invades Russia, Boris goes off to defend Moscow, but on the way his unit is routed. He and a comrade named Yakov are wounded, make their way to a hospital and finally are sent to Stalingrad where they participate in the great battle, then join the counteroffensive across Russia. Boris idolizes Yakov, who saves his life on several occasions.

After the Battle of Kursk, the Nazis retreat to Germany. Boris is ecstatic as town after town is liberated and he exults in the Red Army’s triumph, in the camaraderie his fellow soldiers have shown toward each other. He imagines returning home as a hero and reuniting with his family. He even imagines that his father may be there, or at least that Stalin will release him when victory is complete.

His dreams are shortly shattered. The Nazis, though in retreat, have launched a scorched-earth policy, and when Boris finally reaches home, he finds the village of Nadezhdinsk in ashes, his entire family having been burned alive.

His family destroyed, Boris is devastated. He turns his hopes once more toward finding his father, but Yakov disabuses him of this dream and Boris lashes out at him. They part in anger, a fact that Boris regrets ever after.

Distraught and half-crazed, Boris thinks of nothing now but massacring Nazis, but instead is captured and dragged to a concentration camp in Germany. While in prison, he contemplates his fate and concludes that Yakov was right about Stalin, about life and idealism. He begins thinking of his father as a fool, almost equating Stalin with Hitler, and finally joins the Russian Liberation Army (RLA), which is seeking to rid Russia of Stalinism and restore true Bolshevism.

The war ends, however, before the RLA can enter Russia and Boris is caught in the middle. He escapes to the British Zone and later an official helps him get to London where posing as a Finnish national he changes his name to Boris Stevens, acquires a false passport and lands a job on a freighter traveling to America. While docking at Mobile, Alabama, he jumps ship and hires on as a cook in a café. When the café folds, he becomes a partner in a restaurant business in the community of New Hope just outside Mobile.

After his partner dies, Boris becomes the business’s sole proprietor, but has problems managing it, until a young woman on the rebound helps him make a go of it. After a time, Boris and Kendra fall in love and are married, which union produces one son, Joey.

Kendra’s father, Papa Joe, owns a small dairy but has greater ambitions. By hard work, shrewdness and an obsession to get ahead, he makes a small fortune in several investments, including a shopping center. Boris, in his desire to forget his past, looks up to Papa Joe as a kind of father figure, in a sense denying his own father (“If my father had been as shrewd and realistic as Papa Joe,” he tells himself, “he would never have gotten caught up in such foolish idealism.”). Following Papa Joe, Boris gets caught up in the idea of success, in “getting ahead.” Having accumulated a certain amount of capital, he begins, like Papa Joe, to become absorbed with protecting his property and begins sympathizing more and more with the “Communist menace” crowd of red-baiters and John Birchers. He becomes both an avid capitalist and a superpatrio