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This volume represents a history of a book and an attempt to understand the traumatic experience of a man and his generation. Whilst researching "Far from Moscow", a classic socialist realist novel by a writer named Vasilli Azhaev, author Lahusen discovered Azhaev had assembled an extensive archive integrating his personal history with the poitical history of his time. Drawing on the archive, Lahusen reconstructs the genesis, writing, reworking and reception of the Stalin Prize novel. He leads the reader from a forced labour camp to the highest reaches of the Soviet literary bureaucracy and back, in the process of helping us better understand the failure of the bold Soviet effort to integrate literature and life, utopia and reality. Azhaev's novel chronicled the construction of an oil pipeline in the Soviet Far East during World War II. His personal archive revealed that the pipeline was built not by the book's heroic workers but by inmates of forced labour camps. Azhaev, who would end his life a "classic of Soviet literature" had himself arrived in the Far East as a prisoner, but later became an honoured member of the GULAG administration. Blending historical analysis, fiction, biography and autobiography, Lahusen provides a picture of the vicissitudes of literature and life in Stalin's Russia. The volume includes an array of illustrations depicting moments in Azhaev's life and that of his generation. The text frames the questions which continue to baffle and terrify those who contemplate the Stalinist era.