The Meaning of Generations of Winter

Vassily Aksyonov was a Soviet dissident writer and GMU professor. His most famous work was probablyGenerations of Winter, a sprawling historical novel about three generations of a Soviet family. GMU history professor Steven Barnes, a great admirer of the book, doesn’t just assign the book in his class on modern Russian and Soviet history; an original essay on the book is the course’s most important assignment. While I rarely quote undergraduate work, Tristan Caplan’s pieceonGenerations of...