Boris Slutsky, one of the most original of Russian poets, belongs to Solzhenitsyn’s generation, but unlike him Slutsky did not reveal publicly his disillusionment with Stalinism and Soviet labels. He remained a member of the literary establishment—if not entirely trusted by Soviet officials—until his mental breakdown in 1977. He was, in one critic’s phrase, “the black box in the fuselage of the USSR.” Gerald Smith of Oxford University has assembled Slutsky’s poetry and prose to paint a gripping portrait of a highly intelligent and articulate Soviet patriot passing through the dynamism and terror of the 1930s; a twice-wounded political instructor fighting for the motherland in World War II; an increasingly skeptical witness to the re-Stalinization of Russia during the cold war; and an ironical observer of the 1960s “youth culture” poetry and finally of the decline of the Communist ideal into senility during the Brezhnev era. Slutsky’s work, always understated does not sing; it reports. Its power lies in its clear and dispassionate observations.