The brothers Vitali and Yevgeny Abalákov became adults at 13 and 14 years old, respectively. It happened the night the Bolsheviks knocked on the door of the house of his uncle, a merchant and businessman—and, therefore, an enemy of the people—who had adopted the two orphans years before. It was 1920 and the civil war was entering Siberia. The brothers, still children, settle at the door to prevent their adoptive father from being taken away. The red guard solves the problem by arresting the three. His aunt is quick to bribe authorities with vodka and hors d’oeuvres. The brothers will stay at home. But, as they pray for their uncle—who will first be sentenced to death and finally granted amnesty after trying hard labor—they realize that they have moved on to a different stage in their lives. And they are not able to imagine everything that was to come. Because the future will bring them stories so implausible that they could only be true.
Stalin’s mountaineers (Criticism) is the book in which Cédric Gas chronicles the life history of those two brothers, who became national heroes in Stalin’s Soviet Union and who ended up being purged. After the revolution of 1917, the heights were no longer the heritage of the upper classes. The mountains began to bear the names of the new leaders and conquering their peaks was a matter of heroism, patriotism and exaltation of the newly installed regime. The Abalákov brothers, raised in the shadow of the Stolby – a formation of cliffs ideal for climbing – rose to fame when they managed to summit a peak in the Caucasus that, until then, only foreigners had reached. He is the new Russian man—unbreakable and triumphant—proving that he can dominate nature and take a bust of Stalin to the highest points of the territory. But dictatorships never have enough and end up doubting everyone. Vitali is arrested and tortured. Yevgeni is found dead in an apartment next to the corpse of a soldier. Back on the climb, Vitali undertakes one last attempt: Stalin Peak which, in 1962, was already called Kommunizm. A story of the USSR and mountaineering told through the tragic lives of the two brothers.
