Dzerzhinsk

Dzerzhinsk is a city on the Volga, renamed in 1929 for Felix Dzerzhinsky. In the book’s opening, it becomes a tightly controlled wartime industrial center: a weapons factory employs the entire population, NKVD troops guard it, and a chance meeting beneath the threat of bombing begins the story of Venyamin Savenko and a young worker.

Name and Setting

Before the Revolution, the city was called Rastyapino. Its later name honors Felix Dzerzhinsky, an early Bolshevik and founder of the secret police. That history gives the name a pointed resonance in a passage that describes surveillance not as a distant political abstraction but as part of the city’s daily life.

A City at War

In the spring of 1942, heavy industry had been dismantled and moved away from the fighting. One weapons factory relocated to Dzerzhinsk came to employ the whole city, while NKVD troops watched over the workforce. The factory’s importance brought work, but also placed ordinary labor under the authority of a security apparatus that could punish lateness with a court-martial and execution.

The danger was not only political. One night, Messerschmitts on a reconnaissance flight from the Lower Volga dropped bombs on the city. Amid the fires, a soldier on guard used his flashlight to guide a young worker who had left her post late and was hurrying to shelter. She stumbled, caught his arm, and the two kissed.

Narrative Significance

Dzerzhinsk is the setting where state discipline, industrial mobilization, and immediate physical danger meet in a single scene. The encounter between the guard and the worker takes place within a system that assigns them opposing duties, yet the darkness and bombing briefly bring them together. The soldier is identified as Venyamin Savenko, a Ukrainian peasant’s son and skilled electrician recruited into the NKVD rather than sent to the front. The city’s wartime factory thus connects the intimate opening to the broader machinery of recruitment, labor, and displacement.