Pravda's Power In Sofia Petrovna By Lydia Chukovskaya

The novella Sofia Petrovna by Lydia Chukovskaya depicts a widowed mother Sofia, friend Natasha, and her beloved son Kolya, among their involvement during the height of Stalin’s power. Chukovskaya comments at the end of her book how the book was an image of Soviet society. It was a society that was “poisoned by lies, a society has gone mad, and who seriously believed that what took place was rational and just” (Chukovskaya). During this time in the early 1930s, Stalin utilized the secret police to purge the civilian and intelligentsia population to keep his power in check. In addition, Stalin lied to the public with Pravda as the state- sponsored newspaper as a propaganda tool by Stalin to corrupt and hide the truth from the people. Pravda was

Early in the novel, it is revealed that Natasha’s “father, a colonel had died in 1917 of a heart attack” (10). Natasha believed that she was unable to become a Komsomol member due to this. Therefore, is convinced she is “unable to truly sympathetic to the regime” because “her father was a colonel and homeowner” (10). In reality, Natasha fathers was purged during the Red Terror for being a white-party member. Another example of a poisoning of society is when it is revealed that Sofia swayed into the new holidays created by the regime including the “New Year’s tree” which they would decorate. Sofia was corrupted from society’s lies about forgetting the “old Russia.” She was poisoned enough by propaganda that she “would place slips of paper inscribed with ‘Thank you for Stalin’ for a happy childhood into packages of candy” (30). When she received a card and flowers congratulating her on International Women’s Day, “she put the flowers on a desk under the shelf which held the collected works of Lenin, next to the little bust of Stalin”