Leo makes the right decision.
But the story breaks down in an unimaginative ending, given the fact that some prisoners at the MGB’s Lubyanka prison, to cite one form of torture, are stripped and placed in coffinlike closets where bedbugs had been left to multiply. They quickly confess to anything.
Overall, however, Smith has done a remarkable job of submerging us in a time and place that “didn’t need poets, philosophers and priests.” Instead, “it needed productivity that could be measured and quantified, success that could be timed with a stopwatch.” Even if the commodity being measured was human beings.
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