One of Solzhenitsyn’s shorter and more directly political works, written during the brief cultural thaw of the Khrushchev years.

A group of students and teachers at a provincial technical school have spent years helping to build themselves a new school. Just as they are preparing to move in, Party officials decide the building would be more useful elsewhere. The theft is justified, naturally, as being “for the good of the cause.” 

The work functions as a precise study of bureaucracy: looking at the way personal ambition acquires institutional language, how injustice becomes administrative procedure, and how apparently decent people learn to make cowardice sound principled. Published in Novy Mir in 1963, the novella became the subject of an unusually public Soviet literary argument; this edition is particularly interesting because it appends translated material from that contemporary controversy, effectively giving you both the fiction and the ideological fight it caused.

It’s minor Solzhenitsyn only in scale. The mechanism he’s interested in is enormous: nobody needs to announce themselves as a villain when an institution can simply keep saying that what it wants is necessary.

Edition & condition: Sphere Books, 1972 reprint of the 1971 Sphere edition. Paperback. Considerable cover rubbing, creasing and edge wear; pages age-toned with some foxing. Binding sound. Good reading copy.