Before George Kennan's formulation (surrender-on-the-installment-plan) of containment, and WAY before the Reagan/Casey/Kirkland/John Paul II policy of active engagement of Soviet communism, there was roll-back, wherein the west would aggressively seek liberation of sovietized countries. In the forties it seemed Albania was a good spot. If it was or not we wouldn't know, because the Soviet agent Philby, stuttering through bad teeth, had the British buffaloed. His betrayals caused deaths of those seeking liberty all over the world: Russia, Ukraine, Central Europe, and our servicemen in Korea. But here Bethell concentrates on one act: Philby's actions in Albania. Paramilitary forces were to be inserted, Enver Hoxha to be deposed, our natural allies liberated. Instead, the treason of one man left the operation destroyed, the participants slaughtered and or tortured, and Albania cast into decades of marxist darkness.

Having just finished reading it for the third time, I believe that Cancer Ward is a very fine novel, rich at many levels: in its depiction of Soviet provincial society in 1955, a poor society just emerging from Stalinism; in its portrayal of many separate characters (doctors, nurses, patients, hospital workers) in that society, many of whose lives have been permanently damaged by the terror and the GULAG, but in different ways; and, as I know from personal experience, in its depiction of the isolated world of the cancer patient, from which the rest of society is seen dimly, as though through dirty glass. In spite of all medical progress, the basics of this world have not changed much in 50 years: the core treatments are still surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, and the side effects both long and short term can still be brutal.

The ending of the book will disappoint those who want a happy ending, or just an ending with all the loose ends tied up. In real life, though, loose ends usually stay loose. My thought is that Solzhenitshyn intended the reader to understand that for the characters and the society who are so damaged by the past there can be no happy endings; the best they can hope for is to continue from day to day, grasping at whatever happiness briefly comes their way.

Cancer Ward is often overshadowed by its predecessor, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, and its successor, the immense memoir, The Gulag Archipelago. While the worldly impact of those two works is perhaps greater, the aesthetic power of Cancer Ward is stronger than both of those works. The story is poignant and powerful, reaching out and probing deeply into the essential questions that are never answered by not only Soviet society, but western culture as a whole. The religious message that emerges is stunning and unique, recalling the works of Dostoyevsky. Overall, this is an excellent book, and any reader who enjoyed One Day or Gulag will be blown away by this work.

I read Len Feders review and I was so horrified that I had to write something myself. Forget the politics, its a book! It's a great story and it is a story about choices, real choices like we face in real life, not fairytale endings like Len was seeking. Forget bad guy good guy stuff - all the patients in the cancer ward face death and their pasts are irrelevant. As the poem says -scepter and crown are equal made with poor and crooked scythe and spade (Death the Leveller). What distinguishes this book is the ending where Kostoglotof walks out of hospital to view the world with hope and to live each day for what it is, as each of us should live every day of our lives. We all die - cancer or not - and what is important is not that we live but how we live. Forget the politics -read this as a book about people - just ordinary people dying in a cancer ward.