“It is better to break the ribs of a hundred innocent people than to let one guilty person go” — this was the slogan of the era in which millions of Ukrainians lived in the 1930s, and it is this tragic experience that Ivan Bahryanyi depicts in his novel “The Garden of Gethsemane.” Using the life of Andriy Chumak as an example, the author demonstrates in detail how the perfect repressive mechanism of the Soviet system operated, how this system enslaved and destroyed people regardless of their achievements, origin, age, or gender.
