This was one of my favorite books, and this author, one of my favorite authors. And then I find out he's an anti-semite who also held strong discriminatory feelings toward non-Russian ethnic peoples. That explains a lot actually. There are a couple of sections in this book that portray non-white ethnic peoples, such as the Uzbeks, in a negative way, but since the sections are told from a hateful character's POV, I didn't think much of them at the time.The star rating is for the book alone and also because Rusanov was such an irksome old coot that his problematic views were justified by his being a difficult, sickly old bastard.
