"Everything Flows" tells the story of Ivan Griegorievich's return home after thirty years in prison camps under the tyrannical regime of Stalin, who has just died, in 1954.
The reunion with his cousin Nikolai, who had to lie about him to maintain his status as a scientist well regarded by the party, is the first stage of a short period of time in which he is reintegrating into the life of Moscow and St. Petersburg, the city where he goes to see the woman he loved before being arrested. His reencounter with life in a country where the freedom of an entire generation has been swept away. The memory of his own and others' suffering in the political prison camps and the desolate panorama of a society burned by the panic of a persecuting regime is the topic of the story.
It is a well-done, interesting narration, but it lacks tension, to draw a message about the social destruction to which totalitarianism leads and the wound in the souls of the people who have suffered it.