Soviet Union, 1953. Stalin dies. Ivan Grigorievich is released after thirty years in the Gulag camps. Trying to find his lost life again, he will realize that the years of terror have plunged Soviet society into a quagmire of subjugation and resignation, and that he must fight hard to survive in a world that is essentially unknown to him.

Taking up the thread of Ivan's struggle, Vasily Grossman gives us another deeply human novel, leading us once again into the labyrinth of Soviet society. His simple and captivating pen allows the people surrounding his central hero to speak about their obsessions and guilt. Scientist Nikolai, who sacrificed his conscience for the sake of his career, Pinyagin, who betrayed Ivan, a host of former informants trying to justify their heinous acts by saying they were working for the good of the Soviet Union, Ivan's lover Anna Sergeyevna, who remembers the terrible famine of 1932 and the millions of dead Ukrainian peasants, all compose a strange tableau of the tragic consequences of totalitarianism.

In the novel "Everything Flows," Vasily Grossman delves even deeper into his relentless criticism, always from the same perspective: respect for human life and an unwavering belief in freedom.