Moscow might not be top of your travel itinerary at the moment, but with crime fiction and historian Catherine Merridale you can safely travel there in your imagination in Moscow Underground.
The setup is fascinating. As he consolidates power, Josef Stalin wants to show the world and Soviet citizens that Russia is a modern, progressive state and that Moscow is a thriving city. It’s 1934, and the construction of the Moscow Metro will do this. However, building it requires tunnels under the city – tunnels that unearth treasures and secrets. Tunnels that also destabilise the city’s existing buildings.
An expert who understands the old architecture has been brutally murdered, his body left in a derelict mansion. For some reason, Anton Belkin is being railroaded into solving the case by his former lover, Vika. He’s an investigator for the Procurator General. She works for the OGPU – the secret police. With powerful gangsters, black marketeers, transport construction bosses, military men, Communist officials and more all taking an interest in the tunnels, they both know they’ll be walking on eggshells as the totalitarian regime takes hold.
Having studied Russian history since the mid-1980s, and an expert in the oral history of Russia and the Soviet Union, Catherine Merridale is an internationally recognised author, but Moscow Underground is her first work of fiction. We had to know more about it, so we invited her to join us here on the site. The novel comes out on 14 August 2025.
Welcome to Crime Fiction Lover. What led you to write Moscow Underground, your first detective novel?
I have witnessed the whole sweep of change since the end of the USSR in the 1980s. As part of that, I’ve had the privilege of travelling around the former Soviet Union to listen to some amazing people, most of them survivors of the 1930s and 1940s. I’ve talked to prison guards and the bone-hunters who unearth their secrets, to oligarchs and the pensioners whose lives were shattered when the Soviet Union collapsed. I have even met and interviewed a professional killer who worked for Stalin’s secret police. And I love crime fiction; I’ve always wanted to try it for myself. When I was writing Moscow Underground it was as if I was hearing those voices again, the memories and impressions of real people stepping in and out of my story as I created it.
What will crime fiction lovers love about this novel?
Moscow Underground takes you straight into the heart of Stalin’s Moscow. It’s a place we barely know at all, a place where everything is changing but where the past still exercises power. That tension fascinated me, of course, and I hope crime fiction lovers will also pick up the troubling parallels with today’s Russia. It’s what makes crime fiction enjoyable – the chance to look beyond one case.
Who is Anton Belkin? What inspired and how did you develop this character?
Anton is a criminal investigator with the Soviet courts. I wanted him to be an honest, decent man whose dream of a quiet life will never quite work out. That’s what happened to hundreds of the people I interviewed, including heroes of the Great Patriotic War and survivors of the Gulag. And I loved developing the contrast with his firebrand radical father.
What’s he up against?
Anton survived the Civil War, where he was in Ukraine. He knows what violence can do and he avoids it whenever he can, which is challenge enough in Stalin’s Soviet Union. Against his better judgement, however, Anton is roped into investigating the murder of a specialist historian. And the secret for which that man was killed will nearly cost him his life.
Tell me more about Vika and some of the other key characters we’ll meet?
Vika is Anton’s former lover. As a senior figure in the secret police, she is both ruthless and dangerous but I found as I created her that she had a vulnerability we might not expect. Among my other favourite characters are the affable Misha, the head chef at the National Hotel, and Anton’s stubborn, angry father, the revolutionary artist known as Belka, the Squirrel. But other readers love the enigmatic Ivan Glukhov, who is far more than a mere driver of Vika’s black Ford Model A.
The construction of the Moscow Metro is fascinating milieu. Why did you set your story around this historic project and how does it play into your fiction?
I started with the archivists who had to help with the excavations, actually. I found a record of their work when I was in the Lenin Library. That set me thinking about the tunnels and the shafts and everything that lay behind the Metro’s gleaming facades. The Soviet state promised a dazzling future but the only palaces that people got were buried in the city’s earth beside the bones of the long dead.
There’s something special about investigators seeking truth or fact in a totalitarian system. We seem to empathise with them more, perhaps because the system they face is perceived to be more unfair than our own. What are the moral dilemmas Belkin faces and how does he negotiate them?
Anton is a Soviet person. He thinks like one even in old age. The moral dilemmas that we see, reading his words, are not the ones he perceives himself. Looking back on his own youth as he tells the story, he knows that Stalin’s power will become grotesque, but at the time he and his friends still held on to frail shreds of hope. The challenge for readers will be to empathise with him at a human level despite his ideological views.
What aspects of your research into the oral history of Russia and the Soviet Union have you brought to the novel?
The words, the intonations and the ideas all come straight from my unforgettable interviews and conversations in real life. Anton’s attitude to women rather shocked my editor, in fact, but he can’t help his time and generation, can he?
We don’t really get crime fiction from Russia. Do you think Russians will read this?
That’s a difficult one to answer because there is so little contact between our cultures now. There’s an unfriendly rivalry between East and West that is, ironically, one of the themes of Moscow Underground itself.
Which crime fiction authors and/or books have inspired you, and what are you reading at the moment?
I love off-beat detectives – Fred Vargas is one of my favourite writers, with Commissaire Adamsberg. But there are lots of great new writers out there. Right now, I’m reading Chris Whittaker, beginning with Tall Oaks and All the Colours of the Dark.
What’s next for Catherine Merridale and for Anton Belkin?
I’ll be sticking with Anton in spite of the pressures on him. The Great Terror is coming, his closest friends are in mortal danger and he will be lucky to escape with his life.
Moscow Underground is released on 14 August 2025. Order a copy with our buttons below.
