Like Kiev and Prague, Moscow’s history stretches deep into the medieval period. At its centre is the Kremlin. Originally a fortress, it has protected not just Russia’s ruling elite but also some of its great institutions and churches over the centuries. And like so many other European capitals, it has been built upon and built upon. The soil beneath Moscow holds many secrets. In Catherine Merridale’s debut crime novel, some of them will come to light.
Under Lenin, the Soviets moved their capital back to Moscow from St Petersburg, but now it’s 1934 and Josef Stalin is consolidating his dictatorship. The second five-year plan is in full swing; the city is being transformed. Aristocratic elegance, bourgeois finery and much of the city’s traditional architecture are giving way to a new, socialist aesthetic for the workers. This includes a metro that will be the envy of the world, taking workers wherever they need to be quickly and efficiently. However, digging the subway is unearthing some of the city’s buried secrets. Some of them are worth killing for.
A body has been found in a derelict building new one of the shafts leading to an underground construction site. It’s that of Andrei Dovlatov, an academic sometimes brought in as a consultant when the metro’s construction unearths artefacts of value. The treasures of the tsars. The relics of the Eastern church. Sometimes items that date even further back.
Dovlatov has been beaten, tortured and killed and the case falls to Anton Markovich – a minor figure in the confusing Soviet legal system, who normally uncovers fraud and corruption. Or doesn’t, depending on who the guilty party is. Actually, it hasn’t exactly fallen to him. He’s been railroaded into investigating it by his old flame, Vika, who is as red as they come. She’s a rising star in the OGPU – a predecessor of the KGB.
Vika knows more than she’s letting on, and also knows Anton will bite because the slippery Lucas Jansons of the security bureau of the Transport Construction Division is trying to pin the murder on a 15-year-old orphan. Yes, Fedor Limonchik is a petty criminal. No, brutality is not his style. Anton’s sense of justice is tweaked.
Author Catherine Merridale has placed us in a fascinating milieu very alien to most Western readers. Justice in a totalitarian system is nothing like we understand it to be. Anton and Vika are in a world where the truth is what their superiors say it is, all the way up the line to the big bosses, and Stalin himself. Approaching the case in the wrong way could see Anton or someone he knows denounced. After all, Stalin’s show trials are just beginning.
When he starts asking questions, he stokes up the anger of smugglers and organised crime gangs who now and again ‘produce ‘find’ ancient artefacts that can be sold in the West. Similarly, ambitious mid-level would love to get their hands on those ancient chalices, icons and manuscripts to enrich themselves, the Soviet state, or both.
Somewhere amongst them is Dovlatov’s murderer, and all of them are a danger to Anton Markovich. Key to understanding Dovlatov’s death is finding out just what it is he was looking for, but the man’s notes and the architectural drawings he kept are all cryptic.
As we’re seeing today, when political opinions are strong, experts are held in suspicion. Writing down a secret is a dangerous thing to do.
However, there’s much more to Merridale’s book than a murder mystery in the tunnels of the Moscow Metro. The author has used her own studies and expertise to give us a flavour of Russian life under the Soviet system. We meet a celebrated young engineer in charge of digging one of the main lines. He reminds us of the Soviet icon Alexei Stakhanov, who dug coal mines instead of rail tunnels. His fervour for the new Soviet state is unbending, his work ethic unparalleled. Luckily, he’s also an honest man.
One of Anton’s best friends is a chef in a famous international hotel. This is the perfect chance for Merridale to tell us about the food powerful people enjoyed in Moscow at the time, and contrast that with the impoverished living standards of many Muscovites who’d only barely survived the famines caused by the collectivisation of agriculture. And Anton’s father is the artist Belka, a painter of posters celebrating the Revolution. But his Bolshevik idealism and his shade of red are not what Stalin wants to see anymore. Belka is on the cusp of being denounced, but Vika can prevent this and thus has leverage over Anton.
Then there is the menace of just about anyone in a true position of power. Conversations with bureaucrats are spoken in code. Certain words and certain omissions are signs to Anton that his self-preservation may be at stake. And going beyond veiled threats, we also see the killing and torture used to eliminate threats and frighten everyone else. And it’s used by certain parties to advance their own interests.
A significant part of the novel also takes us back to the Red Army’s Great Patriotic War in Ukraine after the Revolution. This is where Anton and Vika first met, and this is where their bond was forged. Vika and her squad are there hunting down and killing White Russians and Ukrainian patriots. Anton is there as a medic, tending the wounded and helping those beyond help. Again, the author fills the story with tales from her research, many of which are terrifying.
The survival instinct develops differently in each of them, and now there is a love-hate relationship between them. Both in 1919 and in 1934, we see Russians pragmatically doing what they must to survive while at the same time holding to their political beliefs even as their political leaders betray the ideals of the Revolution.
This is the perfect read if you love Martin Cruz-Smith’s Arkady Renko novels, or Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, which take place under Russian and German totalitarianism respectively. I think Anton and Vika will be back. Jaded by this case, it’ll be interesting to see how Anton faces the Gulag era.
Fontana
Print/Kindle/iBook
£9.99
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
