Book review: In 1938, the people of Stalin’s Russia have lived through The Great Terror, a time of cruel tortures, deportations to slave labour camps and random executions. Paranoia reigns, to the degree that “you never knew when Moscow’s mind had changed and what was yesterday encouraged, even enforced, was today a capital crime”. Conspiracy has become “the Soviet Union’s national sport”.
Australian writer Malcolm Knox – a multiple prizewinning journalist and author – has written a blackly comedic satire around this default setting that is normal life for Russian citizens, a satire so caustic it is a mere hair’s breadth from reality – and even that reality is questionable when it’s “a fiction created by those who rule”.
Most of the novel’s characters are historical and we have a handy list of significant persons at the start to help with those tricky Russian surnames and nicknames. The chief protagonist is Lavrentiy Pavlovich “Lavrushya” Beria, governor of the Republic of Georgia. In the future he becomes head of the NKVD, the Soviet Secret Police, and continues the brutal and bloody regime, but back in 1938, he faces an upcoming visit from Stalin to the Soviet leader’s home state of Georgia.
For Beria, the visit must be a perfect balance of success (showing that he is good at his job) and sycophancy (but not good enough to topple Stalin off his pedestal).
The book swerves from the political to the personal with the introduction of the fictional Vasil Anastasvili Murtov, Beria’s oldest friend and his personal driver. As a child, Beria, of impoverished working-class stock – and therefore a perfect future communist leader – is adopted into, and educated by, Murtov’s parents, who are wealthy bourgeois – and therefore to be disparaged and mocked for their stupidity. Murtov feels protected from the ravages he deserves by the importance of his relationship with Beria. But is it protection or a case of being nurtured for a future he does not deserve?
Murtov prefers to be “clueless … a policy that has got him to his fortieth year”, but his wife Babilina, a former professor of literature, is less assured of this and warns him that Beria is “the prince and he is his fool”. Although Murtov would like to believe that “even the worst person has a best friend”, he starts to become a witness – who do not have long lives – to events that foresee the eventual destruction of his own family. This especially involves his two pre-teenage daughters, growing towards an age in which Beria, a known sexual predator, shows a very unhealthy interest.
The compassion Murtov feels for his family is part of a delicate balance for survival in an ideological environment that rewards an individual’s total commitment to the cause. As Beria’s obsession with Stalin’s visit grows, there are blatant hints that the friendship might be on a slippery slope.
In an unusual structural strategy, Knox begins the book with a chapter covering Murtov’s near death and follows this with chapters labelled Forty Days To Live and downward in a countdown to The End. The countdown mirrors that of the 40 upcoming days to Stalin’s visit and the novel evolves into a satirical thriller – or is that a thrilling satire? Knox achieves both, leavening the darkness with a clever and biting layer of humour. Altogether, The First Friend is a brilliantly conceived, thoroughly researched and, despite the subject matter, highly enjoyable story.
The First Friend, by Malcolm Knox (Allen & Unwin, $37.99), is out now.
