Go back to New York, Dr Kelso, and play your games of history in somebody else’s country, because this isn’t England or America, the past isn’t safely dead here. In Russia, the past carries razors and a pair of handcuffs.’ (p.167)
Dr Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso is a historian of modern Russia. Described by one Sunday supplement as a ‘battered Byron’, he is in fact ‘a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit’ (p.55). He’s overweight, drinks too much, despises his colleagues and has for many years devoted more time and energy to appearing on the telly and churning out articles and reviews for fashionable magazines than doing any actual historical research, and hence the envy and contempt of his peers.
He along with a cross-selection of colleagues are gathered at a mind-numbingly boring conference about archives and research in the newly post-communist Russia. Kelso’s three marriages and three subsequent divorces, his general air of shambling drunken disreputableness, the way he drinks so much he throws up and the next morning causes a kerfuffle when he hungoverly stumbles out of the first lecture of the day, all this gives him the feel of a Kingsley Amis character.
But he is a Kingsley Amis character thrown into a gripping thriller, because the reason he’s so hungover is that he was up half the night drinking with a mysterious, raddled old Muscovite who had attended one of his anti-communist lectures, tutting all the way through, and had then cornered the good doctor to put him ‘right’ about Comrade Stalin. Over drinks in his shabby hotel room Kelso and the Russkie – Papu Rapava – get really drunk while Papu pours out his heart about how misunderstood kind Comrade Stalin was.
In the middle of the tears and vodka Rapava tells an extraordinary story about being present at Stalin’s death. He had been a young security guard to Lavrenty Beria, the feared head of Soviet Secret Police, when one night he was summoned to drive his boss out to Stalin’s dacha. Here they found the old tyrant lying paralysed by a stroke on a sofa. Instead of calling for a doctor, Beria ordered Rapava to help him look for a key, the key to Stalin’s safe. When Rapava finds it, stashed down the sofa beside the comatose dictator, Beria orders him to drive them back to Moscow, to the Kremlin, where Beria bluffs his way past the guards and then uses the key to open Stalin’s private safe and take from it a metal box containing Stalin’s most private papers. Then they drive to Beria’s Moscow house, where Beria orders Rapava to bury the box in the back garden. And then they drive back to Stalin’s dacha in time to be present with other officials at Stalin’s actual death (it took three days, apparently).
However, in the turmoil following the dictator’s death, Beria is himself arrested, tortured and then executed. Rapava, as his security guard and driver, finds himself sentenced to fifteen years in a labour camp above the Arctic circle, experiences which he gruesomely recounts to the pissed Kelso… But, he drunkenly tells Kelso, he never told anyone, he hugged his secret all this time…
While Kelso is throwing up in the loo, Rapava staggers to his feet and out of the hotel, and although Kelso pathetically chases him down the stairs, across the lobby and out into the freezing night, he loses him. Damn.
Next day Kelso tells his closest confidante among the delegates about this strange encounter, and decides to track Rapava down. First of all he goes to visit a scary relic of the communist regime, Vladimir Mamantov, to interview him about the notebook, to try and get background information from one of the few surviving communists who were in Stalin’s circle. But Mamantov immediately pounces on Kelso’s hints. ‘The notebook?’ Mamantov says. ‘Stalin’s notebook, the one referred to in all the memoirs but which was never found?’ Hmm. Maybe not such a good idea to have let him know. Kelso departs with a bad feeling…
Russian spies
At this point the narrative switches to follow Major Feliks Suvorin and Lieutenant Vissari Netto of the Russian security service. It turns out that they are monitoring Mamantov’s apartment and phone calls. Mamantov is still a threatening political presence. He took part in the 1991 coup against Gorbachev and was imprisoned for 18 months, but now he’s at liberty again, with widespread connections and the money to fund an unreconstructed communist magazine, Aurora.
Thus the security services tap Kelso’s phone call to Mamantov and their subsequent conversation. Thus they learn about the fabled Stalin notebook. Shortly after Kelso’s visit Mamantov’s mad, old wife leaves the building with her minder for her regular morning walk. When she doesn’t return for some time, then not at all, the watching officers nervously realise something’s up. When they break into the apartment they find his wife tied and bound in the wardrobe. Mamontov had dressed in her clothes to fool them, escape surveillance and is now on the loose.
R.J. O’Brian
So now Kelso, Mamatov and the security services are all after the fabled notebook. That night Kelso goes to the bar where the drunken Rapava had told him his prostitute daughter works, the Robotnik, in a bid to track down Rapava. Here Kelso bumps into a brash, loud American TV journalist, R.J. O’Brian, who, it turns out, also knows all about the notebook. How? He’d been hanging round the conference centre and the academic Kelso confided in had told him (the swine). So now Kelso, O’Brian, Mamantov and Russian security are all after the damn notebook.
Rapava’s daughter
Kelso gets the barman to point out Papava’s daughter, Zinaida, who turns out to be a battle-hardened whore, well used to fleecing foreign tourists. Kelso only wants her to drive him to her father’s apartment but she insists on the full rate ($400). She dumps him in a terrifying urban wasteland of badly built high-rises on the outskirts of Moscow, telling him the block, floor and apartment number.
In a tense, scary scene Kelso makes his way in the late-night darkness through the utterly empty snow-swept high rises, climbing the piss-smelling, vomit-strewn stairwell up to Rapava’s apartment where he finds the door hanging off its hinges and the flat more systematically ripped to pieces than anything he’s ever seen. Foolishly, he enters and investigates, eventually coming across the bathroom sink full of blood and shreds of scalp with hair attached. He stumbles back out towards the lift – only to find Rapava’s body hanging from the lift cables – or what’s left of his body, completely eviscerated, looking more like a side of beef, and with his penis cut off and shoved into what’s left of his mouth.
In the police station
Kelso runs to the nearest apartment and gets them to call the police. He finds himself being arrested and taken to the cells where he spends a very worrying night. But in the morning he is not charged or beaten up under interrogation (as he feared), but released into the care of one of the security officers we’ve been getting to know in the parallel sequence of scenes about them, notably the young westernised Major Feliks Suvorin.
Suvorin asks Kelso why he went to see such a dangerous man as Mamantov? Does he realise that by mentioning the notebook he signed Rapava’s death warrant – for it was Mamantov, when still a senior KGB official, who had interrogated Rapava after the fall of Beria, and then upon his release from the labour camp. Thus he knew that all the other witnesses to Stalin’s death were dead. Thus he knew that what Kelso took for his own clever and subtle references to ‘a contact’ who had mentioned the notebook, could be only one person. Thus Mamantov absconded from his apartment and went direct to torture and murder Rapava. ‘And you know what, Dr Kelso? Now he may come looking for you.’
This is the scene where the quote from the top of the page comes, with Suvorin telling Kelso he is out of his depth in the jungle which is post-communist Russia. ‘Go back to the West. Leave while you are still alive.’ Then Suvorin drives him back to the hotel and tells him to catch the flight home along with the other academics. Here Kelso showers and tries to wash away the horrors of the previous night.
Zinaida’s note
The next morning he joins the waiting historians filtering into the big tourist coach, jostled along by their ‘minder’, Olga, with her prodding umbrella, to be driven off to Sheremetevo airport. At the last moment Kelso is cornered by O’Brian who wants them to go 50-50 on the ‘scoop’, but Kelso says, ‘No deal’ and happily drives off with the others to the airport. Here they bicker and catfight as only academics can, but then Kelso sees Zinaida standing on the other side of the departure lounge glass. He goes outside to talk to her and she lures him into the nearby multi-story car park where she reveals that her father had visited her just a few days ago, drunk and apologetic, and left her a scribbled letter. It says he left her something valuable – and tells her where it’s hidden. It must be the notebook!
Kelso looks at his colleagues queuing up to go through passport control. He knows his visa has only one more day to run after which he will be staying in Russia illegally. He knows it is crazy to go with a mercenary and unreliable prostitute. But he is not just a historian, he is bitten by the deeper bug of needing to know. He gets into the car. He says, ‘take me there.’
In the lock-up
Zinaida drives Kelso to the derelict garages, part of the complex of high rises where he found Rapava’s body. Presumably the police didn’t know that Rapava owned a garage and he went to his death, heroically defying incomprehensible torture pain, not revealing it, so his daughter could have it, it and whatever money it brings. A bitter gift from a distant and difficult father. Now Kelso jumps down into the garage well and, pulling away the sides, quickly comes across a metal box. Inside is a leather folder containing a notebook and papers! It is at this moment that the garage door opens from the outside.
It is a typically heart-stopping moment in a novel full of them: will it Mamantov and his psychopath torturers? Will they eviscerate the girl in front of Kelso and then start on him? But no, it is in fact the irritating, boosterish Yank TV journalist, O’Brian. Zinaida, the hard-bitten whore, pulls the gun she always carries and there is a tense stand-off, which Kelso helps reconcile into a deal. O’Brian will pay Zinaida for the book; and gets to film Kelso re-enacting the discovery then opening the notebook then reading it.
Stalin’s notebook
In fact, the notebook turns out to be completely different from what everyone expected. Far from being some kind of record of the great dictator’s mind and plans, it turns out to be the diary of a 21-year-old girl, Anna Safanova, a keen Komsomol Party member, born and raised in Archangel in Russian’s far north. The diary begins as Anna is plucked from provincial obscurity and invited to come and work at Stalin’s dacha, where she is instructed by the head of the staff in all his little ways and foibles. The diary describes her excitement at this amazing stroke of luck, and logs the fairly innocuous moments over the coming weeks until the moment when Stalin asks her to dance for him one evening – at which point the journal breaks off. Kelso notes that the next forty or so pages have been carefully torn out.
Turning to the other papers in the folder, Kelso quickly realises they amount to an official profile of Anna Safanova, appraising her fitness, genetic inheritance, ideological commitment and so on. Kelso and Zinaida both realise at the same time that she was one of a number of fit, healthy, young women brought to Stalin for him to breed with. Anna’s diary breaks off at the point the Great Leader made his pass at her. Zinaida is physically sick. She throws the notebook at the men, ‘Take the damned thing… Take it. Keep it.’ (p.224)
But O’Brian asks the key question: ‘Could this Anna Safanova possibly still be alive? Whatever happened to her? Let’s go up to Archangel and find out: are you up for that, Dr Kelso?’ And Kelso, like a fool, agrees.
The drive to Archangel
The two men load a four-by-four with petrol, food, filming and editing equipment and set off on the long, long drive to Archangel in the frozen north. After the gruelling journey they arrive to find it a shabby backwater but manage to bluff their way into the local party headquarters where they bribe a resentful old communist to open up the local files. The files covering the two years when Anna Safanova would have joined the communist party are mysteriously missing – but the official comes up with the surprising news that Anna’s mother is still alive.
Meanwhile, Suvorin picks up and interrogates Zinaida. She’s tough so he drives her to the morgue where he shows her her father’s tortured body. She screams and collapses. ‘This is what they’ll do to you and Kelso when they find him; so where is he?’ She tells him. She tells him Kelso and O’Brian have the notebook and have driven to Archangel to find the girl whose diary it is. Suvorin calls his office and makes arrangements for a plane to fly him north.
Meanwhile, Kelso and O’Brian drive to the rundown clapboard house of Vavara Safanova, now a bent 85-year-old crone. She gives vivid descriptions of her childhood after the revolution, she remembers the British ships which arrived to put it down in 1918, her education, joining the party and marriage to Mikhail. Then she recalls their daughter, Anna, her birth and childhood and growing up beautiful, a devoted communist, and how it was these qualities which made the local party recommend her to take part in a mass Komsomol parade in Moscow – and then a few weeks later, the mysterious summons, to return to Moscow and become an assistant to senior party leaders.
Eight months later Anna returned to Archangel heavily pregnant. When the baby was due, she haemorrhaged and the doctors couldn’t save her, but they saved the baby, a boy. Vavara and her husband never saw him. He was sent to be fostered by a family named Chizhikov in a settlement east of Archangel. She points it out on O’Brian’s map, at the end of a single road, deep in the taiga. One day her husband set off to the settlement to find the child. Five days later his dead body came floating down the river. He’d had a heart attack, they said…
O’Brian overcomes all Kelso’s objections – the road will be dreadful, there’ll be no gas stations or hotels, it will be snowy wilderness, it will be dangerous – and insists they drive out there straightaway. They set off and it takes hours, as the road by the river gives way to snow-covered track and then to just a deeply snowed-in gap between the endless tress on either side. Harris vividly describes the eeriness of snowy forest, and Kelso’s mounting anxiety. They are driving slowly enough to notice a clearing off to one side and – hang on – is that smoke? At that moment the 4-by-4 hits a really big rut and the whole front end nose-dives into it and the car stalls.
In the forest
The novel now takes on the intensity and spine-chilling quality of a horror story. Kelso and O’Brian walk towards the settlement of houses, noting the smoke has now ceased. It is completely abandoned and ruined. They notice a small cemetery of graves off to one side and Kelso notes that some of the photos – placed Russian-style on each grave – have been defaced. O’Brian says he’ll go back to the car to get the satellite phone. He is gone a long time. When Kelso follows his tracks they go back to the car alright, but then off into the woods in the opposite direction. The novel becomes very scary. Moving warily through the close-knit deep-snowed-in trees Kelso hears a moaning and a creaking sound. He comes across O’Brian caught in a rope snare, hanging upside down by his ankle from a tree. Kelso cuts him down and O’Brian moans something about ‘I saw him’. At that moment Kelso becomes aware of a primitive ape-like face staring at him from between the trees.
Stalin’s son
A rough, rude peasant in animal skins and boots emerges from the pine and shepherds them at gun point to a basic cabin in another part of the woods, skirting the booby traps and mantraps he has planted everywhere. ‘Are you the ones?’ he asks them, ‘the promised ones?’ He sits them down and then shaves with a razor sharp knife, taking off his beard to reveal a full bushy black moustache; and then changes his clothes to put on a Russian military uniform. Kelso is shocked, horrified: it is Stalin to the life. Without a doubt this is the son, the son of the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century, of all time.
What emerges over the next few pages is too weird to be true, but is true: Stalin’s son by Anna Safanova was spirited off into this isolated settlement where he was brought up by four couples of hand-picked fanatical communists, indoctrinating him with his father’s beliefs, making him listen to endless gramophone records of Stalin’s speeches, making him read and reread the twelve volumes of Stalin’s Collected works until, as now, before Kelso and O’Brian, he does a word perfect imitation of his father, lazily half closing his eyes, enquiring why they are so nervous, putting the fear of God into them.
As the boy came of age, he began flexing his psychological powers and tyrannising his minders. As a teenager he found one of his guardian guilty of ‘defeatism’. He was the first to be interrogated and executed. Then there was an outbreak of ‘right-deviationism’, as some of them discussed giving up and returning to civilisation. These criminals had to be punished. And then the sabotage started, as the fish in the river were poisoned and food went missing from traps. When one of the minders was found prowling round after curfew he too was interrogated, tortured and admitted all his crimes, before being executed. His wife hanged herself a week later.
Now Kelso realises the grisly significance of the little cemetery. One by one Stalin’s son had picked his minders and carers off until he was alone. In an appalling sidelight, Kelso gets to see papers on his desk, among the well-thumbed volumes of Stalin’s speeches, each of them headed ‘Confession’, and realises some of them are by outsiders who stumbled across the settlement, including two carefree hippy travellers in 1968. They too were tortured, interrogated and executed.
Kelso realises they are at the mercy of a paranoid psychopath, a kind of quintessence of Stalin who reveals the secret of Stalin’s success: creating an atmosphere of total fear.
The Spetsnaz
Meanwhile, Major Suvorin arrives in Archangel to find the local militia unhelpful to the point of rudeness. When he phones his boss back in Moscow he discovers the reason why: the story of the missing notebook having been found and Zinaida’s account of it recording the breeding and birth of Stalin’s son and heir, have reached the highest circles ie the President. And the order has come back to strangle and suppress it; to kill everyone involved; to kill the son but also the two foreigners.
The westernised Suvorin is appalled, but those are the orders. The militia who seemed so rude are members of the Spetsnaz, Russia’s special forces. Assassins. They mock the soft westernised Suvorin as he struggles to clamber into the big snowplough they’ve commandeered. They have earpiece radio comunications, black balaclavas and loads of machine guns. They set off in the snowplough up the same road Kelso and O’Brian took just a few hours before.
Meanwhile, Kelso and O’Brian are still in the hut, being lectured by Stalin’s son who is quoting his father’s speeches at length, thinking things can’t get much weirder – when a skull appears at the window. It is one of the Spetsnaz men. In one uncanny movement the son pulls up a trapdoor and disappears below the floorboards. At that moment the special forces burst into the hut, push Kelso and O’Brian up against the wall and handcuff their wrists. ‘Under the floorboards’, they say and a Spetsnaz man opens up with a machine gun, systematically perforating the floorboards with bullets till the magazine runs out. He slots in a new ammo clip and starts again. But when they pull up the trap door they find it leads to a tunnel. The son is on the loose.
To be brief – he kills them all, luring one man into a man-trap, and when another returns to help him, killing the second one then shooting the trapped one in the head. Then he hunts down the last one, the arrogant major. Bang. Dead.
During this slaughter Major Suvorin has finally clambered out of the snow plough and made it up to the hut. Here he releases Kelso and O’Brian and asks them what the hell is going on. All three of them hear the bursts of machine gun fire, the screaming, as in a very scary horror film. When Suvorin reluctantly goes back towards the snowplough he finds the corpses of the Spetsnaz men and the snowplough exploded and on fire. He is stuck here.
In his absence O’Brian takes the satellite radio into a clearing to try and call for help from the outside world. Kelso examines the papers on the son’s chaotic desk and is piecing together more of the terrible story of the settlement when the son magically reappears in the hut and shepherds Kelso towards the river, picking up O’Brian on the way. Here there is a boat with outboard motor, and into it they climb, pull the cord and out into the river they go. Suvorin hears the motor and runs in its direction through the trees, arriving to see the boat round a corner in the huge river. The sound dwindles to silence. He is on his own in his useless western clothes, abandoned in the middle of the Russian forest as the snow falls.
To their (and the reader’s) amazement and relief, Kelso and O’Brian find themselves arriving at Archangel, back in the real world after the hair-raising horror of the wilderness, and the son steering them into a quayside where they moor. As they go up the steps it seems as if the son’s expecting them to take the lead; they are, after all ‘the ones’ that he was expecting. They will know what to do next. In fact Kelso and O’Brian run for the nearest cab and fling dollars at the driver to take them to the station, where they jump the long Russian queue and throw more dollars at the ticket desk until they get tickets for the huge, long train which is about to pull out for Moscow.
On the train
They find their ‘sleeper’ compartment, make a meal of the crappy food they just had time to buy, stare at each other disbelievingly, and fall asleep, into a deep, deep sleep punctuated only by the announcements of all the little stations on their 800-mile journey. When Kelso awakes, he groggily realises he’s slept for 9 hours straight. Looking out the window he sees a picture of Stalin float by and thinks he must still be asleep and dreaming. But at the next settlement they pass through there are people holding up pictures of Stalin and Lenin; and at the next one, a village band has assembled and he catches a snatch of the old Soviet national anthem. Something weird is happening.
Kelso stumbles into the corridor and makes his way through the long, dirty, smelly and increasingly congested carriages. He has a growing sense of fear. When he opens the door to the fifth carriage his fears are confirmed. In the eerie and terrifying way the son was able to appear and disappear in the forest, had a sixth sense about the arrival of the Spetsnaz and effortlessly outwitted them – somehow, magically, he managed to make it onto the train.
Here he is, fast asleep, the spitting image of the virile young Stalin, and surrounded by an awed crowd of admirers. As the train pulls into a station, Kelso becomes aware of packs of black-uniformed young men getting onto the train and then he sees Vladimir Mamantov among them. Kelso runs in a panic back towards his compartment and grabs the folder with the notebook and papers in. He is about to start tearing them up when O’Brian comes fully awake and tries to stop him. They argue and O’Brian punches Kelso to the floor, but the latter manages to escape and run down the corridor, now pursued by some of the blackshirts.
He hurtles into a spare compartment, locks the door, gets out his cigarette lighter and sets the first paper alight… just as the door is kicked open and brutal hands wrench the paper and folder out of his grasp, pushing him down onto the seat and pinning him there. And then the grizzled, terrifying old communist party fanatic, Mamantov, enters the compartment and sits down, wagging an admonitory finger at foolish Dr Kelso.
Mamantov’s story
Mamantov tells him the full story. He knew about the notebook from the beginning. Rapava told him about it and where it was buried. Mamantov knew all about the girl Anna Safanova, about Archangel, about Stalin’s son. He had even travelled up there, out into the woods, and met him. But think about it – If he, Mamantov, announced that he had discovered Stalin’s son and heir in the middle of nowhere, nobody would believe him, they’d laugh at him and at this pathetically transparent ruse to get the communists back into power.
No, he needed someone who would verify it all for him, an objective authority. And who could be more objective than a historian, not just a Russian historian – too compromised – no, a western historian, ideally one with a well-known antipathy to Stalin and all his works. Someone like… the famous TV historian, Dr Christopher Kelso!
And so Mamantov had used his money and influence to arrange the entire conference that Kelso was attending, had ensured that Kelso’s name was on the guest list, had ensured that he actually attended. And it was Mamantov who arranged for comrade Rapava to sit in the front row tutting through Kelso’s lecture damning Stalin, and then to buttonhole Kelso and end up telling him all about the notebook. He had counted on Kelso’s addiction to history, his need to find the truth.
And he had paid O’Brian to film everything. It wasn’t a coincidence that O’Brian had attended the conference, pretending to be sniffing around for a story – because he knew the story well in advance. It wasn’t a coincidence that O’Brian was in the Robotnik nightclub when Kelso went to find Rapava’s daughter. It wasn’t a coincidence that O’Brian walked into the garage as Kelso uncovered the notebook. Because it had all been set up and planned in advance, so that every step of the way O’Brian could document and film the odyssey of an authoritative and sceptical western historian, who would validate every successive finding.
And when O’Brian left Kelso in the hut in the forest, as the son was dealing with the Spetsnaz forces, O’Brian wasn’t just ringing the outside world – he was sending his long report, complete with all the rushes, back to his TV station in America, a station which – out of courtesy – of course shared the report and rushes with Russian TV.
So that while Kelso slept, the sensational story had topped world newscasts, but especially Russian newscasts, for the past nine hours. Stalin had a son. He was brought up in the wild north woods, a rough and ready chip off the old block. Now he is returning to Moscow to heal Russia’s ills, to clean out the corruption, the prostitution and AIDS and drug addiction, to clear away the mafia and the corrupt politicians, to restore Russia to her former glory, a mighty nation to be feared and respected.
‘And all with your help, Dr Kelso. All with your invaluable help.’
At the station
Intercut with this dazzling revelation had been scenes at the HQ of security forces. While the train had been stationary at the stop where Mamantov and his black shirted men boarded it, the security forces had been asking their political leaders what to do: should they storm it to neutralise Mamantov and the son? But that risked a blaze of publicity, with attendant casualties and the possible death of Stalin’s son?
Down from the top comes the order: No. Let it be. Too risk. — Suddenly there is panic throughout the administration. In the office of the President they don’t know which way things will go, will the return of Stalin’s son lead to a popular uprising in his favour? So feverish, so febrile, is the atmosphere of post-communist Russia and Moscow which Harris has painted, that you believe anything is possible.
The head of security calls off all the surveillance on Mamantov and all records of it to be destroyed. If the son takes power, everyone had better start protecting their asses. He also calls off the guard which Suvorin had set on Zinaida’s apartment after he’d taken her to the morgue. So that when she wakes up and finds the security man at her door gone, she wonders what’s going on – then she switches on the TV. It is wall-to-wall coverage of Stalin’s son’s return. My God!
But she is her father’s daughter, tough as boots, and she takes the pistol he gave her and slips it into her handbag. She takes the metro to Moscow central station and, in her dark jacket and skirt and glasses, can pass for one of the most dedicated of the loyalists who are now flooding into the station, forming a huge crowd expecting the arrival of the new young master, Russia’s saviour.
She elbows her way to the front of the crowd, near to the podium which has been erected for the messiah to make his first speech. The train draws in and slows to a halt, the crowd go wild. A door opens and down steps the handsome charismatic man, spitting image of his father with his big black moustache, followed by the looming presence of Mamantov. They walk towards the podium and start climbing it to address the crowd and at that moment Zinaida draws the pistol from under her coat and takes aim.
And there the novel ends, leaving the future of Russia – and the world – hanging breathlessly in the balance.
The atrocity thriller
In his first three novels Harris perhaps created a new sub-genre, the atrocity thriller, a thriller which revolves around one of the great atrocities or horrors of the twentieth century. His first three novels revolve around, respectively: the Holocaust, the Katyn Massacre and Stalin’s purges. Because Kelso is a historian, Harris is able to intersperse the text with Kelso’s ‘lectures’, thus being able to give the reader devastating indictments of Stalin the man and politician.
In one of these lectures we learn of the way Stalin drove his wives to suicide and systematically murdered all his and their relatives. In another one, we are reminded of the incomprehensible scale of the suffering he imposed on the Russian people – the man-made famines of the 1930s caused by the stupid policy of forced collectivisation and the endless purges which continued right up to the eve of the Second World War and which fatally weakened the Red Army, ensuring it was defeated and pushed back deep into the heart of Russia before it could finally halt the Germans.
Professor I.A. Kuganov estimates that sixty-six million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1953 – shot, tortured, starved mostly, frozen or worked to death. Others say the true figure is a mere forty-five million… Neither estimate, by the way, includes the thirty million now known to have been killed in the Second World War. (p.156)
The current population of Russia is 143.5 million; demographers calculate that, without the enormous loss of life caused by the Bolsheviks, by communism, and specifically by Stalin, the population would be nearer to 300 million. Has any man been responsible for more deaths anywhere at any time? It is the world record.
As with Fatherland and to some extent Enigma, just reading a factual account of the ‘background’ to the story, makes you feel sick.
Russia after the Soviet Union
And then there’s the foreground, the situation of Russia after the collapse of the USSR. Didn’t exactly turn into a capitalist paradise, did it? The end of communism was followed by a calamitous drop in GDP, incomes and welfare, drastic decline in life expectancy, accompanied by a surge in unemployment, alcoholism, drugs, in mafia gangs running drugs and prostitutes, a collapse into criminality at every level, as described by Martin Cruz Smith in his Arkady Renko novels.
All the characters refer to the broken-spirited shabbiness and unfettered criminality of post-communist Russia, there isn’t a building that hasn’t been vandalised or had swastikas spray-painted onto it, there isn’t an official who can’t be bribed or corrupted. It is an almost failed state, deeply humiliated and resentful, which Harris vividly captures in scores of details and bitter exchanges of dialogue, as well as the occasional bit of symbolism.
On the waterfront four giant Red Army men, cast in bronze, stood back to back, facing the four points of the compass, their rifles raised in triumph. At their feet, a pack of wild dogs scavenged among the trash. (p.266)
Style
Once again, Harris suits the style to the subject matter. The core of all his novels is basic ‘modern thriller prose’, but given a slightly different vibe for each book. Fatherland had a rangy American feel; Enigma was slightly but noticeably more formal and old-fashioned, befitting its 1940s setting. And this book’s thriller-speak is inflected towards the English non-public school slangy idiom of its protagonist (who, we learn, was the first boy from his provincial grammar school to go to Cambridge).
Thus a lot of the characters – the Russian gulag survivors, the Russian cops, Fluke and various other academics – say ‘fuck’ quite a lot (‘Fuck you’ says his third wife Margaret down the phone from New York, p.112) [and, as we know from the novels of Martin Cruz Smith, ‘Go fuck your mother’ (p.82, 161) is a favourite Russian expression].
Kelso’s idiom is already fairly coarse but the text becomes considerably more profane once O’Brian arrives with his yankee effing and blinding:
- The sheer bloody tedium of academic life… (p.41)
- The end of history, my arse, he thought. This was History’s town. This was History’s bloody country. (p.116)
- It was vindication. Vindication for twenty years of freezing his arse off in basement archives… (p.193)
- [O’Brian] raised his hands in disgust. ‘Shit, I can’t stand around here bitching all afternoon…’ (p.220)
- Oh, fuck it, what did it matter? (p.238)
- The Office of the President of the Federation had been on the line to Arsenyev, demanding to know (a direct quote from Boris Nikolaevich, apparently) what the fuck was going on? (p.256)
- ‘Oh, go ahead, enjoy yourself,’ said O’Brian, bitterly. ‘This is my idea of a perfect fucking Friday. Drive eight hundred miles to some dump that looks like Pittsburgh after a nuclear strike to try to find Stalin’s fucking girlfriend -‘ (p.267)
I’m not objecting to the swearing; just pointing out that it’s one of the ways Harris differentiates the style and feel of this one, from the previous two novels.
Prolepsis
- If Kelso had seen him full-face he probably wouldn’t have recognised him, and then everything would have turned out differently. (p.120)
- Afterwards, Kelso was to recognise this as the decisive moment: as the point at which he lost control of events. (p.196)
- It happened with a kind of inexorable logic so that later, when Kelso had the time to review his actions, he still could never identify a precise moment when he could have stopped it, when he could have diverted events on to a different course – (p.216)
- I am trapped, thought Kelso. I am a victim of historical inevitability. Comrade Stalin would have approved (p.217)
All three of these novels use this device half a dozen times – of the narrator sign-posting important turning points in the narrative with an ominous ‘what if’. They not only indicate important hinges in the narrative but at the same time fill the reader with an undefined sense of dread, that things are going to turn out badly. And all because of a tiny moment, an accident, a coincidence, when things might have gone OK – but didn’t.
It’s a very effective tension-building device, as the novel proceeds into a realm of almost supernatural horror, creating a heart-stopping sense of dread and fear.
Credit
Archangel by Robert Harris was published by Hutchinson in 1995. All quotes and references are to the 1996 Arrow Books paperback edition.
The TV series
Archangel was made into a three-part TV adaptation for BBC 1, starring Daniel Craig and broadcast in March 2005, just before his James Bond period started. Craig has the physiognomy of a hardened criminal so it’s always a surprise when he behaves polite and civilised and, as here, almost permanently cowering and scared, not how we normally picture him.
The first two-thirds of the dramatisation follow the book closely, but it makes a major departure when, instead of Zinaida washing her hands of the notebook, going back to her Moscow apartment and leaving the boys to it, in the TV version she teams up with Kelso to steal O’Brian’s car and it is they who drive all the way to Archangel, to track down and interview Anna’s mother together. I guess it’s just a law of film and TV drama that there needs to be a heterosexual love interest (and Kelso and Zinaida in the TV version do indeed end up snogging and shagging and worrying about each other – completely unlike in the novel).
In this version, O’Brian only catches up with them by hiring a private plane to fly him to Archangel. He arrives just after Kelso and Zinaida have had to flee from two ordinary Russian policemen who had been sniffing round their 4-by-4, taking flight and belting down snowy back alleys in an unconvincing chase scene (not in the novel). While they’re hiding behind a shed, a shiny BMW pulls up, a scary man in a leather jacket gets out and shoots both the cops dead at point-blank range. He is later revealed to be one of Mamantov’s crew but this scene, with its cynically sadistic violence involving the gross execution of a man already on the ground wounded, is not in the novel.
The scenes in the forest are also made to be more violent than the book. Instead of being on his own, the TV son-of-Stalin has two of the old minders still pottering about to help him. Well, the Spetsnaz just shoot them down in cold blood, with sickening brutality. But hey, using a cool silenced pistol which makes that cool schtook schtook sound. Almost always TV and film make novels more violent, and more cynically, disgustingly violent.
And instead of the three Spetsnaz men of the novel, in the TV version there are more like eight, not least so they can all jump out the back of an armoured vehicle to the accompaniment of thumping action music. These TV-version Spetsnaz threaten Kelso and O’Brian much more aggressively than in the book, and are on the brink of shooting our boys dead on the spot when Suvorin intervenes, holding a pistol to the Spetsnaz leader’s head in a melodramatic Mexican stand-off (not in the book).
It’s at this over-the-top moment that the son, hidden in the trees, shoots the first of the soldiers so that Kelso, O’Brian and Suvorin can take advantage of the ensuing confusion to turn and flee. Unfortunately, while his boys are dealing with the shooter, the hard-man leader of the Spetsnaz pursues our chaps through the woods, shooting Suvorin dead (not in the book) then shooting O’Brian dead (not in the book, in which he lives to accompany Kelso and the son back to Archangel by boat and then onto the train), then tracking Kelso down to the pier by the motorboat. Then, in a scene we’ve all seen in hundreds of movies, he slowly, gloatingly lifts his rifle to execute the cornered Kelso when – … you’ll never guess! A shot rings out and the baddy crumples to the floor! (Not in the novel.) Cut to a shot of the son-of-Stalin on the river bank, lowering his rifle. He has saved Kelso, who now jumps into the boat and putters off down the river and arrives in Archangel on his own, making it onto the train alone (unlike in the novel).
Instead of accompanying him (as in the book), in the TV version the son returns to the hut, dresses in his father’s field marshal uniform, and waits in a clearing for a helicopter – Mamantov’s helicopter – to arrive and collect him.
I prefer books and novels to TV drama and films because they can be so much subtler, more unexpected and thought-provoking. All the changes made in the TV version move it in the direction of empty cliché, clunky stereotype and – above all – substantially more and more unpleasant, violence – instead of jolting and surprising you as the novel consistently does.
It is interesting, unexpected and satisfying that in the novel Zinaida remains a tough bitch, who in no way gets close to Kelso, instead maintaining her independence and aloofness. It is lowering, deadening and thumpingly predictable that in the TV version Kelso and Zinaida end up having a ‘romance’ (‘Be careful darling,’ she whispers to him outside Vavara’s cottage as he and O’Brian prepare to drive off into the forest, obviously without her – for ‘This is man’s work, honey.’ It might as well be a 1950s Western – tired, predictable and revoltingly sexist.)
Not only does the characterisation become cruder, but TV and film invariably make stories like this more violent, blood-thirsty, cruel and sadistic. The unnecessary execution of the policemen is followed by the unnecessary execution of the old couple in the woods and followed by the unnecessary execution of Suvorin and then of O’Brian. All this violence ends up merely shocking for its own sake, sickening and then deadening the nerves. In the novel the violence is kept to the minimum needed in order to create a powerful feeling of dread ie only three Spetsnaz are killed by the son, just enough to create a sense of his almost supernatural mastery of the woods. In the TV version it is just bang you’re dead, bang you’re dead, bang you’re dead. The effect is deadening – dulling the mind and the senses.
The novel ends with an amazing cliff-hanger, with Zinaida pulling out her pistol to shoot the son but then stopping – leaving none of us knowing what happens next, whether she shoots or misses. This creates an awesome effect, a powerful last twist to the fiction, letting our imaginations run wild about what might happen next, including the Nightmare Scenario where Stalin’s son lives to take over modern Russia.
All of this, along with all its possible consequences and implications, along with everything thought-provoking and intelligent and suspenseful, is discarded in the TV version. Here Zinaida just pulls out her pistol and shoots the son dead. Bang you’re dead (again). End of. All over. Yawn. Time to turn off the TV and go to bed.
Is it a law that TV and film adaptations of books must make them duller, less imaginative, more clichéd, more sexist, more violent and more insultingly stupid?
Related links
- Archangel (the novel) on Amazon
- Archangel (the DVD) on Amazon
- Robert Harris’s website
- Robert Harris Wikipedia article
- Archangel Wikipedia article
Robert Harris’s thrillers
1992 Fatherland – Berlin 1964. Germany won the Second World War. Xavier March is a cop in Berlin, capital of the huge German Empire. The discovery of a corpse in a lake leads him on an increasingly nail-biting investigation into the dark heart of the Nazi regime and its most infamous secret which, in this terrifying parallel universe, has been completely buried.
1995 Enigma – Bletchley Park 1943, where a motley collection of maths, computer and coding geniuses are trying to crack the Germans’ Enigma codes. The hero – weedy geek Tom Jericho – discovers that the gorgeous, sexy woman who seduced him and then as casually dumped him a month later, is in fact a spy, stealing top secret intercepts from the base for her Polish lover. Or is she?
1998 Archangel – Dr Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso, a populist historian of contemporary Russia, stumbles across one of the secrets of the century – that the great dictator Josef Stalin had a son, brought up by communist fanatics in the forests of the frozen north, who is now ready to return to claim his rightful position as the ‘Great Leader’ and restore Russia to her former glory.
2007 The Ghost – The gripping story is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a ghost writer called in to complete the memoirs of former UK Prime Minister Adam Lang (a thinly disguised portrait of Tony Blair) after the previous writer died mysteriously. Marooned with the politico and his staff in a remote mansion on the coast of New England, the ghost writer slowly uncovers a shattering conspiracy.
2011 The Fear Index A series of bizarre incidents plague American physics professor-turned-multi-billionaire hedge fund manager, Alex Hoffmann. Slowly it becomes clear they are all related to the launch of the latest version of his artificial intelligence program – VIXEL-4 – designed to identify and manage anxiety and fear on the financial markets, but which has gone significantly, bewilderingly, beyond its money-making remit.
2013 An Officer and a Spy A long, absorbing fictional recreation of the Dreyfus Affair which divided France at the end of the 19th century, seen from the point of view of a French army officer who played a key role in the prosecution of Alfred Dreyfus as a German spy, and then slowly, to his horror, uncovers the evidence which proves that Dreyfus was innocent all along, and his trial one of the great miscarriages of justice in history.
Books & Boots 