Walking a tightrope during Stalin’s reign of terror (2024)

FICTION
The First Friend
Malcolm Knox
Allen and Unwin, $34.99

After Stalin had completed The Great Terror, a stupefying mass murder of hundreds of thousands of people – with even more sent to concentration camps – the Soviet Union had descended into a truly bleak dictatorship committed to brutally stamping out any hint of dissent or opposition.

One of Stalin’s key allies was Georgian-born Lavrentiy Beria, who would become the People’s Commissar for Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union (a secret police force responsible for prison labour camps) in November 1938. Onto this historical canvas, Malcolm Knox has added an invention: Vasil Murtov, Beria’s “first friend”. Murtov’s family took in Beria as a child and raised him as their own.

When the cruel and calculating Beria swept to power, he kept Murtov around as his personal driver and lapdog. Murtov survived through his loyalty, unthreatening persona and political malleability; he developed a knack for “turning oneself into a substance more liquid than solid, to flow into the gaps and cracks”.

But when Beria hatches plans to fast-track a building project to construct a grandiose palace for Stalin’s visit to Georgia, Murtov’s position becomes more perilous. He spends much of his time trying to determine which of Beria’s closest confidantes are double agents to stay one step ahead of the murderous machinations of the party elite. It’s a world of surveillance, paranoia and constantly shifting loyalties.

It’s no spoiler to say Murtov doesn’t survive, dying in the prologue of this dark but often grimly funny tale. From there, the tense, vividly rendered story jolts backward in time and counts down to his final days, morphing into a whydunit and ratcheting up the tension as Murtov tries to engineer an escape from the tyrannical state for his loyal wife Babilina, a former academic who the state deposed in a previous purge of intellectuals, and their two young daughters, who are increasingly brainwashed by Stalinism.

This is a time and place where propaganda has replaced art and education, sycophants have ousted intellectuals and history has morphed into constantly rewritten self-serving fiction. With all the usual checks and balances on power – political opposition, police, the press and the judiciary among them – eliminated, Stalin’s power is absolute. Still, the zealousness of his secret police knows no bounds, and the force’s former leader, the torture-happy Nikolai Yezhov, is still hanging around, waiting for his chance to strike Beria.

Often, the grim realities of the Soviet Union under communist rule play out as farce here, like the regularity of fake assassinations or the ban on wristwatches: “It didn’t matter if they had the wrong time; it only mattered that they were all wrong together.” The personality cult of Stalin is similarly ridiculous; the dictator’s pomposity would be laughable if it weren’t inextricably linked to the mass murder. He gifts his most loyal devotees autographed photos of himself for their service and releases a lengthy gramophone recording of his speeches, where one whole side “consisted entirely of applause”.

Grovelling party loyalists’ reference to Stalin as “The Steel One” is insufficient and they have instead adopted “The Shining Sun of the Soviet Country, And More Than The Sun, For The Sun Lacks Wisdom” as a moniker.

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The First Friend, which is Knox’s first novel not to have any real ties to Australia, nonetheless imports a distinctively local vernacular. Operatives are called “old mate” or “a good sort”, underlings fear that Stalin will throw “a tanty” or “do his block” and Hitler is dismissed as “that mad German prick”. It’s a device that grounds the human carnage in the ordinary, making the violence and ideological absolutism all the more unsettling.

With a couple of disturbing exceptions, the story keeps Beria’s most appalling behaviour – he was a serial rapist and murderer – in the shadows, but the restrained approach is chilling in its own way. The depth of his evil is often hinted at in the shocked reactions of peripheral characters, such as the ambitious and callow trainee Adam Adamashvili Adamadze (AAA), who seems to have designs on Murtov’s role as driver.

Writing about the trial of one Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, Hannah Arendt coined the seminal phrase “the banality of evil” to capture how a seemingly bland bureaucrat had become a war criminal of horrific proportions by following a largely careerist approach. In Knox’s brutal, convincing vision of the Soviet Union, evil isn’t just banal; it’s petty, vain and deeply silly.

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