ISABEL SANTAULARIA I CAPDEVILA
ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses some contemporary thrillers and crime narratives set in Russia written in English in order to investigate how they perpetuate a negative vision of the country, which is depicted as a monstrous space, far more abhorrent than the crimes investigated by the protagonists. The chapter aims at demonstrating that, even though the authors shy away from drawing comparisons with a supposedly better West, and, thus, do not overtly celebrate Western exceptionalism, they still resort to strategies intended to demonize Russia and anchor its contemporary deficiencies to the country’s revolutionary and communist past. By turning Russia into a gothic landscape, in fact, these texts offer meaningful, if dated, conceptions of space that ultimately guarantee the superiority of the West.
Introduction: The Representation of Russia in Crime Fiction and Thrillers
The representation of foreign settings in crime fiction and thrillers written in English has seldom been innocent. Authors who situate their stories in foreign lands may simply be trying to find a niche in the very crowded crime fiction scene by adding the mystery of the outré to the crime being investigated by the protagonist and targeting armchair travellers craving for lurid descriptions of exotic locales. However, and simultaneously, these stories often reinforce political and cultural prejudices contingent upon ← 179 | 180 → their times and portray foreign lands in the light of contemporary geopolitical tensions that determine the perspective from which readers will perceive them. Thus, as Anderson, Miranda and Pezzotti claim, exotic settings ‘reveal more about the society that observes them than they do about the society that is apparently observed and represented’ (2012: 6). Russia is a case in point since its portrayal in crime fiction and thrillers written in English responds to Western fantasies or anxieties related to the perception of Russia as an ally or an enemy at any given time. In the nineteenth century, for example, as Choi Chatterjee demonstrates in his study of the representation of Russia in popular fiction produced in the United States from the mid-nineteenth century till 1917, the arrival of Russian revolutionaries escaping persecution led to practices that challenged the popular view of Russia as a ‘barbarous land of slave-like people, responsive only to the persuasion of the whip and the knout wielded by an autocratic tsar’ (2008: 754). Russian émigrés made their voices heard and they ‘played a significant part in creating models of themselves for American consumption […] that subsequently captured the American imagination’ (2008: 758) and found their way into representations of Russia and Russians in popular fiction. In the 1930s, on the other hand, writers such as William Buchan and Cyril McNeile turned from Germans as the villains of their thrillers to left-wing politicians, trade unions and foreign Bolsheviks, but Eric Ambler ‘responded to this reactionary tradition with a series of novels in which Soviet agents were treated as honourable individuals and in which international capitalism was perceived as the real enemy of world peace’ (Neuse 1980: 156).
Positive renditions of Russia, however, are scarce, especially during the Cold War period when, in Everson’s words, the movies and popular novels ‘seized on Russia and communism as a convenient scapegoat and staple villain’ (1964: 137; emphasis in the original). Crime fiction and thrillers in countries such as the United States and Britain propagandized the Western values of democracy, the free market, human rights or the rule of law as opposed to the perversity of the Soviet Union, and dramatized the conflict between East and West as Armageddon, with Russia threatening our very existence with nuclear annihilation. The end of the Cold War and the dismantling of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, therefore, not only left ← 180 | 181 → Americans and the Western world in general without a foil against which to construct themselves as defenders of freedom and saviours of the world against communism and authoritarianism; it also meant that popular fiction had to look elsewhere to find foreign villains since Russians, as Elena V. Baraban’s unpublished thesis argues, were now allies in pursuit of the selfsame Western values they had abhorred in the past.
This is not to imply that the end of the Cold War led to a significant transformation in the presentation of Russia in crime fiction, as recent contemporary examples that will be considered in this chapter demonstrate, namely, Andrew Williams’s To Kill a Tsar (2011), Sam Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar (2010), William Ryan’s The Holy Thief (2010), Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (2008), Boris Starling’s Vodka (2005), A. D. Miller’s Snowdrops (2011) and Jason Matthews’s Red Sparrow (2013). Published between 2005 and 2013, these stories carry momentum as mouthpieces for a particular vision of Russia that confirms negative stereotypes and does not go beyond what we know, or think we know, about the country. Read chronologically, and taking into account the period when the action of these novels takes place, one can actually observe a continuum in the presentation of the Soviet Union/Russia, which is pictured as a monstrous space through and through, far more abhorrent than the actual crimes being investigated by the protagonists.
Post-Soviet Union Russia, in fact, has not turned out to be a better version of its former self, especially if we focus on the time-span that covers the publication of the novels under analysis, which coincides with Vladimir Putin’s terms as President (2000–8), Prime Minister (2008–12) and President again (2012–present). Post-perestroika Russia was a nation on the verge of collapse, burdened with ‘unemployment, the near-total impoverishment of the population, the resurgence of tuberculosis, and the growing threat of AIDS; prostitution and sexual slavery; the increasing “brain-drain” and threat of nuclear proliferation; and […] terrorism and the war in Chechnya’ (Borenstein 2008: 1–2). Putin’s Russia is, apparently, much improved thanks to the liberalization of state-owned industries, especially the gas and oil industries, and the firm leadership of the President, fashioned by the Russian mass media as a reassuring ‘“man’s man” who can husband the nation’s resources and promise a return to ← 181 | 182 → greatness’ (Borenstein 2008: 227). Also, the visibility of the new Russian jet set projects an image of a rich nation that has gone from ‘being ready to sell anything […] [to being] ready to buy anything: football clubs in London and basketball clubs in New York; art collections, British and European energy companies’ (Pomerantsev 2015: 3).
Underneath this glittering façade, though, lies the harrowing reality of a country characterized by ‘the Kremlin’s growing centralisation of power, the state’s restored control over television news, and the increasing irrelevance of the print media in the court of public opinion’ (Borenstein 2008: 227); and this is not to mention the many ills affecting contemporary Russia, including widespread poverty, corruption and oppression under the governance of a gangster state that seizes properties at its whim so that the middle classes feel they have no real right over their possessions; or the lack of a real democracy that guarantees a serious opposition to Putin’s regime. All in all, as Pomerantsev explains, quoting Oleg Deripska, a member of the nation’s nouveau riche, Russia ‘isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends’ (2015: 50).
Indeed, Russia remains so objectionable that it can still be conveniently used to produce sensationalist, scary representations of the country in popular fiction and to promote, by contrast, Western values. Having said that, it would be one-dimensional to assume that negative representations of Russia in crime fiction and thrillers written in English respond only to neo-Orientalist practices that attempt to advance Western superiority by demonizing the East, especially if we take into account that the genre is too jaded to entertain the notion that our Western societies are inherently good. If we look beyond the clue-puzzle or cosy mystery traditions, contemporary examples of the genre interrogate Western societies and focus on the systemic nature of crime, with ‘individual crime […] seen as a symptom of, result of, or reaction to basic flaws in the political, social and industrial systems’ (Christian 2001: 2). The West in general and capitalism in particular, in fact, are exposed as criminal in novels such as Ian Rankin’s Black & Blue (1998), John le Carré’s The Constant Gardener (2005) or Paco Ignacio Taibo and Subcomandante Marcos’s The Uncomfortable Dead (2006), which scrutinize the cracks and crevices that break through the smooth ← 182 | 183 → façade of Western societies and demonstrate how far they have strayed from democratic and civil ideas. As a consequence, contemporary crime narratives exacerbate, rather than assuage, as the genre did in the past in its most conservative examples, our discomfort with the world we inhabit.
Our unease with our contemporary world is also aggravated by broad developments that have affected our perception of space and our position in relation to other spaces, such as the dismantling of old colonial empires, the withering away of states or the emergence of bewildering forms of global finance and communication (Tally 2013: 77), which have intensified what Lukács termed our ‘transcendental homelessness’ (1971: 21), a sense of not being at home in the world. This state of disorientation, more than (or at least as well as) neo-Orientalist forms of knowledge-production of the East, comes in handy when accounting for the negative rendition of Russia in contemporary crime narratives since, in these stories, Russia’s monstrosity helps (Western) readers draw lines in a world that has become too porous and flexible to understand and, incidentally, reaffirm old spatial divisions that take for granted the West’s superiority.
Enter the Monster: The Representation of Russia and Comfort-making Strategies
Crime fiction, thrillers and the Gothic have more in common than is apparently obvious. As critics like Julian Symons, Philip L. Simpson and Judith Halberstam demonstrate in their studies on, respectively, crime fiction, serial killer narratives and monstrosity, crime fiction, like the Gothic, explores the dark side of society and paints landscapes of evil inside and outside the human soul; polices the boundaries of normality by excluding the abnormal, the deviant and the criminal; and creates monsters/villains that can be read as symbolic representations of the fears and anxieties assailing our society at a particular time in history and are ‘either […] symptom[s] of or […] metaphor[s] for something bigger and more significant than the ostensible reality of the monster itself’ (Hutchings 2004: 37). Monsters, whether ← 183 | 184 → human or supernatural, are intended to generate fear and, therefore, are crafted in such a way as to condense as many disgust-inducing elements as possible in their mottled, composite personas. Ironically, monsters are also reassuring, especially when their demonic, utterly ‘other’ nature and threatening potential stem ‘primarily from outside the culture […] rather than within its most precious policies and ideologies’ (Simpson 2000: 173) and become personifications of everything we think ‘we are not’.
Thus, foreign, ethnic or racialized monsters/villains have become staple fare in crime and gothic narratives ‘as symbols of a diseased culture’ (Halberstam 2000: 14), often used, as Ken Gelder explains, ‘as a means of confirming (to “civilized” audiences) the unbridgeable backwardness and “savagery” of the object on display’ that a nation feels it must expel ‘even as it requires it for self-definition’ (Gelder 2000: 226–7). If we focus on crime narratives with a Russian setting, the villain is not just the foe the detective tries to outwit, capture and/or bring to justice, but villainy extends to the context in which the detective moves, which is so excessive and disgusting as to become completely alien, allowing readers to appreciate the difference between Western societies and Russia without having to resort to a comparison with the supposed good qualities of the West, which are not invoked in the novels under analysis.
The monstrous image of Russia in contemporary crime narratives written in the last decade, and the attendant comforting perception of a world in which West and East remain completely different entities positioned at opposite ends of the good/evil spectrum, therefore, is drawn by means of various representation strategies that confirm Russia’s hideous nature to Western readers. To start with, most of the stories analysed in this chapter have Russian protagonists. While authors are entitled to provide accounts of different cultures, and they can be well acquainted with them through travel and study, it is significant they choose insider protagonists whom readers may easily take for granted speak for the people of Russia and, in this way, give their texts an aura of authenticity. Interestingly, the Russian protagonists are either revolutionaries fighting against an autocratic tsar in Williams’s To Kill a Tsar, or work for the authorities in Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, Ryan’s The Holy Thief, Smith’s Child 44, Starling’s Vodka and Matthews’s Red Sparrow. Consequently, they are all associated with and/or ← 184 | 185 → support communism (anarchism in Williams’s novel), which is supposed to work for the creation of a society in which property will be equally distributed and social injustice will disappear. However, as the stories unfold and the protagonists witness the abuses and depredations committed in the name of communism and/or the party’s disregard for the actual needs of the people, they lose faith in their original beliefs and the legitimacy of the means used to guarantee the creation of a Soviet paradise, so they all disparage communism from a position of authority conferred by their status as insiders intimately familiar with their surroundings.
Williams’s To Kill a Tsar, for example, takes place between 1879 and 1881 and focuses on the revolutionary group Narodnaya Volya’s (The People’s Will) terrorist attempts to assassinate the Tsar, whom they saw as ‘the embodiment of autocracy, antipathy to democracy and the oppression of the ordinary people’ (2011: 430). The group’s claims that there was no freedom in Russia and change was necessary were legitimate if we take into account that the Tsar, Alexander II, believed that his divine right to rule was ‘unshakeable and attempts by nationalist and democratic movements to challenge it were ruthlessly suppressed across the empire’ (2011: 427). Nevertheless, the novel seems to have been written to condemn revolutionary activity, which, in the story, leads to chaos, discontent and even more oppression. Williams spends little space elaborating on the Tsar’s tyrannical rule or on the conditions in which ordinary people lived, and focuses almost exclusively on the fanaticism of the members of Narodnaya Volya, as well as on their elitist detachment and disregard for the actual will of the people, whose lives become even more miserable after the regicide. In the novel, the terrorists are not romanticized freedom fighters but criminals moved by the single-minded objective to assassinate the Tsar to ‘purify the atmosphere’ (2011: 35), and they do not contemplate alternatives beyond terror and chaos, so they are ready ‘to say and do disgusting things in the name of the people, to lie, to slander, to be […] hateful’ (2011: 143).
Williams also emphasizes their violence and the collateral damage that results from this violence. The third unsuccessful attempt against the Tsar, for instance, takes place in the Winter Palace and results in ‘[s]ixty casualties, soldiers and palace servants, severed limbs and broken bones, severe blast burns and shock’ (2011: 267). One of the injured is a nineteen-year-old ← 185 | 186 → soldier, ‘his chest crushed by falling masonry, his right leg attached by only a white sliver of bone. His chances of survival [are] slim’ (2011: 267). And no one can yet determine ‘how many men [are dead] in the guard room or how many [will] die of their wounds in the days to come’ (2011: 267). The fourth and definitive attempt against the Tsar is successful but Williams focuses on the innocent victims that result from the attempt: a Cossack killed outright, ‘his mount still twitching in a pool of blood in the centre of the road’; a passer-by ‘collapsed in a ball at the edge of the pavement, his clothes tattered, his face covered in blood’; ‘the broken body of a boy of ten or eleven, the raw meat he [carried] in his basket scattered in a macabre arc around him’ (2011: 382).
And this is all for nothing since, after the assassination of the Tsar and in spite of an inflammatory notice posted by the group celebrating the regicide and urging workers to rise to claim their freedom, there are ‘no barricades or demonstrations in the streets, no general rejoicing’ (2011: 389). No one heeds the call to revolution and St Petersburg is ‘subdued, even a little fearful, the churches full of mourners and those seeking the comfort of the old system’ (2011: 389). Meanwhile, the ‘white terror’ (2011: 389) begins in earnest and the immediate effects of the attempt are more tsarist oppression, the execution of those involved in the regicide and the realization, at least for the only member of the party who has some scruples, Anna Kovalenko, that her comrades’ sole objective is to unleash chaos upon Russia. After the assassination of the Tsar, in fact, she can no longer envision a positive outcome resulting from revolutionary activity, so she ‘watche[s] and listen[s] to [her comrade’s] talk of liberty and the future with a dull ache in her chest until she [can] stand it no more and [leaves] the room’ (2011: 386). Thus, Williams’s revolutionary characters are used to ascertain the horror of the system they spawned and, incidentally, confirm a negative perception of Russia ever since communists took control of the country.
The same strategy is used in Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, Ryan’s The Holy Thief and Smith’s Child 44, which take place during Stalin’s dictatorship. In the first, Inspector Pekkala has been in a gulag in Siberia for a decade when the story begins, but a reprieve comes when Stalin summons him to investigate the identity of some bodies found in an abandoned mine. Supposedly, they are the remains of the Romanovs and Pekkala’s mission ← 186 | 187 → is to track down the men who killed the Tsar and his family and to locate the Tsar’s treasure. As the Tsar’s Eye or personal detective, Pekkala knew the Tsar intimately and had a relationship of affection and respect for him and his family. When Pekkala is released in 1929, he finds himself forced to work for a man, Stalin, he considers responsible for his years in Siberia and for the unfair assassination of a tsar he loved and admired, as well as for the chaos, oppression and poverty in the country. Consequently, his views of Stalin’s policies and the man himself are negative to start with, and he only works for him because the alternative is a death sentence that Stalin reminds him he could sign any time he pleased. Pekkala holds no faith in a system which uses terror to guarantee the submission of the people and does not trust Stalin since he can glimpse what lies beneath his ‘emotional blankness’ (2010: 451) and what he ‘[finds] there [fills] him with dread’, so his only defence is to pretend ‘he [cannot] see it’ (2010: 452). The Holy Thief, in turn, takes place in Moscow in 1936. Captain Alexei Dimetrevich Korolev is a detective of the Moscow Militia’s Criminal Investigation Division who investigates the murder of a girl found dead and tortured in an old church. When the victim is identified as an American citizen, Korolev’s investigation is supervised by the NKVD, the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, known for its political repression during Stalin’s dictatorship. Tom Rob Smith’s novel begins during the great famine in Russia in 1933 and then jumps in time to the last months of Stalin’s dictatorship. In this context, Leo Demidov, an ex-soldier who works for the Ministry for State Security, the MGB, later to become the KGB, investigates a series of child murders in the supposed Soviet paradise where crime does not exist.
Unlike Pekkala, both Korolev and Demidov believe in the system but their investigations bring them face to face with the grimy reality of Soviet life and, as a result, their faith in the communist utopia is progressively eroded. Korolev, for instance, thinks ‘things [will] be better soon […] for the next generation anyway’ (Ryan 2010: 143) since they are just ‘a stage in the evolution of history’ (Ryan 2010: 336) which requires sacrifices at the moment but will eventually result in widespread well-being. However, he finds it increasingly difficult to believe that ‘the leadership [is] working for the People’s future’ though he sticks to his faith since, if he stopped believing, ‘where would he be? What hell would he find himself in then ← 187 | 188 → – if it all turned out to be a blood-soaked lie?’ (Ryan 2010: 203). At the end of the novel, Korolev comes to terms with the realization that some members of the party are corrupt and order the assassination of those who threaten to expose the situation. As a result, his faith is further shaken and he confesses: ‘I’m not quite the Soviet citizen I thought I was’ (Ryan 2010: 338). Demidov’s awakening to the reality of the country comes much earlier in the story as his job as interrogator of people accused of counter-revolutionary activity or espionage involves torture and the consequent execution of those who, under exertion, confess to their crimes, even when they are innocent. Demidov is progressively revolted by his job, but keeps doing it nonetheless, sticking to the belief that innocent men are going to be ‘crushed in the cogs of a vital and important but not infallible State machine’ but the protection of the nation is ‘bigger than one person, bigger than a thousand people’ (Smith 2008: 110). As he investigates the child murders, however, and realizes they have been solved incorrectly, ‘covered up or blamed on the mentally ill, some political enemy, a drunk, a vagrant’ (Smith 2008: 324), Demidov changes his views. The ‘seed of doubt, sitting dormant and undigested in the pit of [his] stomach, crack[s] open’ (Smith 2008: 94) and Demidov ‘buck[s] the official line and [starts] thinking for himself’ (Smith 2008: 325).
The protagonists of Starling’s Vodka and Matthews’s Red Sparrow similarly abdicate their alliance to the Russian authorities as the stories unfold. Situated in the 1990s post-perestroika era, Vodka focuses on the privatization process of a State-owned vodka factory, Red October, as the first step towards the liberalization of prices and free market in the country. Set in Putin’s Russia, Red Sparrow revolves around Dominika Ergorova’s gradual loss of faith in her government after a stint in the infamous Sparrow School, where young and attractive SVR agents are trained to use sex to obtain information, and a spell in the Lefortovo prison, where she is held and tortured after she is suspected of counter-espionage activity. The protagonist of Vodka, Lev, is a vory, a member of the Russian mafia, but also the director of the Red October distillery and a parliamentary deputy. As a vory, he is sufficiently disengaged from the government to qualify as the hero of the story because, unlike the corrupt authorities, the vory have ‘kept [their] structure, [their] ideology’, they are ‘superior […] in culture ← 188 | 189 → and morality’ and they ‘pay the hospital bills of [their] wounded, [they] provide for the families of jailed men’ (2005: 128). Consequently, they are ‘honourable and decent’ since ‘the real gangsters are the politicians and bureaucrats, the state criminals, who enrich themselves without helping children and the elderly’ (2005: 148–9). As a parliamentary deputy, though, Lev supports the government’s new policies, which he expects will result in better conditions for the citizens of Russia. However, he realizes the president and the prime minister are not ‘good men trying to do good things’ (2005: 492). They are only concerned with self-preservation and will resort to anti-democratic measures to wipe out any opposition and guarantee their re-election. Consequently, ‘if democracy is to exist in Russia […] it will be not because of [them] but in spite of [them]’ (2005: 493). Dominika in Matthew’s Red Sparrow similarly becomes aware of the fact that the modern SVR is not so different from the former KGB. If anything, it is worse. In the past, agents were recruited ‘because of their ideology, their belief in world communism, their commitment to the dream of a perfect socialist state’; in the present, it is all ‘sharada, a charade’ (2013: 359) in a country where ‘the end of the Cold War has not diminished [its] leaders’ inclinations to do mischief’ (2013: 322), now in the name of greed and ‘the global politics of oil and natural gas’ (2013: 358).
If foreign protagonists appear in the novels, on the other hand, it is either to provide a moral perspective and to cast a condemnatory glance at the ravages that take place in Russia or as sacrificial lambs faced with a ravenous society craving for human blood. The foreign protagonist of Williams’s To Kill a Tsar, for example, is Frederick Hadfield, an English doctor who lives a comfortable life tending to the needs of the Anglo-Russian gentry in St Petersburg. However, his affair with Anna Kovalenko brings him face to face with the reality of revolutionary activity as conducted by Narodnaya Volya. Consequently, even though he thinks democracy is needed in Russia, his role in the novel is to denounce Narodnaya Volya’s terror practices, which he believes will ‘set back the cause of reform by frightening liberal opinion’ (2011: 37) and, he ominously predicts, will only lead to the creation of a nation ‘where anyone who stands in [the party’s] way [will be] judged to be an enemy of the people’ (2011: 288). ← 189 | 190 →
The aptly named Alice Liddell in Starling’s Vodka is an American ingénue brought to Russia to supervise the privatization process of the Red October distillery. She has the knowledge and experience since she has spent the last two years running privatization programmes in Eastern Europe, ‘suddenly liberated after the momentous autumn of 1989 when government after government toppled, the Berlin Wall was dismantled and the Ceaucescus were executed by their own people’ (2005: 32). Equipped with ‘graphs, statistics, market research, forecasts and projections’ (2005: 98), she believes she is ‘gonna show these bastards a bit of ol’ American kickass’ (2005: 55) and help ‘a great nation back to its feet’ (2005: 229), ‘make a difference, […] transform this society’ by laying ‘the foundations of democracy and the free market’ (2005: 172) so ‘the Russian people […] can live in a normal country, not one run on lies and sophistry’ (2005: 330). Her good intentions, though, collapse when she is confronted with the reality of Russia, which, she is warned at the beginning, ‘is unique […] categorically and absolutely not like anywhere else’ (2005: 33) and certainly not ‘delirious with gratitude for the end of the Soviet Union’ (2005: 34). Predictably, she learns the hard way that Western methods cannot be applied to Russia, not because they are bad, but because Russia is not amenable to improvement. Faced with cumbersome bureaucracy, incompetence, external interference and disappointment, she increasingly finds Russia ‘tiresome’ as ‘everything [seems] annoying and difficult’ (2005: 348). And this is before she finds out she has simply been used to legitimize a process designed not to make society better, but to guarantee those in power can go on pocketing the profits of the companies they privatize. When the privatization of Red October fails, in any case, Alice is publicly blamed for the fiasco and dismissed, allowed, in the president’s own words, ‘no further part in the great reform effort, an enterprise to which she has contributed nothing but harm’ (2005: 468). After this, Alice self-destructs with vodka and even contemplates suicide; after all, the Russians ‘brought down Napoleon and Hitler; they can bring down anyone’ (2005: 470). At the end of the story, though, Alice decides to stay in Russia but only because she embraces the insanity of a country ‘where black [is] white, white [is] black’ and everything makes sense only if you step through ‘the looking-glass and [surrender] yourself to the peculiar principles of logic that [hold] sway in Wonderland’ (2005: 660). ← 190 | 191 →
Nicholas Platt, the protagonist of Miller’s Snowdrops, is another of Russia’s casualties. Even though, like Alice, he is in the country on business working as a lawyer for a foreign firm, he believes that Putin’s Russia is beyond redemption and he takes his stay in Russia as an opportunity to enjoy Moscow’s wild nightlife and to take full advantage of the privileges he has as a foreign expat. His job involves doing the paperwork on the loans Russian conglomerates receive from foreign banks to make their acquisitions, and he is fully aware of the nature of the transactions conducted by his firm, which are described as ‘lipstick on a pig’, ‘a kind of legal money laundering’ that not even ‘sanitising covenants, undertakings, sureties and disclosures [can] perfume’ (2011: 27). In spite of his apparent scepticism, Nicholas takes for granted that people’s intentions must be good and, consequently, he is doomed to break against Russia’s cruelty. The latest deal he works on turns out to be a scam. In addition, he is taken advantage of by a Russian femme fatale who seduces him and uses his expertise to legalize a scheme designed to steal an elderly woman’s flat. At different points in the story, Nicholas is warned about Russia. The front man of the company his firm represents, for instance, tells him, ‘Be careful […]. Sometimes, in our Russia, people can be less kind than they seem’ (2011: 201). Faced with how unkind people in Russia can actually be, Nicholas is devastated and the hardest lesson he learns is that the country brings out the worst in people, that you cannot be ‘interested, concerned, noble’ (2011: 134); and he is no exception to the rule since, when he goes along with the crookedness of the country without either fighting or escaping it, he becomes ‘the kind of person [he] never [knew he] could be until [he] came to Russia’ (2011: 259).
What these insider and foreign protagonists have in common is that they all revile Russia or are destroyed by it, often both, and, consequently, they all project a negative view of the country, which is not allowed to materialize as anything but the immoral monster we have received from numerous accounts in the media and other crime narratives. In the novels under analysis, furthermore, the roots of Russia’s evil are to be found in its revolutionary past, which marks a schism in time when things changed for the worse. In fact, the two novels that focus on tsarist Russia, To Kill a Tsar and Eye of the Red Tsar, do not provide an account of its problems, which, as stated before, are only tangentially addressed in Williams’s novel. ← 191 | 192 → Instead, both novels highlight how international forces could have exerted enough pressure to lead to reform if revolutionaries had not interfered. They also present the tsars as ‘not […] evil [men] but as much […] prisoner[s] of family and circumstance as everyone else’ (Williams 2011: 387) and the revolutionaries as harbingers of ‘[d]ark times’ and ‘crooks’ who, in the past, financed themselves by stealing from banks and now ‘have learnt to steal the whole bank’ and will soon be ‘running the country’ (Eastland 2010: 78–9). The motivations and conditions that led to revolution are not contemplated either. Instead, when the novels take place in the past, it is mobilized to confirm Russia’s monstrosity, so they concentrate on Stalin’s Russia, which is portrayed in all its grimness and depravity in Eye of the Red Tsar, The Holy Thief and Child 44.
These three novels emphasize Stalin’s use of terror to oppress the population and describe a society characterized by physical and moral degradation. In the country, imprisonment, torture and executions without trial are common and people are sent to the gulags in Siberia if they support even mild types of reform. In fact, the enemies of the Party are ‘not merely saboteurs, spies and wreckers of industry, but doubters of the Party line, doubters of the society which await[s] them’ (Smith 2008: 29). Citizens are sent to Lefortovo if found guilty of what the government describes as ‘anti-Soviet agitation, counter-revolutionary activity and espionage’ (Smith 2008: 78), and subjected to interrogations that involve torture, forced confessions and death. In a context in which ‘[t]error [is] necessary’ since it ‘protect[s] the Revolution’ (Smith 2008: 77), fear is cultivated as if it were a virus released into the population so people live in a constant state of paranoia, afraid that a neighbour, a member of the family or a colleague may accuse them of betraying the Party, so it seems that ‘there [is] no class solidarity now that everyone [is] the same class’ (Ryan 2010: 140). In the country, ‘virtues like honour, compassion and justice’ (Ryan 2010: 168) do not mean anything since to guarantee the survival of the system it is ‘[b]etter to let ten innocent men suffer than one spy escape’ (Smith 2008: 43).
Meanwhile, justice does not exist and people do not act according to what they believe is right or wrong, but simply by what they think ‘will please their leader’, who in turn decides who lives or dies ‘depending on his annotations on a list: a line against a name save[s] a person, no mark ← 192 | 193 → mean[s] they [are] left to die’ (Smith 2008: 171). Without a fair judicial system, people are simply forced to follow the Party line, so being ‘a good Communist […] [is] like following an arbitrary God who require[s] you to believe that white [is] white one day and black the next’, a situation that only makes sense if you take into account the rationale Stalin uses to justify his policies: ‘that the country [is] surrounded by enemies who [are] terrified by its very existence’ and that ‘[f]aced with such implacable foes’ the Party needs to take steps that seem ‘at odds with its long-term historical destiny’ (Ryan 2010: 100). In the country, crime proliferates even though one of the fundamental pillars of society is that ‘[t]here is no crime’ (Smith 2008: 28) since it is believed that ‘murder, theft and rape [are] symptoms of a capitalist society’ (Smith 2008: 192). As a result, there is no need for a police force, which simply means that the militia are only a subsection of the Ministry of the Interior, ‘poorly paid, poorly respected – a force comprised of secondary-school dropouts, farm workers kicked off the Kolkhoz, discharged army personnel and men whose judgement [can] be bought with a half bottle of vodka’ (Smith 2008: 193). In this context, even a serial killer can go on murdering with impunity, ‘concealed not by any masterful brilliance but by his country’s refusal to admit that such a man even exist[s], wrapping him in perfect immunity’ (Smith 2008: 362).
Stalin’s Soviet paradise is only a façade sold to tourists and foreign journalists invited on guided tours to places like Vodovenko, model towns built to offer a false impression of prosperity and to convince visitors that ‘the famine is a fabrication of anti-Soviet propaganda’ (Eastland 2010: 172). Meanwhile, the citizenry lives in poverty. When farms were collectivized, they were left in the hands of people who did not know how to run them, so crops failed and millions died during the great famine. As a result, huge numbers of peasants migrated to big towns driven by a combination of ‘hunger at home and the prospect of work in one of the big factories or on one of the many construction sites’ (Ryan 2010: 144), but they could not always find a job or a place to live, so now they are forced to find ‘a scrap of dry floor to lie down’ and to sleep ‘on stairs, on trams, in the Metro’ (Ryan 2010: 144). The reality of Soviet life is visible in the slums in Moscow where the new arrivals sleep rough while they wait for work permits, and those ← 193 | 194 → who die of starvation are ‘picked up […] from the streets everyday’ (Ryan 2010: 136) by the militia.
People’s living conditions and the state of infrastructures bespeak the country’s moral degradation. Buildings in Moscow have been ‘flattened into rubble’ and used to ‘fill the foundations of the new city’ (Ryan 2010: 98). However, the ‘new world socialism [is] creating’ (Ryan 2010: 98) is as decrepit as the system itself. Roads are ‘holed and pitted by heavy trucks’ and tenements are tottering and leaning ‘against multi-doomed churches, shabby with […] disuse’ (Ryan 2010: 98). When it rains, it washes Moscow’s skies clear of the factories’ smog, only to ‘drop it into the streets as murky puddles of black sludge’ (Ryan 2010: 176). The city’s sewage and factory waste feed into the river Don and create patterns of ‘oils, filth and chemicals on the water’s surface’ (Smith 2008: 314). The winter’s snow hides the city’s imperfections, but does not eliminate them, so Russia becomes a vision of hell where people with haggard faces and ragged clothes are lost in a labyrinth of ‘long hours, short rations and vodka’ (Ryan 2010: 14). It is, all in all, a country of victims. As Pekkala says at the end of Eastland’s novel, ‘We are all victims of the Revolution. Some of us have suffered from it, and others have suffered for it, but in one way or another all of us have suffered’ (2010: 375).
Russia’s revolutionary past and Stalin’s dictatorship, on the whole, are not used merely as backgrounds for the novels that take place in these contexts, but to ascertain the fiendishness of the country they created. The past, therefore, is invoked to paint landscapes of fear and destitution at the root of the country’s revolutionary beginnings which, unlike in countries like the United States, did not lead to a brave new world, but to widespread oppression, penury and poverty under communism. In fact, there is no progression in Russia’s history as depicted in the novels under analysis. Instead, Russia is presented as a ‘giant laboratory, performing on itself giant innovations in social engineering’ (Starling 2005: 65) and its history since the Revolution as a series of stages each leading to worse conditions than the last: ‘In the thirties there had been collectivisation, in the forties war; liberalisation in the fifties, retrenchment in the sixties; the seventies had brought stagnation, the eighties perestroika; and now this [making reference to the liberalisation of prices in the 90s], freedom ← 194 | 195 → or anarchy, depending on whether your vodka glass was half-full or half-empty’ (Starling 2005: 111). These stages have culminated in present-day Russia, which, like one of the country’s most notorious serial killers, Andrei Chikatilo, is not a ‘mistake of nature’ but a product of a ‘past dipped into darkness’ (Starling 2005: 210). The past, all in all, is ultimately activated to justify the nature of contemporary Russia, which remains as terrifying as it was during Stalin’s regime, trapped in the deadlock of a revolutionary legacy which the new Russia is unable to leave behind in novels such as Starling’s Vodka and Miller’s Snowdrops, which give the impression that the country is still Byzantine, unpredictable and illogical, lurching from one lunacy to the next.
In Starling’s Vodka, the attempt to implement free market and democratic policies is doomed to fail because Russia is mired on the depths of the deficiencies and irrationality of its communist past. There is, for example, no ‘proper legislature’ in the country since laws are still made on the whim of the president, who then commits them to paper and can, and often does, ‘countermand or contradict [them] the next day’ (2005: 401). Laws, on the other hand, are ‘unjust and irrational’ and ‘rarely enforced’, so Russia has been turned into ‘a nation of lawbreakers’ (2005: 482). Furthermore, since the judicial system has been slavishly devoted to the service of state and party, it cannot become now ‘a neutral arbiter of society, a defender of the constitution, a protector of civil liberties, contracts and private property rights’ (2005: 482). Fair justice is still non-existent in a country where the prosecutor’s office is run ‘on strictly Soviet lines’ (2005: 135), confessions are exerted through torture, sentences are based on confessions and, if admissions contradict the facts, ‘then the facts are wrong; if the facts are wrong, they should be changed’ (2005: 137), and convicted felons are sent to prisons that ‘could [give] Satan nightmares’ (2005: 131). And if the judicial system is not sanitized and modernized it is because the fallacy that serious crime is nonexistent is very alive, deemed an abomination ‘found only in the West’, as are ‘racists, gangs, whores, the unemployed’ (2005: 209). Criminals are, therefore, a priori, déclassé elements, ‘Marxist for life’s flotsam’, that even have their own categories, ‘Easy Morals, Drifters, Adolescents, Retards’ (2005: 209). ← 195 | 196 →
Russia, all in all, is trapped in the old system, which ‘will never be finished’ (2005: 188; emphasis in the original) because remnants of the old regime refuse to disappear and ‘will never be gone. Under a different name, perhaps, but never gone’ (2005: 86). In this context, Russian-style capitalism becomes ‘another ghastly social experiment’ (2005: 231) that wrecks the economy and only brings misery, ‘[p]eople begging on the streets, folks dying faster than they can make the coffins, no potatoes in the stores, babies born with only half a face, people who can’t take a piss because they’ve got the clap, pensions worth shit’ (2005: 99). Indeed, the only thing liberalization manages to achieve is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer as hyperinflation means that prices are too high so common citizens cannot even afford bread, people’s savings are wiped out, more and more people drop below the poverty line and discontentment leads to riots and anarchy in the streets. As a consequence, everyone is still living under ‘the zone’, the term used to refer to ‘the gulags and the prisons’ during Stalin’s regime and which in these days simply means ‘all [people are] frightened’ (2005: 393).
And if people are frightened, it is with good reason. The country as a whole emerges as nightmarish, a gothic landscape populated by swarms of beggars, hustlers, homeless children, ‘[the] poor bastards […] [found in] the metros and street corners, playing war ballads or simply holding out upturned hands beneath lowered heads’ (2005: 539) that haunt a country described as a ‘banana republic. Without the bananas’ (2005: 73); a ‘shithole […] [that] could have inspired Dante to rework his Inferno’ (2005: 59); a world characterized by tragedy with onions as its perfect symbol since ‘[o]nions have multiple layers, and the more you peel away, the more you weep’ (2005: 220); a place where ‘there are no good times […], just bad times and worse times’ (2005: 97) so vodka is an ‘anaesthetic without which life would be unendurable, […] the only drug that enables the dispossessed to endure the monstrously cruel tricks life’s played on them’ (2005: 37). In a novel populated by killers (including a serial killer), torturers, mafia members, psychopaths, and terrorists, Russia is the true monster, ‘a society in decline and at war with itself’ (2005: 531), ‘created by the old system and nurtured by the new, forged in the white heat of a revolution ushered through without the first thought for what it would do to […] the little ones, the forgotten ones’ (2005: 548). And what is worse, there is no room ← 196 | 197 → for improvement. As the author explains, ‘There was to be no miraculous recovery, and that was only fitting; the reason why none of Russia’s great novels have happy endings is because Russians wouldn’t know what to make of them if they did’ (2005: 651). If, like in Bulgakov’s novel, The Master and Margarita, Satan came to Russia to create havoc in the capital, ‘he’d find his work already done’ (2005: 536).
The devil himself, in fact, seems to be responsible for the contemporary Russia represented in Miller’s Snowdrops, which, predictably, shows no signs of improvement and is described as equally garish. Underneath an artificial façade of neon lights, new elite restaurants and nightclubs, there is only poverty and corruption in a country where ‘there are no business stories. And there are no politics stories. There are no love stories. There are only crime stories’ (2011: 84). Russia is ‘a ruthless place’ (2011: 8) which can, like Lariam, ‘make you have wild dreams and jump out of the window’ (2011: 151). It is, indeed, ‘fucking Russia’, the whole country embodied in impressions of the ills that assail foreign visitors and natives alike, ‘The booze. The pollution. The shit food. The fucking airplanes. The crap that falls out of the sky when it rains, you don’t even want to think about’, so Russia is like ‘polonium. It attacks all your organs at once’ (2011: 83). Even though new money floods the country, nothing has changed and, amidst the skyscrapers where corrupt politicians and Western expats do business, Russia is the same country of ‘drunks and wrecks […] poor hopeless bastards’ (2011: 20) who slip off the end of the greased ladder. In Eastland’s Eye of the Red Tsar, Pekkala asserts, ‘The only way to have a future in this country is to have no past’ (2010: 294), with which he expresses how the legacy of your past actions and allegiances follows you into the present. If applied to Russia as a whole, the sentence reverberates with meaning since it summarizes how the weight of the past determines Russia’s present, which, in the novels situated in contemporary Russia, is moored in the swamp of moral and physical sludge generated by years of communism. ← 197 | 198 →
Conclusion
Given that the contemporary novels under analysis in this chapter continue to fabricate a negative impression of Russia and, therefore, the image of the country as monstrous remains as alive as it was in narratives produced during the Cold War, it would be easy to conclude that Russia is still perceived as a threat rather than a defeated foe, brought to its knees after the dismantling of the Soviet Union and forced to remain in semi-colonial tutelage to the West. Since this has not been the case and Russia continues to mean trouble for the West, popular narratives could have resorted to the old cultural war of constantly comparing and contrasting Western efficiency, civilized values and liberal policies with Russian backwardness in order to counter the anxieties generated by Russia’s importance to the global economy and its colonial control of areas with vast oil resources, among other riches. However, as I have attempted to demonstrate in this chapter, crime novels and thrillers in English set in Russia produced in the last decade evade any attempt at comparison with the West and concentrate on painting Russia as a gothic landscape using a series of strategies ranging from the use of authoritative insider voices and horrified foreign bystanders who bring to the fore the brutality of the country or the use of the past to bind Russia to a perpetual state of arrested development, incapable of escaping or overcoming the legacy of its revolutionary origins and of the Soviet Union with its crime, corruption, anti-democratic policies and instability. Consequently, these stories do not apparently resort to neo-Orientalist practices designed to celebrate Western exceptionalism, which both crime narratives and thrillers have for a long time now endeavoured to undermine with their accounts that expose the underbelly of capitalist societies.
And yet, the depiction of Russia as monstrous, alien and completely ‘other’ is still comforting nonetheless. First, because by the novels’ activation of, to borrow Jameson’s terminology, cultural codes or ‘proverbial wisdom or commonplace knowledge’ (1988: 28) related to Russia’s evil past and present, these narratives help us project a map onto the world that, in these stories, remains firmly divided into good and evil and is familiar ← 198 | 199 → and fully understandable, passed on from novel to novel in a continuum of images inherited from Cold War texts into the present. And secondly, the construction of Russia as a monster forces Western readers to distance themselves from Russian society and to look elsewhere for self-definition. In this way, the West does not even have to be invoked to reaffirm our values and our commitment to justice, democracy or the free market, no matter how flawed they have turned out to be. At some point in Ryan’s The Holy Thief, Korolev walks into a dilapidated bar where an emaciated elderly black man is performing tunes on a battered piano, his eyes ‘focused on another place. Another foreign Comrade washed up on the Moscow beach, thinking of the place he’d left behind’ (2010: 281). After reading these novels, we cannot help but do the same as the old pianist. We may not look back in nostalgia to idealized visions of the West we know may have never existed, but we look at our surroundings in relief since, at least, we are not in Russia.
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