Sleuthing in Stalin's Moscow

Jonathan Kay
National Post

ARCHANGEL

By Robert Harris

421 pp.

Random House, $34.95

"Do you know what Lenin called the Tsarovich?" muses Fluke Kelso, the pudgy Soviet historian at the centre of Robert Harris' thriller, Archangel. "He called the boy 'the living banner.' And there's only one way, Lenin said, to deal with a living banner."

Dark words. But where the act of murder itself was concerned, Lenin was all talk compared to his less voluble successor, Joseph Stalin. The intriguing hypothesis at the heart of Archangel is this: What if the murderous man of steel had produced a son, a 'banner' of his own?

What if? Robert Harris has been successfully asking that question since 1992. In his first novel, Fatherland, Harris altered the outcome of the Second World War and showed us how a JFK-era Europe might have looked under the rule of a 75-year-old Hitler. Fatherland's formulaic detective plot smacked a little too strongly of paperback pulp to arouse the interest of the high literati, but the European dystopia Harris constructed was compelling, and the book sold millions even before it was made into a fairly lacklustre television miniseries.

In Archangel, his third novel, (I'll skip over 1995's uninspired Nazi-thriller, Enigma) Harris turns his attention from Germany to Russia, and the quality of his storytelling seems to have benefited from the change of locale.

Harris begins the novel with a scene that has its roots in historical meetings that are scrupulously possible. It's 1953. Politburo opportunitchik, Lavrenti Beria, is summoned to Stalin's Kuntsevo dacha where he finds the leader lying stroke-ridden on a grubby sofa. Before the corpse is cold -- before it is fully a corpse, in fact -- Beria manages to steal the key to Stalin's private Kremlin safe. There, Beria finds the mysterious oilskin exercise book whose actual existence has been pondered by historians and archivists, and the Harris-construed contents of which drive Archangel's modern-day plot.

The whole 45-year-old tale comes to the attention of the historian Kelso courtesy of Papu Rapava, a frightening gulag relic who claims to have once been Beria's bodyguard. Kelso, who is visiting Moscow for a Sovietology conference, is fascinated by the old man's account. It is just the sort of bombshell he needs to breathe life into his stalled career. As his fellow conference attendees cattily remind him, he hasn't published a lick in five years.

Unfortunately for Kelso, Rapava gives him the slip as soon as Kelso's hotel mini-bar is exhausted. However, the historian has learned enough to pick up a trail that (eventually) leads him to the notebook, and, from there, to the illegitimate son Stalin conceived with a long-dead mistress.

Rapava is the book's most intriguing character, and the plot slumps noticeably when Kelso is left to his own investigations. Unlike Xavier March, the stock detective protagonist Harris used in Fatherland, Kelso is a frightened little man, and he is often overpowered (physically and otherwise) by harder-edged co-stars like Papu's daughter, Zinaida (don't worry, Harris spares us the traditional sexual intrigue), and, later on, O'Brian, an American reporter who pairs up with Kelso to track down Stalin' s progeny in Russia's frozen north.

Still, the middle chapters are well worth the read, because Harris' send-up of Moscow's mafiocracy is assiduously rendered, and the historical counterpoint allows Harris to contrast modern-day Moscow's libertine freak show to the grim law-and-order backdrop of its Communist-era past.

Harris also satirically captures the Communist holdovers who survived Glasnost. When Kelso meets with a regional Communist functionary from the northern town of Archangel, for instance, he writes: "Wood block flooring, thick water pipes, a heavy radiator, a desk calendar, a big green Bakelite telephone, like something out of a 1950's science fiction movie, the smell of polish and stale air -- every detail was familiar, right down to the model Sputnik and the clock in the shape of Zimbabwe left behind by some visiting Marxist delegation."

As with his other novels, it is clear Harris has done his historical homework. His depiction of Stalin's Moscow is informed by modern works such as Edward Radzinsky' s outstanding 1996 volume, Stalin, and this strong factual base sees Archangel through even when the plot flags. Historical credibility is essential in novels of this type -- and Harris provides plenty.

If you liked Fatherland, you' ll appreciate this one even more. Harris has served up the same action and historical detail, but his new characters provide more variety and are more polished creations. This fine book leaves the reader hungry for Harris' next effort. Mao and Mussolini, to name but two likely suspects, await his talents.