IRON CURTAIN COPS

By Jim Doherty

 

It happened that, as this column came due, I was researching the case of Andrei Chikatilo, the serial killer who terrorized Southern Russia, the Ukraine , and Uzbek from the 1978 through 1990, for a short story I'm writing. The definitive work about that case is Robert Cullen's The Killer Department (Pantheon, 1993), a book that was later dramatized in the Edgar-winning TV-movie Citizen X (HBO, 1995), written and directed by Chris Gerolmo.

Citizen X is one of the best cop-hunts-serial-killer movies I've ever seen, theatrical or made-for-television. Depicting, as you would expect, the single-minded determination of the detective on the case, Viktor Burakov, it also shows just how difficult it was to investigate such crimes in the Soviet Union back when the Iron Curtain was still lowered.

There's a rather famous line in the film Touch of Evil (Universal, 1958), in which cop-hero Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) tells cop-villain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) that “police work is only easy in a police state.” Well, police work is probably easy in a police state if you have no humane impulses, and you don't really give a damn about getting the right answers. But trying to do real police work, if you're a decent person and you care about doing a quality job, isn't at all easy when you're working under a political system that is fundamentally inhumane and places no value on getting the right answers.

Remembering the dichotomy the film set up between doing quality police work and acquiescing to the needs of the police state, it occurred to me that this was the common theme in virtually all entries in the very small list of police procedural novels (at least those published in English) set behind the Iron Curtain. And it also occurred to me that trying to enforce the law in a compassionate, just manner within an fundamentally cruel and vicious political system that places no premium on truth or justice was an inherently noir situation, a situation that can't help but yield a dark, sinister atmosphere.

Most Iron Curtain cop novels are, not surprisingly, set in the former Soviet Union , but a few are set in satellite countries. In fact, the earliest such novel that I've been able to find, M. Fagyas's The Fifth Woman (Doubleday, 1963), is set in Hungary during the 1956 uprising.

Born in Hungary herself (though she had apparently become a naturalized U.S. citizen by the time this, her first book, came out), it was natural for M. (for Maria) Fagyas to choose Budapest as the setting for The Fifth Woman . It tells the story of a police inspector who discovers a murder victim hidden among the bodies of four casualties of the uprising.

There's a line from another movie, Off Limits (20 th /Fox, 1988), in which a senior NCO in the US Army Military Police tells two younger subordinates who are investigating a murder during the Vietnam War, “You're floatin' in a big sea of shit and instead of just stayin' in the boat, no, you reach out and you pick up this one little turd and you say ‘This turd, well this turd pisses me off. I'm gonna do somethin' about this turd!'”

Logically, there doesn't seem to be much point in, as the MP sergeant puts it, “doin' somethin'” about one particular “turd.” But what if it happens to be the one turd you're actually able to do something about? In the midst of so much evil and death that he can do nothing about, Ms. Fagyas's cop decides that he will rigorously investigate the one death he can do something about. And the result is a riveting read that earned Ms. Fagyas an Edgar nomination for Best First Mystery Novel (and probably should have earned her the Edgar).

Ms. Fagyas only wrote four more novels, and only two more mysteries, both set prior to World War I, long before the Iron Curtain was lowered. But The Fifth Woman , coming nearly two decades before better known books by writers like Martin Cruz Smith and Stuart Kaminsky, doesn't get nearly the credit it deserves for being so far ahead of the trend.

Julian Semyonov (sometimes rendered as Yulian Semyonov and sometimes as Julian Semenov), like Maria Fagyas, was a native of an Iron Curtain country. In fact, he was a native of the Iron Curtain country. Which is to say Russia . Unlike Ms. Fagyas, he lived there his whole life. In his own country, he was best-known for somewhat propagandistic spy novels like the stand-alone TASS Is Authorized to Announce. . . (Mosaic, 1987), and a series featuring an heroic Soviet agent named “Stirlitz,” often referred to as the “Russian James Bond.” In Semyenov's cloak-and-dagger fiction, the KGB were the good guys, the CIA and MI-6 were the bad guys, and Marxism was the answer. His first novel, however, was a police procedural that included several gibes (comparatively gentle ones since he lived there and, presumably, wanted the book to get published) at the Soviet regime.

It was called Petrovka 38 (Stein and Day, 1965). To most Russians, that would probably have seemed like a fairly generic title for a police procedural, since Petrovka 38 was, and is, the street address for the headquarters of the Moscow Police (or Militia to use the local term), and consequently, was as recognizable to the average Muscovite as Scotland Yard would be to a Londoner, One Police Plaza to a New Yorker, Parker Center to an Angeleno, or Quai des Orfevres to a Parisian.

The book was a fairly straightforward cops-and-robbers affair, with a pair of Militia detectives tracking down a gang of armed robbers. In the end, they bring the outlaws to book through patient, methodical investigation that would have done Joe Friday proud. Along the way, though, there were subtle yet pointed criticisms of the system the cops had to work under. One of the detectives has been separated from his family for several years because the State hasn't assigned him an apartment big enough to accommodate his wife and daughter. Phones don't work. Elevators go so slowly it's faster to climb stairs. And refrigerators can't keep food cold without freezing it solid. A co-founder, and past president, of the International Association of Crime Writers, Semyonov died at a comparatively early age in 1993 after sustaining a heart attack three years earlier from which he never recovered.

1981 was the breakthrough year for police procedurals set behind the Iron Curtain, with three different Moscow-set cop novels appearing that year, all three introducing successful series characters.

The biggest splash was made by Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park (Random, 1981), which introduced Arkady Renko, the Chief Homicide Investigator for the Moscow Militia. Renko's hunting the killer of three people found dead in the titular park, their fingerprints and faces cut from their bodies to prevent identification. Born into the nomenklatura , the elite Soviet ruling aristocracy, Renko uses his privileged status as protection when his murder investigations expose the corruption of the Soviet system, but this time the corruption runs too deep, and his being a member of the ruling class doesn't protect him when his solution to the crime proves too embarrassing to the State.

Renko returned in Polar Star (Random, 1989) in which, having been dismissed from his position as a policeman, he is serving as a crewman on a fishing vessel, where he undertakes to look into the murder of another crew member. In the third novel, Red Square (Random, 1991), Renko is back in Moscow , reinstated as a Militia detective just prior to the fall of communism. In this restored official capacity, he travels to Cuba in Havana Bay (Random, 1999), to the Ukraine in Wolves Eat Dogs (Simon & Schuster, 2004), and returns to Moscow in Stalin's Ghost (Simon & Schuster, 2007).

Despite the critical and commercial success of Gorky Park , and despite Smith's having been nominated for Edgar awards on three previous occasions without winning, not only didn't the novel win the Edgar, it wasn't even nominated. A film version (Orion, 1983) would win Dennis Potter one in the screenplay category, but the novel itself got no Edgar recognition. It did, however, win a Gold Dagger for Best Novel from the British Crime Writers Association. Ten years later, Havana Bay would win a Hammett Award from the IACW.

A Moscow-set cop novel that did get an Edgar nomination, in the Best First Novel category, was Anthony Olcott's Murder at the Red October (Academy Chicago, 1981), which, in this case, does not refer to a nuclear submarine, but to a hotel in the Soviet capital. The night shift house dick at the Red October is an unambitious, not particularly bright slacker named Ivan Duvakin. Since there are no private businesses in the USSR , Duvakin is not a security guard, but an actual member of the Militia, whose assigned beat is the hotel. Generally his shifts are uneventful, and on a really exciting tour of duty, he might have to deal with a drunk or an irate hotel guest. When he stumbles onto a murder in one of the rooms, he knows he's out of his depth and immediately turns it over to the KGB. Thinking he's out of it now, he finds himself pulled back into the investigation, against his will, when he chances upon a Russian doll filled with heroin. Aside from winning Olcott an Edgar nomination, Murder at the Red October spawned two sequels.

In the first, May Day at Magadan (Bantam, 1983), Duvakin, dismissed from the Militia, has been exiled to Siberia as a result of his actions in Red October , but, despite no longer being a professional law enforcer, manages to get involved in another criminal investigation. In the third novel of the trilogy, Rough Beast (Scribner's, 1992), set during Russia 's uneasy transition from communism to capitalism, Duvakin, now working as a minor functionary in the Oil and Gas Ministry, has been reassigned to Kazakhstan , where he's swept up in yet another mystery when his wife is murdered. In addition to his own fiction, Olcott has translated Russian novels into English, and is the author of Russian Pulp (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001), a survey of Russian crime fiction.

In the sense of sheer prolificity, the most successful of the three Russian cops introduced in 1981 is surely Stuart Kaminsky's Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, Chief Criminal Investigator for the Moscow Prokuratura (roughly, Prosecutor), who was introduced in Death of a Dissident (Charter, 1981). A paperback original, it did not, at first, get nearly as much attention as the other two books. This would soon change. Like Renko, Rostnikov finds it difficult to seek truth and justice in a system that is inherently dishonest and unjust, but he still perseveres, and has been persevering now for fifteen novels. The second book in the series, Black Knight in Red Square (Charter, 1984), would get an Edgar nomination in the Best Paperback Original category. By the third book, Red Chameleon (Scribner's, 1985), the series had moved to hard covers. And the fifth, A Cold Red Sunrise (Scribner's, 1988), won an Edgar for Best Novel, a prize that Olcott failed to get and Smith wasn't even nominated for.

The Soviet system has long since fallen, which would seem to leave this “Iron Curtain Cop's” raison a tad short of a d'être , but the series is still going strong. The latest entry, People Who Walk in Darkness (Forge, 1988), appeared only last year and is just out in paperback, and a short story, “Snow” ( First Cases – Volume 3 , edited by Robert J. Randisi, Signet, 1999), describing a young Rostnikov's first day as a rookie beat cop, won Kaminsky a third Edgar nomination. He's gone on to be named an MWA Grand Master.

With the exception of Semyonov's novel, I've dealt so far primarily with novels by writers from the West, indeed with American authors writing in English. Even Maria Fagyas, though foreign-born, was an American, and she wrote her books in English.

Nevertheless, I don't wish to give the impression that Russians were not producing their own crime fiction during the Soviet period. Indeed, it would be hard to believe that the country that gave us Dostoevsky and his masterpiece, Crime and Punishment , would suddenly stop producing writers of crime fiction once communism took over. In fact, as Olcott's Russian Pulp shows, crime novels, or detectifs to use the local term, were quite popular in Soviet Russia. But the Soviet regime never really approve of them, and few were published beyond the Iron Curtain. All were subject to Soviet censorship

A pair of Russian crime writers who did find success in the West were Edward Topol (sometimes rendered as Eduard Topol) and Fridrikh Neznansky (sometimes rendered as Friedrich Neznansky), who were able to write mystery fiction without the constraints of government restrictions after emigrating to the United States. Topol had been a journalist employed by the state media organ Pravda . Neznansky, one-time law school classmate of Mikhail Gorbachev, had served as a criminal investigator for the Moscow Prokuratura for fifteen years. The success of Martin Cruz Smith, Stuart Kaminsky, and Anthony Olcott proved that there was a market for crime fiction set within the Soviet Union , and, as veterans of Soviet news media and Soviet law enforcement, Topol and Neznasky were in a position to provide something Smith, Kaminsky, and Olcott could not. An insider's view.

Their first collaboration, Red Square (Quartet, 1983), not to be confused with Smith's identically titled 1991 novel, was based on a real event, the mysterious 1982 death of General Semyon Kuznich Tsvigan, deputy chief of the KGB under Yuri Andropov, and brother-in-law to Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. At the time of his death, there was speculation that Tsvigan committed suicide when exposure of his corrupt involvement in black market activities was imminent.

In their novel, Topol and Neznansky suggest that Tsvigan was actually murdered at the behest of Andropov in a power struggle that would ultimately lead to the KGB director taking over the country. Prosecutor's Investigator Igor Shamrayev, leading a team of police looking into the death, is unlikely to be able to prove this when pitted against such powerful foes. One month after the novel was completed, Andropov actually succeeded Brezhnev as the Soviet Union 's General Secretary, fulfilling the prophecy made by the two writers.

The partners followed up with Deadly Games (Quartet, 1983), in which Shamrayev returns to investigate the disappearance of a well-connected Soviet journalist just as a Russian-US summit is about to begin, and, once more, find himself at odds with the powers-that-be. This would be their last collaboration.

Topol has gone on to write books in a variety of genres, but has returned to the cop novel in Red Snow (Dutton, 1987) and The Kremlin Wife (apparently unavailable in an English language edition), both featuring Anna Kovina, billed as the first policewoman to be the protagonist of a Soviet-set mystery novel.

Neznansky has proved to be quite successful on his own, with a series about young Prosecutor's Investigator Alexander “Sasha” Turetsky. Turetsky has, in the post-Soviet era, become something of a folk hero among Russian mystery fans, and several of the books featuring him have been turned into films and television serials. Regretfully, only two of the Turetsky novels have been made available in U.S. editions, The Body in Sokolniki Park (Bantam, 1987) and Night Wolves (Infinity, 2004). A third solo Neznansky novel, Operation Faust (Corgi, 1988), was published in the UK , but not in the States. It tells the story of a police investigation into the bombing of a Moscow subway train, apparently based on a real-life 1977 terrorist incident that killed seven passengers and seriously injured another thirty-seven. I have been unable to determine whether or not Operation Faust features Turetsky.

As I mentioned earlier, with the Cold War now a relic of the past, the point of setting cop novels behind the Iron Curtain, the tension between the humane policemen and the inhumane police state, seems to deprive procedurals set in contemporary Russia of their overarching theme. If Arkady Renko and Porfiry Rostnikov no longer have to contend with a totalitarian system dead set on keeping them from discovering the truth, why write novels about them at all? Of course, the reason is because, whether the Cold War is still raging or not, they are still riveting characters and readers are still interested in their stories.

Nevertheless, the conflict between state officials employed to ferret out truth by the very government determined to keep them from finding that truth is an attractive one for writers, and one they are now deprived of since the Soviet Union is no more.

The solution some writers have resorted to is writing historical novels.

Olen Steinhauer, for example, has written an excellent series of five novels that examines the entire history of the Cold War from the viewpoint of an Eastern European country's police officers and intelligence agents. The first book in the series, The Bridge of Sighs (St. Martin's, 2003), tells of the very first murder investigation conducted by rookie Homicide Detective Emil Brod in 1948, just as the first major skirmish in the Cold War, the Berlin Airlift, is taking place. By the fifth novel, Victory Square (St. Martin's, 2007), set in 1989, Brod has become the Chief of Homicide, and, as the Berlin Wall is demolished and the entire Soviet system begins to unravel, discovers that he is on a list of old men who are being murdered one by one.

In the intervening books, The Confession (St. Martin's, 2004), 36 Yalta Boulevard (St. Martin's, 2005), and Liberation Movements (St. Martin's, 2006), Steinhauer tells the stories of other cops and other spies, conducting other investigations and/or carrying out other intelligence operations, against the backdrop of such benchmark Cold War events as the Hungarian uprising of 1956, the Vietnam War, and the awkward beginning movements towards détente .

The setting in all five novels is an unnamed Soviet satellite, a country that is specifically identified as not being Poland , Hungary , East Germany , Bulgaria , Albania , etc. Yet by not being any of them, it is, in a sense, all of them. That said, it should be noted that Steinhauer lived in Romania for several years, and was inspired to write these novels during that period, so it's not unreasonable to infer that the unnamed country is probably more Romania than anyplace else.

Steinhauer's series has won well-deserved critical success. The Bridge of Sighs was nominated for an MWA Edgar, a Bouchercon Anthony, an MRI Macavity, and a Deadly Pleasures Barry for Best First Novel, and for a CWA Dagger in the Best Historical Crime Novel category. Liberation Movements was an Edgar nominee for Best Novel. And all five books have been given almost uniformly glowing reviews, winning spots on numerous “Best of the Year” lists. The series more than deserves all the kudos it's received.

Coming full circle, we arrive at Tom Rob Smith's Child 44 (Grand Central, 2008), which, like the TV-film Citizen X with which this article began, fictionalizes the years-long rampage of serial killer Andrei Chikatilo. To examine how such a series of murders might be investigated, not by a cop who knows that communism is a sham and a fraud, as was the case in the film (and, for that matter, in real life), but by a true believer, he backdates the murders to 1953, the height of Stalinist repression, and puts an idealistic, devout Marxist, MGB Investigator Leo Stepanovich Demidov, in charge of the case.

Assigned to look into the death of a child, Demidov is, at first annoyed, since the investigation takes him away from what he feels is a more important case, the exposure of an “enemy of the state.” When more deaths occur, all of them having an identical MO and an identical signature, Demidov reluctantly comes to the conclusion that a serial killer (though that term won't be coined for several more decades) is preying on the USSR 's children. But, in Stalinist Russia, to assert such a thing is a crime in itself. Murders like this simply can't occur in the Revolutionary Paradise. Murders like this can only be the product of decadent Western values, and, consequently, it follows that the deaths Demidov's investigating must not be murders, let alone murders committed by a single killer.

The official position is that all the children's deaths are coincidental and probably accidental, and, by questioning that position, Demidov finds himself at odds with the system he loves and believes in with all his heart. Despite his unquestioning Marxism, he's too competent an investigator to ignore the plain evidence. Despite the evidence, he's too dedicated a communist to willingly flout the party line. The dichotomy at the heart of all “Iron Curtain Cop” novels is, in Child 44 , a dichotomy that rages, not merely within the dysfunctional bureaucracy of a dysfunctional system, but within the protagonist's own soul.

Child 44 didn't get Edgar recognition last April, but there are several mystery awards yet to be given, and I'll be very surprised if Smith's stellar debut doesn't at least get a few nominations.

The Soviet Bloc is, of course, not the only totalitarian system in which in which police fiction has been set. Qiu Xiaolong and Christopher West write cop novels set in the Peoples Republic of China . James Church sets his police procedurals in North Korea . Philip Kerr's police novels are set in Nazi Germany. And in J. Robert Janes's series, a Gestapo agent and a Sûreté inspector work as police partners in Nazi-occupied France . Perhaps, in the course of time, we'll see cop novels set in Radical Islamic nations.

But police work within the Soviet empire holds a particular fascination. No other totalitarian regime lasted as long, oppressed as many people, or affected the world quite as much, and the notion that the very people who worked for the police, the arm of that oppression, might be honest, competent, and compassionate, intent on doing their duty honestly, competently, and compassionately, is particularly intriguing.