MGB officer Leo is a man who never questions the Party Line. He arrests whomever he is told to arrest. He dismisses the horrific death of a young boy because he is told to, because he believes the Party stance that there can be no murder in Communist Russia. Leo is the perfect soldier of the regime. But suddenly his confidence that everything he does serves a great good is shaken. He is forced to watch a man he knows to be innocent be brutally tortured. And then he is told to arrest his own wife. Leo understands how the State works: Trust and check, but check particularly on those we trust. He faces a stark choice: his wife or his life. And still the killings of children continue...
Child 44, Tom Rob Smith
CHILD 44 is the debut novel for Tom Rob Smith, set in the dying days of Stalin's Soviet dream society, inspired by a real-life serial killer.
Starting in 1933, with villages of people starving to death in a desperate winter, the opening chapter of CHILD 44 deeply underscores the desperation of life in that environment. Moving 20 years later in 1953 Moscow, a very young child is found dead on the railway tracks. His death is barely investigated. The Security Services have other things on their minds. Mostly vicious persecution of ordinary people. Slowly, Security Ministry Officer Leo Demidov is being manoeuvred into the position of State enemy, and ultimately he is sent, along with the wife he refused to hand into the authorities, to the Ural Mountains where other children are found murdered. Murder (and most crime) isn't acknowledged by the Soviet authorities, unless it can be blamed on the insanity or perversity of the perpetrator, so convenient scapegoats are found and the cases quickly closed. Leo knows there's something more going on, and when the local Police General finally is convinced as well, they discover something much more sinister. The problem then really becomes whether Leo and his wife can survive long enough to get to the end of the trail.
CHILD 44 takes a while to get moving - in terms of a pure investigation of crime novel. The early part of the book is taken up with the events that lead Leo into the position of being "an enemy of the State". Throughout this part of the book the direness of the Soviet experience, the petty corruption and bullying that a martial society allows are brutally explored. The sheer cruelty of a system that seeks to find it's own citizenry guilty is glaringly stark.
Patience as this building of scene is rewarded though as once the book hits the point at which Leo and Raisa (his wife) end up in the Urals, events begin to pile on top of each other.
There's a lot more to CHILD 44 than the investigation of a shocking series of child murders. What's also at stake is the whole way that fear can control a society, can affect personal relationships, can twist everything.
Obviously there's been considerable research into the background of CHILD 44, but the book doesn't read as a research tome - it reads as a story of fear, manipulation, power struggles, petty jealousy, brutality, cruelty, madness, loss, survival and humanity.