Spies, Denouncers and Gods

The Denouncer

Paul M. Levitt (Rowman, $11.99 paperback)

Levitt has deeply immersed himself in the double binds and faint allegiances of the Stalin era. His first novel, Stalin’s Barber, reviewed here a year or more ago, was a masterful historical jaunt across the Soviet empire on the coattails of an itinerant barber. This second book is darker yet no less compelling.

Sasha, we are led to think, is a good man. A smart young man. Not a Communist man, but one who knows how to survive most of the social and linguistic traps of the Stalinist state:

“...he knew not to gloat about his mental accomplishments. Too many made you an enemy of the people; too few made you fodder for a factory. As a result, Sasha always measured his speech carefully, using among workers a common diction and among the well-educated a learned one.”

The book begins rather suddenly, with Sasha (home on college vacation) saving his parents’ lives by beheading two policemen come to arrest them as Enemies of the People. Sasha then sends his parents away to safety in obscurity, which allows him to “safely” denounce them for the murders. Deals and compromises follow, and Sasha is manipulated into working as an informer, then a school director, where his reforms inevitably cause him to be denounced himself.

Twists turn in on themselves and Sasha must stay one step ahead of himself, of his past, if he is to survive. Then two men arrive in town who seem to bear incriminating knowledge of that past.

To tell any more would lessen this powerful novel’s value for the reader. It is smart, well written, and imbued with a fine sense of this very dark time. Highly recommended.

Stalin’s American Spy

Tony Sharp (Hurst, $35)

In these pages I recently reviewed a book on Duncan Lee, a Soviet spy who worked as a top aide to US intelligence chief “Wild Bill” Donovan during World War II. This new work is of the same era, but the spy story is entirely different.

Noel Field was a Soviet agent working in the US Department of State during the 1930s. After the war, a ruse lured him to Prague and he was imprisoned and interrogated, turned on by the very Soviet masters for whom he had spied. Stalin, it turns out, needed a western patsy to bolster the spurious claims of his showtrials. Field was that patsy.

But, as Sharp shows, that may only be half of the story. Field, evidence suggests, may have been a double agent who infiltrated the Communist Party of the USA at the behest of Allen Dulles, pretending to work for the Soviets until he was tricked into traveling to Eastern Europe.

A well researched and fascinating read that illuminates the dark world of Soviet spies in the US and sheds some light on the mechanisms and motivations for Stalin’s show trials, beyond that of discrediting his political enemies, of course.

Hard to Be a God

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky (Chicago Review Press, $19.95)

Following her wonderful translation of the Strugatsky brothers’ Roadside Picnic, Olena Bormashenko has now brought another of the scifi brothers’ classic novels into English (this one recently put onto film after a very long production).

In this “prime directive” driven novel, the protagonist, Anton (masquerading as Don Rumata), is sent to live on a distant medieval kingdom, Arkanar. He is allowed to observe and participate, even to influence events in that world (possibly to introduce peace if possible), fully inhabiting his role as a colorful and dangerous rogue, but he cannot directly interfere, cannot kill. He defends intellectuals from the evil prime minister, Don Reba, but the limits on his brief mean he cannot stop the tide of grey totalitarianism that he sees coming but the other Earth observers do not.

Full of the sort of “between the lines” allusions that Soviet era scifi was so gifted at delivering, Hard to Be a God is a classic of twentieth century Russian literature. Bormashenko’s fine translation also includes an afterword by Boris Strugatsky about the challenges of the novel’s crafting in the USSR of the 1960s.