Since the eruption of the banking crisis in 2008 and the justifiable public anger in the UK & USA at the amount of taxpayers money that had to be pumped into the subsequent bailouts there has been a marked revival of anti-capitalist, class war rhetoric and a renewed interest in the ideas of Karl Marx.
At the same time the bombastic posturing of the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin who now rules Russia with the help of a gang of vindictive and sticky fingered ex secret policemen seeks to restore the reputation of that archetypal left wing dictator Josef Stalin who spent thirty years claiming to have constructed the world’s very first perfect socialist where all men were equal and where all the means of production were controlled by the workers themselves – or rather, since it would be impossible to run a business dependent on the fluctuating wishes of the masses – controlled by the officials of the Communist Party claiming only they knew the “true” wishes and feelings of the working classes.
Russia and communism are both getting a big media makeover.
Which is why every sane man and woman in the west should read “Child 44” by Tim Rob Smith
Read it and realise the true nature of Russia in the 1930s and early 50s, the society that lay behind the Five Year Plans and People’s Arts festivals and the edifice of lies and hypocrisy that was shored up by the Bolshevik hacks and their brutal enforcers – and the useful idiots in the west who fell hook line and sinker for the whole sham.
It is essentially a crime novel in the police procedural mould, a hunt for a serial killer of children in Russia during the 1940s and early 50s during the latter years of the Stalin regime. Or rather the non hunt because the Communists claimed to have created a new kind of society where poverty and greed had been abolished and therefore crime no longer existed. If crimes were committed they were deliberate anti Soviet counter revolutionary acts, political crimes – therefore almost all policing resources were poured into the political police, the NKVD /MVD. Everyday policing was left to the underfunded and despised Militia. It followed that if an act could not be considered a political crime then it just drifted under the radar.
The novel is about an up and coming NKVD officer who upsets his bosses because he wants to track down a serial killer. He continues this obsession even after he is transferred to a dead end Militia placement.
It is a cold story set against the background of the moral vacuum of Soviet Russia where the only imperative is to survive the dead weight of an oppressive and secretive regime. There are disturbing snapshots of the darkness within the NKVD/MVD – one of the most chilling moments is the description of NKVD “specialists” (i.e.torturers) leaving the Lubianka at the end of their shift, going home to their families after a day of breaking bones and smashing bodies as if they were office commuters.
Read it if you can – then keep it burned in your memory next time you see somebody waving a hammer and sickle claiming to represent “the workers” – or watch Putin posturing on a Russian TV clip….
