Back in the USSR? Malcolm Knox’s dark comedy leans into the ridiculous
- Written by Luke Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Wollongong
Fans of Soviet history and/or the 2017 comedy film, The Death of Stalin, will remember Levrentiy Pavlovich Beria as the ruthless would-be successor to a certain General Secretary left lying on the floor in a puddle of his own urine following a stroke because, as historian Simon Sebag Montefiore puts it, “his comrades and his doctors were too terrified to treat him in case he was merely drunk”.
Unfortunately for “Friend Beria” (as he was known to those with Politburo privileges), Stalin’s fatal brain haemorrhage in 1953 was not the long-awaited catalyst for his ascension to power. Instead, it led to his demise. Some six months after the Vozhd had finally been laid to rest, Beria was arrested and tried for rape and treason. He had his mouth stuffed with a towel, a gun placed against his forehead, and was unceremoniously executed.
The full suite of charges against him reveal a lot about his time as head of the Soviet intelligence agency, the NKDV (the earlier version of the KGB). Appointed by Stalin in 1938, Beria oversaw the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of Soviet citizens in the purges that had begun with the Great Terror of 1937 and continued under his direct authority well into the following decade.
The charges also reveal a lot about the paranoid climate of mid-century Moscow, where the phrase “you can prise it from my cold dead hands” was all but constitutionally enshrined.
In 2000, Beria’s son Sergo attempted to have his father’s reputation restored via Russia’s Supreme Court, arguing that trumped-up accusations (including the spurious claim that Beria was a British spy) were distortions of the truth put forward by his political rivals. The appeal was rejected. Beria’s status as “Stalin’s Himmler” stands.
Review: The First Friend – Malcolm Knox (Allen & Unwin)
But what of his life before arriving in Moscow with stars in his eyes and a hammer and sickle in his trunk? This is the question journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox sets himself to imagining in his latest novel The First Friend.
The First Friend is the fictitious tale of Stalin’s visit to his native Georgia in 1938. More accurately, it dramatises the career-making preparations undertaken by then First Secretary Beria in the lead up to this auspicious moment. More accurately still, it describes the role that Vasil Murtov – Beria’s personal driver, childhood foster brother and figment of the author’s imagination – plays in ensuring Beria’s place in history as Stalin’s mixed-breed lapdog crossed with attack dog.
Murtov is the quintessential grey man, “a substance more liquid than solid … a blob of homo sovieticus fluidum”, who understands that the trick to staying alive is to remain useful (but never so useful as to appear ambitious) and loyal (but never so loyal as to disqualify oneself from switching sides at a moment’s notice).
“Wherever you’re going in the future,” Murtov cautions the trainee driver and party upstart who has been sent to learn from him, or more likely spy on him, in the early pages of the novel,
right now you are an assistant to the flunkey with the spoilt biography. Don’t speak until he has spoken, don’t contradict him, and if he asks you a question say you’re still making up your mind. Don’t tell a lie but don’t take the initiative. No matter how comfortable he makes you, don’t speak first. Got it?
This is the tightrope employees must walk when the boss is a paranoid psychopath who carries a Thompson submachine gun under his arm at all times.
Murtov’s wife Babilina is, by contrast, a colour wheel of agitation. An ex-literature professor who hands out pornographic novels, she keeps a secret seditious “suicide note of a diary” and doesn’t mind referring to their Russian overlord as “old shitbreath” within hearing distance of the listening devices that furnish every room of every residence their side of the Black Sea.
In her husband’s estimation, Bablina may well be “the last Soviet to live without fear”. By her own account, she is just a protective mother who isn’t letting that “born manipulator and closet sadist” Beria get within a “country mile” of her two daughters.
The sun lacks wisdom
In a corner of the world where telling jokes can get you “disappeared” by the secret police quicker than you can say “why did the katami cross the gza?”, Babilina maintains her sense of humour and her moral compass right the way through. She is the only character in The First Friend who can see that things are not going to end well for a society that has just reduced the death penalty age to 12.
The head and heart of the book, Bablina also expresses any historically informed hesitations its author might have about the social experiment that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. But she is not just an enlightened authorial avatar. She is also there to help readers keep on top of plot twists and story developments.
The novel flounders a little here. Exposition-heavy monologues are intercut with two-dimensional dialogic prompts, such as “But how?” and “Why you?” and “Wow. Beria said all this?” The technique gives a somewhat rushed, let-me-explain-my-plan-to-you-Mr-Bond feel to the story’s climax, which is only compounded by the historical afterword that follows the closing of the curtain.
The First Friend is, in fact, bookended by historical notes. The foreword begins with the statement, “Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria (1899–1953) was a mass murder of the twentieth century”. The afterword, some 380 pages later, begins with the disclosure, “There are many unknowns about the life of Lavrentiy Beria”.
A self-proclaimed “bullshit artist”, Knox happily plies his darkly-comedic trade in the space between what is known and unknown. But the factual addendums hint at a possible anxiety weighing on the mind of his publishing house, which perhaps couldn’t quite trust its readers to differentiate between fact and fiction, hard-hitting satire and apolitical frivolity.
The First Friend is, nevertheless, funny in all the right ways. Distressingly so, at times. The novel leans with aplomb into those self-satirising tropes of socialist realism that would pass for propaganda if they weren’t so pisstakingly ridiculous.
Take the scene in which Beria issues “a proclamation that the Georgian people refer to Stalin as ‘The Shining Sun Of The Soviet Country, And More Than The Sun, For The Sun Lacks Wisdom’”. It’s a style of humour that finds its equivalent in the all-caps comedy of Booker Prize winning author, George Saunders, whose early fiction is full of dystopian theme parks where Historical Reconstruction Associates and Hatred Abatement Breathers undertake such tasks as compiling Verisimilitude Irregularities Lists and responding to Revenue Impacting Events.
In a cast full of memorable caricatures, though, the award for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy really must go to Stalin’s mother, Keke. The real Keke died in 1937, one year prior the story’s commencement. The “Mother of the Nation” whom Knox resurrects is a perfect balance of maternal love (“my poor Soso, with his withered little arm”) and nonchalant candour. Midway through telling how she tried to have her mass-murdering son aborted in utero, she interrupts herself: “Oh my lord, what has she done with her hair?”
Stalin’s mother Yekaterina ‘Keke’ Geladze, drawn by by Isaac Brodsky.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Keke is a matriarch in the mould of Tony Sporano’s mother Livia. Being a Person of a Certain Age, she can’t help but narrate each moment of her life “as if the valve between her eyes and mouth had broken down with age, and what entered her head as visual input needed immediate exit as verbal output”. I have been stuck on Sunday afternoon car rides with such People of a Certain Age, and found this character trait hilariously inspired.
Fiction in a time of autocrats
The question of why you might decide to read a fictional story about a collective of 20th-century Soviet criminals written by a Western author in 2024 is addressed head-on in the blurb: “The First Friend is a novel in a time of autocrats, where reality is a fiction created by those who rule [be it] Trump’s America, Xi’s China or Murdoch’s planet Earth.”
In case there is any confusion as to which would-be autocrat in particular Knox might have in mind, the following description – of Stalin apparently – should leave no one guessing (hint: it ain’t Kamala Harris):
He’s so ugly … That skin is so poxy, you want to bog it with plaster. But how could you match that tint? That nicotine yellow … And the hair … All that fucking hair, but if you’re up close, it’s quite thin. It’s an illusion of hair.
Knox is certainly no Stalin sympathiser. The political criticism is fairly heavy-handed right the way through. But maybe it darn-well needs to be, the novel having been written in an climate where democracy is being algorithmically assaulted by demagogues with Twitter accounts and voters are proudly sporting t-shirts that read “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat”.
“History does not repeat, but it does instruct,” writes Timothy Snyder in his short but excellent book, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. And in this regard, Knox’s set pieces – which, at their darkest, reminded me of Bertolt Brecht’s chilling Fear and Misery of the Third Reich – make The First Friend a double-speaking black comedy with an all-too-serious agenda for these partisan times: “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.”
In terms of good old-fashioned storytelling though, I wonder how much readers can be expected to care about the plight of the novel’s protagonist, Murtov. I take it for granted that we aren’t expected to like a character who aids and abets the behaviour of a paedophilic nutjob like Beria. But we ought to root for him, even if it’s against our better judgement. As Lars Bernaerts et al explain:
Narrative empathy is not the result of the reader’s conscious efforts to imagine herself in a character’s shoes, but rather depends on the persuasive force of stylistic devices which call forth empathetic responses almost against the audience’s will.
From the ticking timebomb chapter titles – “Twenty-Five Days to Live”, “Twenty Days to Live”, etc. – through to the focalised point-of-view schema and use of free indirect discourse (a technique where the character and narrator merge voices), there is no shortage of such devices at work in The First Friend. And yet I never quite managed to form any meaningful connection with the “95 kilogram human error” that is Vasil Murtov. Which is perhaps just as well, given that “personal affection” is such a deplorable “bourgeois concept” anyhow.
Authors: Luke Johnson, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Wollongong
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