Child 44, a debut novel by Tom Rob Smith, has become an international bestseller, gathering acclaims from both Europe and the US. Readers immerse themselves into the world of the Soviet Union, from the Ukrainian peasant famine to the extensive methods of torture by the MGB (predecessor of the KGB, the state security agency of the Soviet Union).
Russian Historical Events in Russian Fiction
Smith begins the book in the midst of the Ukrainian peasant famine in the winter of 1933. The scene involves a family's struggle to find something to eat. The mother sends her two sons out into the forest in search of an emaciated cat to hunt and kill for dinner. This scene stems from actual Soviet history. Holodomor literally means "death by starvation" in Ukranian. This peasant famine was one of the worst genocides in world history. An estimated 10 million peasants starved to death although the actual figure is unknown.
During Holodomor, peasants, such as the family in Child 44, resorted to extreme measures to find food. In a February 5, 2009 article entitled "Holodomor: The Secret Holocaust of the Ukraine" (New American), author James Perloff says: "Unable to get food, many [peasants] ate whatever could pass for it — weeds, leaves, tree bark, and insects. The luckiest were able to survive secretly on small woodland animals."
Within the same article, American journalist Thomas Walker discusses his observations of Holodomor firsthand: "About twenty miles south of Kiev (Kyiv), [Walker] came upon a village that was practically extinct by starvation. There had been fifteen houses in this village and a population of forty-odd persons. Every dog and cat had been eaten."
KGB Russian Secret Police
The book's protagonist is Leo, an MGB officer, who grows accustomed to various methods of torture against dissidents and political prisoners. Torture includes cramped cell conditions, injections to cause seizures for the purpose of confession and instruments and tools used to remove portions of a prisoner's body.
At The Museum of Genocide Victims (or the KGB Museum) in Vilnius, Lithuania, Smith's tortuous details prove to be accurate. Perhaps the most sinister part of the museum is the funnel, which is cut into a stone wall. It is here that a prisoner would put his head, and on the other side, an officer would shoot and kill him instantly. MGB officers also used isolation cells to break political prisoners and receive a confession.
Additionally, Smith discusses that MGB officers often spied on one another to make sure every officer was loyal to the state. This is absolutely true. Often, if an MGB officer was suspected of dissidence, he would be followed home and trailed for a duration of time until guilt or innocence was proven (usually the former). If proven guilty, the officer and his family would endure execution or twenty-five years or more in the gulag, a Soviet hard labor camp. Those who were sent to the camps did not live for very long.
Tom Rob Smith intersperses fact with fiction in Child 44, yet in the areas of the peasant famine and MGB practices, he keeps to the truth. Russia's painful history is plainly written across the page, making the truth an evocative read.
Jennifer Ciotta - Jennifer Ciotta is the author of I, Putin (Vladimir Putin novel): http://vladimirputinnovel.com.
Join the Conversation