A powerful tale of life in Eastern Europe during the fall of Communism

A review of Victory Square, by Olen Steinhauer

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

Some years ago I chanced upon one of Olen Steinhauer’s excellent contemporary spy stories, sped through it and read another, and finally, in searching for more of his work, found his five-novel cycle set in a fictional Central European country nestled among Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Austria. (Geographically, the country has to be Slovakia, which only recently gained its independence, but some readers think it more closely resembles Hungary.) Steinhauer’s cycle spanned the years from 1948, when the Soviet Empire consolidated its hold on the nations directly to its West, until 1990, when the USSR and the Warsaw Pact collapsed. 

Victory Square is the fifth and final novel in Steinhauer’s Eastern European cycle, and in some ways it’s the best. Steinhauer, an American who has lived for extended periods in several countries in the region, spent months, perhaps years, meticulously researching the fall of Ceausescu’s regime in Romania. That history forms the basis of the events that unfold in the novel in 1989-90. Against this background, Steinhauer introduces us to an aging homicide cop, Emil Brod, now Chief of the Militia, whom we met as a young rookie when he joined the Militia’s Homicide Squad in the country’s capital in 1948. Brod was the protagonist of the first novel in the cycle, The Bridge of Sighs, and has popped up throughout. Now just days from retirement, Brod is forced to contend with an unraveling government, a series of shocking murders, a best friend engaged at the very center of the revolutionary movement, and an adoring wife even older than he who wants him to leave the capital early, before the inevitable explosion.

The full cycle includes the following (with titles linked to my reviews):

• The Bridge of Sighs (2003), featuring Emil Brod in 1948
• The Confession (2004), centering on Brod’s colleague, Ferenc Kolyeszar, taking place in 1956
• 36 Yalta Boulevard (2005), featuring Brano Sev, the secret policeman who works in the Homicide Department and spies on the squad, set in 1966–1967
• Liberation Movements (2006), featuring Brano Sev and Brod’s young colleagues, Katja Drdova and Gavra Noukas, taking place in 1968 and 1975
• Victory Square (2007)

Together, these five novels constitute a superb introduction to life in Central Europe during the half-century of Soviet domination. Nonfiction couldn’t possibly match the depth of feeling that emerges from these works.

Romance, intrigue, and betrayal in post-World War II Istanbul

A review of Istanbul Passage, by Joseph Kanon

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Some books build slowly, and just as you begin to wonder whether you have the energy to finish them, you discover you’re a captive and no longer able to put them aside. Then they build and build, until you find yourself on the last page, out of breath from the frenzied rush to the end. Istanbul Passage is one of those books.

Kanon, born in 1946, writes spy stories about the period immediately following World War II and before the Korean War (1945-50). Istanbul Passage relates the tale of Leon Bauer, an American businessman whose poor eyesight had kept him out of the war. In compensation — seeking his own war, really — Leon has persuaded a friend of his in the U.S. consulate to hire him for special espionage assignments, helping smuggle Jews out of Romania and on to Palestine. Now, in 1945, Leon receives a different sort of assignment, which involves helping to smuggle a high-value Romanian intelligence target through Istanbul and on to safety in the U.S. But everything quickly goes wrong. Leon finds himself shooting a man to death in a firefight, and the Romanian turns out to be a war criminal at least partly responsible for one of the most notorious massacres of Jews outside the German camps.

Istanbul Passage is a complex and finely written tale. You can’t read the book without getting to know Leon Bauer — and Istanbul — as deeply as though you had experienced the story yourself. Joseph Kanon is one fine writer!

Kanon ran two major New York publishing houses before he began writing in 1995 when he was nearly 50. His five previous novels — Los Alamos (1997), The Prodigal Spy (1998), The Good German (2001), Alibi (2005), and Stardust (2009) — have won widespread acclaim, and deservedly so, as I’ve noted in my reviews. (To see those reviews, click on the titles of his last two previous books.)

Inside the mind’s eye of Eastern European Communism in the 1960s

A review of 36 Yalta Boulevard, by Olen Steinhauer

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

In this, the third novel in Olen Steinhauer’s outstanding Central European cycle, we view the world through the eyes of Brano Sev, a World War II partisan fighter turned secret policeman in his unnamed Soviet satellite country. Now, nearing 50, Brano has been working for months on the assembly line at a factory as punishment for an espionage scandal that erupted after he was sent on assignment to Vienna. Without warning, his superiors pull him out of the factory. temporarily reinstate him as a major in the security service, and send him off to his home village, where he is to investigate why a defector has suddenly returned to the village and what he’s planning to do. The ensuing complications threaten not just to end Brano’s career but possibly his life as well. He flees to Vienna, where his long-held beliefs in the Communist system are challenged from all quarters.

36 Yalta Boulevard — the address is that of the security service headquarters in The Capital — continues the story begun in The Bridge of Sighs and The Confession, which follows the life and work of the five men who make up the homicide department in The Capital’s police department. (Brano is the secret service spy in their midst.) The first book is set in 1948, the second in 1956, and 36 Yalta Boulevard in 1966-67. Two later novels — Liberation Movements and Victory Square — carry the tale forward into the 1970s and 1980s, thus traversing the entire half-century history of Communism in Eastern Europe.

Now, nearly a quarter-century after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Empire in Central and Eastern Europe, a new generation is growing up ignorant of the Cold War reality that hung over our lives for as long as most of us over 30 can remember. Olen Steinhauer brings back one important aspect of that reality in these unusually well-crafted books: the life and times of the millions who existed under the varying but always oppressive weight of state socialism — some, like Brano, willingly, even eagerly; others, indifferent or resisting.

Steinhauer has won numerous awards for the novels in this unusually engaging cycle. He deserves more.

A superb suspense novel set in the USSR, Afghanistan, and the U.S.

A review of Agent 6, by Tom Rob Smith

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

The third book in a trilogy, Agent 6 concludes the story of Leo Demidov, a hero in the Great Patriotic War (as the USSR termed World War II) and later an agent in Stalin’s secret police. By way of introduction, the book opens in 1950 with Leo in thrall to the Sovet State, a senior officer in the MGB (predecessor to the KGB and to today’s FSB) charged with training newly recruited agents. Jesse Austin, a world-famous African-American singer closely resembling Paul Robeson, is visiting Moscow, where he will perform and publicly extol the accomplishments of the Soviet regime as he sees them. Leo is detailed to help ensure that Austin is shielded from the realities of life in Moscow. In the course of this challenging assignment, Leo comes into close contact with Raisa, a beautiful and brilliant young teacher with whom he has been infatuated from afar.

The scene shifts abruptly to 1965, with Leo and Raisa married and living in poverty with their two adopted daughters (minor characters earlier in the trilogy). Raisa has persuaded Leo to leave the secret police. Meanwhile, she has risen far in the Ministry of Education and has been named to head a peace delegation to the USA — a student group in which she insists including her daughters. With great misgiving, Leo agrees not to stand in the way of their leaving for New York.

There, in New York, still in 1965, a tragic series of events involving Raisa, her younger daughter, Elena, Jesse Austin, and a senior FBI agent named Jim Yates swiftly unfold. Leo is unhinged by the tragedy and devotes his life to unraveling the mystery behind it.

Again the scene shifts. It’s 1973, and Leo has just failed again in his frantic attempts to leave the Soviet Union and make his way to New York to investigate the mystery. Seven years later, in 1980, we find him in Kabul, where he had been given a dangerous assignment as punishment for attempting to flee the Soviet Union. He is now the longest-surviving Soviet “advisor” to Afghanistan’s Communist Party, training the new Communist regime’s secret police. Here, in the shadow of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the ferocious resistance by the mujahedeen, Leo becomes embroiled in a series of violent and troubling experiences that eventually make it possible for him to travel to New York at last.

In the concluding scenes of this extraordinarily compelling novel, we find Leo in New York, scrambling to unlock the mystery that has bedeviled him for a decade and a half.

Agent 6 is the conclusion of Tom Rob Smith’s Leo Demidov trilogy, which began three years ago with Child 44, his debut novel. Child 44 was an instant success, both critically and commercially, and won numerous awards both as a thriller and as a work of literature. It was followed in 2009 by The Secret Speech. All three books are brilliant, and all can be read without reference to the others.

Tom Rob Smith is a young, Cambridge-educated British writer, son of a Swedish mother and an English father. It’s difficult to understand how he could have acquired such a fine sensibility about life in Stalinist Russia, let alone in Afghanistan under Soviet occupation. Smith was born in the year the USSR invaded Afghanistan, a quarter-century after Stalin’s death. Yet Agent 6 rings true throughout.

Russia Under Putin

A review of Three Stations: An Arkady Renko Novel by Martin Cruz Smith

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

Mikhail Gorbachev, who ought to know, recently declared that the regime of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev is hard to distinguish from the old Communist regime because both are grounded in authoritarianism. Arkady Renko, the investigator hero of Martin Cruz Smith’s successful series of novels about crime and punishment, first in the USSR and now in Russia, would surely agree.

For nearly 30 years, Renko has plumbed the depths of Russia’s deepest and darkest recesses in search of justice and found little but scorn and resistance as his reward. The seemingly bottomless corruption of the Soviet legal system – the courts, the prosecutors, and the police – is indistinguishable from that of today’s. Only the criminals have changed: they’re billionaires now, victors in the latter-day scramble for spoils unleashed by the fall of Communism.

Three Stations, locale of most of the action in the novel of the same name, is a transportation hub in Moscow where three underground rail lines meet. It’s a place where hustlers, pimps, and young prostitutes just in from the countryside mingle with teenage thugs, under the eye, and often the direction, of the police. The desolate setting seems carefully chosen to mirror the straits in which investigator Renko finds himself as Three Stations begins: suspended, ignored, and on the verge of dismissal for being too good at his job.

In the course of this fast-moving and engaging story, Renko, disobeying orders as always, immerses himself in investigating the murder of a young woman whom his superiors wish to ignore. She has been declared a prostitute and her murder unworthy of further inquiry, but Renko knows better. As he delves ever more deeply into the matter, he becomes involved with the once and future billionaire owner of a string of casinos, a legendary ballerina and her son, and a mysterious young woman who has come to Moscow in search of her baby.

The tale is a good one. But what is most remarkable about Three Stations, as is the case with every one of the seven Arkady Renko novels since 1981, is the compelling way that Smith sets the scene. It is difficult to believe that the author lives in Marin County and never set foot in the Soviet Union before researching Gorky Park, his best-selling  first book in the series. If you’ve spent time in Russia, you’ll be convinced that Smith has lived there longer. If for no other reason, Three Stations is worth reading to gain an inside look at Russia under Putin and understand what life must be like for millions of Muscovites.

ISBN-10: 0743276744

ISBN-13: 978-0743276740

ASIN: B0035G08Q2