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.)

An historical thriller with an insider’s view of Communism in Eastern Europe

A review of The Confession, by Olen Steinhauer

@@@@ (4 out of 5)

1956: Nikita Khruschev’s Secret Speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes; the Hungarian uprising and unrest in Poland it triggered; the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt following Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal; Sputnik’s launch. It was a watershed year, somewhat comparable to 1968 more than a decade later. In The Confession, we view the world of 1956 through the eyes and the troubled mind of Ferenc Kolyeszar, a policeman in a fictional Eastern European country somehow nestled among Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Romania.

However, Kolyeszar is a novelist as well as a policeman, having published a well-received novel about his experiences as a soldier resisting the German occupation at the outset of World War II. Now 37 years old, he is writing The Confession to chronicle his shattering experiences at home and at work against the backdrop of fateful world events.

Kolyeszar’s story involves the unraveling of his marriage to Magda, the disappearance of a senior official’s young wife; the sometimes rocky relationships among Kolyeszar and Stefan, Emil, Leonek, and Brano, his fellow police officers in the District; Stefan’s reopened investigation into the murder of his partner immediately after the War; and the visit to the District of a KGB Colonel from Moscow named Kaminski. These parallel story lines weave in and out of one another, converging in a climactic end-game that brings a just conclusion to The Confession. Along the way we become immersed in the endless strain as Communist rule solidifies in Eastern Europe with mounting ferocity. This is an engrossing and skillfully written story.

Olen Steinhauer’s The Confession is the second in a cycle of five novels set a decade apart from one another about the men of the District. Its predecessor, The Bridge of Sighs, was written from the perspective of Kolyeszar’s colleague Emil Brod and took place in 1948-49. The subsequent three novels carry the story forward to the fall of Communism in 1989. To my mind, judging from what I’ve read so far, this five-book cycle is as insightful a history of Eastern Europe under Communism as any history of the period.

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.