MALCOLM KNOX The First Friend. Reviewed by Ann Skea
Malcolm Knox’s new novel satirises the brutal madness of the Soviet Union, focussing on Stalin’s notorious head of secret police, Beria.
In the business of producing fiction, the novelist can never keep up with authoritarian political leaders. Such leaders offer an invitation to artists, most of all bullshit artists. You want to lie? Thank you I don’t mind if I do. …
In a novel, even when it uses history, the writer is an absolute and capricious ruler. Tyrannies begin with fiction and their reward is more fiction.
In these passages, Malcolm Knox perfectly describes the way The First Friend relies on history but ‘takes liberties’ with it; he also hints at the relevance its historic Stalinist setting has to politics and political leaders today.
The First Friend is both terrifying and blackly funny. Knox satirises the absurdities of life in Stalinist Russia, but he also includes grim passages that demonstrate the horrors of life there, too. Beria, Stalin, Yezhov – all were monsters. The October 1917 Russian Revolution and the subsequent civil wars, mass collectivisation, famines, purges, arrests and deaths of millions of landowners, peasants, and enemies of the regime, which are outlined in the brief ‘background to events’ in the opening pages – all are fact.
Vasil Anastavili Murtov, ‘first friend’ of Beria, however, is fictional, as is his family. So too is the woman, Natia Meskhi, First Assistant Secretary of the Communist Party, a summons from whom ‘was never good news’.
Natia Meskhi was an avid practitioner of what had come to be known as ‘in-depth language’, a form of Partyspeak in which words meant their exact opposite.
Murtov does not trust her, nor does he trust ‘AAA’ (Adam Adamashvili Adamadze), a ‘trainee driver’ who is also a product of Knox’s imagination. AAA is a perfect example of Post-Revolutionary youth brought up on Communist teachings, and he is enthusiastic about practising them. In a car with Beria, who has been complaining about his daughter and son, AAA suddenly breaks his silence:
‘The ABC of Communism,’ AAA said.
‘Ah – it speaks!’ said Beria.
‘The ABC of Communism,’ the kid repeated. ‘Published 1918. It was mandatory in our school. There will be no more speaking of “my” children, only “our” children.’
‘The fuck’s he on about?’ Beria asks Murtov.
‘The selfless Revolutionary will break from Pre-Revolutionary ties such as religion and family, and blow up the shell of private life,’ AAA went on …
‘Fuck me, it not only talks but it’s swallowed The ABC,’ Beria said. ‘I thought I was just having a whinge about my kids.’
Murtov is aware that AAA has a notebook in his pocket and records such things as Murtov’s wristwatch (‘banned after the October Revolution’), his awareness of Murtov’s early life as a part of the imperialist power elite and a ‘non-toiler’, and his ‘inherited blat’ (‘pull, patronage, privilege’) as a friend Beria. Murtov suspects AAA of seeking favour with Natia: ‘AAA was hers. AAA was Post, AAA was multicultural, AAA was a pure Natia mole.’
In spite of his closeness to Beria, Murtov lives in a constant state of tension. As does almost everyone else. The Revolution’s ‘general reinvention of reality’ means that spies are everywhere; appeasement of ‘The Steel One’, ‘Supreme Leader’ (Stalin) is mandatory and his every wish is anticipated; the struggle for power is constant; nobody is safe and nobody can be trusted. Language itself is so full of pitfalls that it is impossible to know what people really mean or intend. Reports are doctored and changed. People are cancelled, ‘sent to another world’, commit suspicious suicide, or are arbitrarily made ‘non-persons’ and imprisoned or enslaved in order to fulfil the government quotas that represent improvements.
Beria has his own warped sense of humour. He terrifies Murtov by holding his revolver against his own temple when he sees Murtov watching him:
With a delighted cackle, Beria pulled the trigger. It clicked against his head. He ‘fired’ again and again, amused to death.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘Georgian roulette: no bullets. But we’ll load it before we go into the Kremlin.’
There is humour, too, in some of the policies of the regime. At a reception to mark the opening of a new extension to the state art gallery, ‘what you would call a Party power dinner, organised by the Soviet Wives’ Movement’, Murtov notes that:
There was plenty of vodka, which Moscow was producing in great quantities. The Kremlin had ordered it as a taxation-raising measure to fund an urgent build-up of the Red Army. The vodka wasn’t designed to keep the population drunk; as Beria said, drunkenness was just a convenient by-product.
Uncertainty, however, pervades The First Friend. We know from the start that Murtov will be betrayed and die, but we do not know how. Knox maintains the tension throughout the book and section headings progress from ‘Forty Days to Live’ through to ‘No Days to Live’. All this time, Murtov is constantly with, or at the call of, Beria, who, as First Secretary of the Georgian Communist Party and governor of the autonomous Georgian republic, is suddenly tasked with preparing for a visit by Stalin to his Georgian birthplace. With only 38 days to prepare for this, Beria become increasingly stressed, drug-fuelled, paranoid and unstable.
‘Nothing’s confirmed, but I’m guessing it’s the anniversary of him taking over the Party … And if it’s something that big, he’ll bring the whole shitshow: family, Politburo, half of fucking Moscow. He’ll want to stay at the beach. For old time’s sake, you know?’
Even at home with his wife Babilina and his two young daughters, Murtov cannot completely relax. Babilina, who voluntarily resigned her teaching position as a university literature professor when purges of ‘Pre’ intellectuals began, has ‘inherited her family’s oppositional temperament’ and is too outspoken for comfort. His daughters are members of the Young Pioneers and have learned to respect the example of the USSR’s teenage ‘hero’, Pavlik Morozov, who squealed on his father, who was then executed, and whose family subsequently murdered him in revenge. Already, Babilina and Murtov are careful about what they say in front of the children, but as the days pass Murtov learns to his horror that nothing about their private conversations is secret; listening devices and informers are everywhere.
Beria’s brutality and his reputation for predatory attention to young girls are not brushed over, nor are his ‘ruthlessly calculated steps up the leadership ladder’ in his aim of eventually becoming Stalin’s successor. It comes as a great shock to him when Stalin promotes him to be deputy head of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, under his hated rival, Yezhov; it also means he must move to Moscow:
‘And in a month I’ve got to move to this shithole,’ Beria said. ‘That’s so Stalin, to demote a man upwards.’ …
‘It’s your first national role,’ Murtov said weakly.
Beria shook his head so firmly he nearly threw his pince-nez off his nose.
‘Boss of all the Transcaucasus, and now in this madhouse under Stalin’s eye. How’s that a promotion?’
Stalin then decides, for security reasons, to let Yezhov take control of the visit to Georgia. Promotion to Moscow is a step up for Beria, but losing control of the Georgia visit tips him further into dangerous instability. He determines to kill Yezhov, and Murtov is ordered to help him do this.
Murtov has always been Beria’s favoured companion, and has always done what ‘the boss’ required of him, but he has had nothing to do with Beria’s worst excesses. What he is asked to do now terrifies him, and the tension in the book mounts as this situation plays out and Murtov’s final day approaches. Even at his end, there is an unexpected twist to the story.
Malcolm Knox tells a gripping tale and he manages to make Murtov seem like an ordinary man caught up in the madness and horror of a place ruled by an autonomous dictator. Stalin was one such man, so too was Mao, and so too are those in control of totalitarian regimes in our present world. As a satire, there is humour in this book, but also truth. The ‘Alternative Facts’ of the Prologue are a reminder of the false ‘facts’, of image and document doctoring, and the cancel culture that all plague society today, and of the dangers they represent. Gaining supreme power, staying in power, and wielding power is still a murderous occupation.
Malcolm Knox The First Friend Allen & Unwin 2024 PB 416pp $34.99
Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.
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