Fiction

Moscow Underground

Moscow, April 1934. The planners have been hard at work; the city is unrecognisable. Entire streets have been torn down: old churches, the great city walls. What is promised is a gleaming new metropolis, a capital not merely for Soviet Russia but for the whole Communist world. The flagship project is an underground railway, the Metro, itself planned as a string of palaces for everyone. The work is gruelling, the challenges immense, but nothing is permitted to stand in the way of its construction. Nothing, that is, except the past and simple human greed.

Anton Belkin is an investigator with the Procurator General’s Office. At thirty-seven, he already has more than a decade of professional experience, much of it focused on the avoidance of controversy. The latter is his father's province, for the older man was famous among artists of the revolutionary avant-garde. Now that artistic temperament does not fit with the times. The family is in jeopardy. When his sole protector in the security services, a high-ranking officer called Viktoria Maksimovna Volkova (Vika), asks Anton to take on a case, he will have little choice.

The crime he must investigate is the murder of a medievalist. Andrei Dovlatov was employed by the Metro to map and report on buried masonry. His body has now been discovered in the ruins of an old house near the Moscow river. A young man is already in custody, but Vika's suspicions are focused on a fellow-officer. Anton is certain she knows more, but he is quickly trapped. The only way to free himself will be to find the truth.

Anton's inquiry will lead him through the many worlds of Stalin's Moscow, from academic libraries to a killing-ground operated by the secret police. Working in defiance of Procuracy regulations, he must navigate the darkening world of Stalinist dictatorship. As his involvement deepens, he also tells us more about his history with Vika, a tale that reaches back to the Soviet civil war in Ukraine. Though Vika now seems ruthless as a secret police boss, the story he confides is one of shared vulnerability and loss. Nothing will be quite as it seems. For Anton, as for everyone, the past will never really free the future from its grip.

The past, too, stands across the path of the showcase Metro's construction. There are plenty of physical obstacles in the soil-layers under Moscow streets, including ancient listening-posts and cellars full of wine. Anton's investigation will report on all of this, but the secret he will ultimately discover will prove to be far more valuable - and far more dangerous.

Told in the first person by Anton himself, Moscow Underground explores how people can live in the shadow of tyranny and the fractures deep in Russian culture that continue to this day.

Moscow Underground is published by Fontana, an imprint of Harper Collins.

For publicity information, please contact Laura N. Meyer, Head of Publicity, William Collins: Laura.N.Meyer@harpercollins.co.uk