The Secret Speech by Tom Rob Smith

Remember when Arlo Guthrie told us the story of Alice’s Restaurant (with full orchestration and five part harmony) just so he could tell us another story, this one about his day down at the draft office? In one level, I thought about that tell-one-story-to-tell-another routine while reading this. Not that such an angle is a bad thing. Just the way my brain operates sometimes.

FYI: the plot summary I prepare will be full of holes. To fill in the holes would spoil the numerous reveals for future readers. I’ll redact important facts.

It’s three years after the Child 44 affair. 1956. Leo is head of a homicide department in Moscow, but its existence is secret because to admit its existence would admit that the crime of murder, an obviously capitalist crime, happened in the evolving Communist order. Leo is called to a crime scene that involves a former colleague.  Then another is killed. His former boss kills his wife and 2 children before taking his own life.

In the aftermath of Stalin’s death, Khrushchev writes a speech that essentially bares the evils of the Stalin regime telling the populace that the policies of hate will no longer be accepted. Political prisoners in the gulags are being released and many, rightly, hold grudges so the increase in retaliations against the former secret police, which Leo used to work for, should not be a surprise.

Leo and Raisa’s oldest daughter, Zoya, has been kidnapped by a street gang (a voya), headed by the wife of Leo’s first arrest of Lazar, a priest. Anisya was pregnant when she was arrested and her child was taken from her. Now called Fraera, she comes out of the gulag as a revolutionary intent of taking away from Leo what had been taken from her.  A simple trade: his daughter for her husband.

Leo and Timur (his partner at homicide) go undercover on a prison transport ship headed for a Siberian gulag to get Lazar (no details, no spoilers. This segment of the story is incredibly intense).

Back in Moscow, the exchange goes wrong and I’ll just leave it at that (again, to say more would be venturing into spoiler territory.

That was the first story that had to be told for the second story. 

The scene shifts to Budapest. Fraera is prodding the Hungarians into revolt against the Russians and helps lead the revolt. Leo and Raisa are there looking for Zoya as the revolution explodes with first the revolutionaries backing the Russians up only to be brutally put down by overwhelming Russian military force.

Sorry about the redacting above. Had to be done to avoid spoilers for both books. Personally, I thought this was the equal to, and maybe even a little bit better than, Child 44 as this one seemed to be more forcefully paced. It appears to me that the overall theme of this trilogy (Agent 6 is the third, next up on my reading list) is Leo’s attempt at redemption for all his wrongs committed while he was part of the first Soviet secret police, just after WWII.  He had done so much to so many innocent people that Leo tries and tries and tries to redeem his own sense of humanity only to keep suffering setback after setback. This isn’t 3 steps forward and 2 steps back – it’s more like 1 step forward an 5 steps back as the pendulum of Moscow’s own attempts at distancing itself from Stalin lead to a confused, paranoid, and vengeful citizenry.  I’ve been trying to come up with a turn of a phrase to describe this series and the best I can say about it is that while this falls under either the ‘thriller’ or ‘mystery’ category, the word I would use to describe both books is ‘intelligent’. This series (so far) is not for everyone. These 2 books are intense, violent, suspenseful, depressing, and extremely unsympathetic to most all the principle characters, the time, and the postwar Soviet society. Various supporting characters are introduced and carefully developed into critical roles only to meet an unexpected and untimely death, putting Leo (and ourselves) further away from redemption for crimes of the past.