The last of Simon Sebag Montefiore's Moscow Trilogy relates the helter-skelter fortunes of a Jewish Russian writer.
RED SKY AT NOON
Simon Sebag Montefiore
Century
The last of Sebag Montefiore’s Moscow Trilogy (it is preceded by the acclaimed Sashenka and One Night in Winter), Red Sky at Noon relates the helter-skelter fortunes of a Jewish Russian writer, Benya Golden, whose literary career is rudely brought to an end with his arrest and trial in January 1940 for conspiring to murder Stalin and his entourage (needless to say, a totally fictitious charge).
Golden is sentenced to 10 years hard labour and sent to the notorious gulag Madyak-7 in Kolyma in distant Siberia.
One of the group passing judgement is Hercules Satinov, one of Stalin’s closest advisers, a fictional character who moves easily from quiet beast to unreliable saviour, chameleon characteristics of anyone hoping to retain their place close to Joseph Stalin himself. Satinov appears in all three books of the trilogy.
In the gulag, Golden manages to save his skin by becoming literary tutor to the mafia boss, an aspiring playwright, in whose company Golden meets a motley crew of criminal types from various nationalities of the Soviet Union. When Germany and its allies invade the Soviet Union in June 1941 many of the prisoners in the gulag volunteer for the front, including Golden, hoping their exploits will gain them a pardon, or at least get them out of the hell of the gulag. In the panic that ensues in Stalin’s entourage, as a result of the collapse of the Red Army in the first months of the war, inmates of the gulags are permitted to volunteer for the "shtrafbats", battalions made up of "volunteers" from penal camps and prisons, sent directly to the front line to stem the German advance. Such "permission" was as good as a death sentence, even if life in the camps was perhaps a slower and more miserable death.
Golden’s mates from the gulag, one or two of whom were Cossacks, are sent to join a cavalry squadron on the Don River south of Stalingrad and take part in the last cavalry charges of history, their sabres cutting a swath through the Italian troops somewhat unwillingly defending the southern flanks of the German advance. Wounded and captured, Golden falls in love with his Italian nurse, who rescues him from the clutches of fascist torturers.
This mid-section of the book is written in somewhat hackneyed prose, reading at times as a pastiche of cheap romantic adventure stories: "He stared at Fabiana, into her eyes - they were a dark brown, and then the sunbeam fell on her face and the brownness turned to the lightness of honey, and he suddenly realised what he already knew, that he was going to trust her."
As in all action novels, subtle characterisation tends to take second place, although the interesting exception is Stalin, where there are hints of a tragic inner core to the maniacal ringmaster.
The wartime exploits of the shtrafniki are exciting, the action moves confidently with telling detail and a sense of authenticity. So, too, are the passages around Stalin and his advisers and toadies, linking this novel to the others in the trilogy and to Sebag Montefiore’s research interests. This includes the tragic first love of Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, a teenager unable to trust anybody, yet anxious to have a personal life outside the glare of Kremlin in-fighting.
The action of the novel takes place over 10 days on the southern front just prior to the battle of Stalingrad, but with flashbacks and an epilogue that moves forward to satisfy the curiosity of those who want to know how it all ends.
History and fiction are well blended to give an insight into the cruelties of war, into the brittle fates of anyone subject to totalitarian rule. If those cruelties seem sometimes overdone then the realities of recent events unfortunately only confirm their ubiquity, even if Sebag Montefiore seems to hunt out the worst morsels to feed our armchair outrage.
- Peter Stupples teaches at the Dunedin School of Art
