Child 44

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Kind 44 (English original title: Child 44 ) is a crime novel by the British writer Tom Rob Smith from 2008. It is set in the Stalinist Soviet Union in the early 1950s. Against the will of the authorities, who would rather see the acts covered up, a single policeman tries to solve a series of murders against children. Smith was inspired by the case of serial killer Andrei Tschikatilo for his novel . The trilogy about the Soviet secret police Leo Demidow was continued with the novels Kolyma and Agent 6 .

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In January 1933, during the famine in Ukraine , two boys hunted a cat in search of food. Suddenly Pavel, the elder, is attacked by a strange man and kidnapped. His younger brother, Andrei, helpless in his shortsightedness, can only tell his mother that his brother has disappeared without a trace.

Twenty years later, a little boy is found dead in Moscow : naked, with a slit stomach and dirt in his mouth. But because a brutal homicide offense in the Soviet Union under Stalin does not fit into the ideological concept of a person improved by communism , the circumstances of the find are covered up. MGB officer Leo Demidow is given the task of convincing the boy's father, his friend and work colleague Fyodor Andreyev, of a railway accident on the nearby tracks and, if necessary, intimidating him. He does this with conviction, because the former war hero is a loyal supporter of the Soviet system. Only the arrest of the alleged spy Anatoli Brodsky, who credibly assures him of his innocence, arouses in Leo doubts about the actions of the security authorities. During the persecution of Brodsky, Leo clashes with his deputy Vasily Nikitin, who unscrupulously executes a friend of Brodsky and his wife and who can only be prevented from shooting the two children through Leo's intervention. Leo knocks down Vasily in front of his subordinates, which makes the two men irreconcilable enemies.

Major General Kuzmin demands a proof of loyalty from his protégé Leo when he puts it on his own wife Raisa, who is also under suspicion of espionage. Leo struggles with himself for a long time whether he should betray his wife and thus save himself and his parents from the impending prison camp. The decisive factor is Raisa's surprising announcement that she is pregnant after many years of childlessness by the state. Leo, who dreams of family life, stands by his wife and disappoints his patron Kuzmin. Leo and Raisa are banished together to the Soviet province of Wualsk, an industrial city built around a Volga plant , where the demoted Leo is transferred to the militia . On the way he learns that Raisa lied to him. She found out about the investigation and just made up the pregnancy to save herself. Born a homeless orphan from the Great Patriotic War , she always tried to survive. She did not dare to turn down the advances of the influential MGB officer, but hated him through all the years of marriage as much as his unscrupulous fulfillment of duties. After this opening, the marriage seems to have broken down, but in the following weeks the couple who are dependent on one another can meet for the first time as equal partners and thus build a new relationship.

The work also arouses an undreamt-of interest in Leo when the body of a young girl, reminiscent of the Moscow child murder, is found in Wualsk. Leo's superior, General Nesterov, tries to blame a mentally ill boy on the crime, and when a second dead person, this time a boy, is found, he focuses the investigation on the homosexuals who are no less lawless in the Soviet Union . Leo succeeds in winning the general's trust and conducting secret research with him. They reveal that in recent months, numerous children's bodies have been found near rail links, all of which have the same modus operandi . But a serial killer is unthinkable even in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, and so all cases were blamed on marginalized social groups in order to improve the crime statistics. Leo counts 43 children's corpses; Arkady Andreev, whom he personally helped cover up, is child 44.

When Nesterov's secret investigations are exposed, Leo falls into the hands of the MGB and his intimate enemy Vasily. Under torture, he reports of a kidnapping in his childhood and his real name: Pavel. During the transport to a labor camp, he and Raisa manage to escape. Still inspired by the hunt down of the child murderer, they go to Rostov-on-Don , the scene of most murders. The only connection to Wualsk seems to be in the trade relationship between the Volga plant and Rostselmasch . In the tractor factory, he tracks down a Tolkach active on the Soviet black market , whose travel dates exactly match the dead bodies found. When he reads the name Andrei Trifomowitsch Sidorow, Leo realizes that it is his brother, with whom he has had no contact since he was kidnapped as a boy.

Andrej is not surprised when his brother visits him in his apartment, because as it turns out, he only staged the whole series of murders to draw attention to himself and to meet him again. All the details on the corpses refer to the two brothers' cat hunt on the day Pavel was kidnapped. Vasily bursts into the fraternal conversation, who has pursued the fugitive Leo to Rostov, but he is stabbed to death by Andrei, who is proud to have saved his brother this time. He then lets himself be shot by Pavel alias Leo. For him, everything turns for the better with the investigation of the series of murders. He is rehabilitated and becomes head of the first homicide squad in the Soviet Union. Together with his wife Raisa, he adopts the two orphans whose parents Vasili shot.

background

According to Tom Rob Smith, his first novel was inspired by the case of serial killer Andrei Tschikatilo , who murdered more than 50 people between 1978 and 1990. The fact that his deeds remained unsolved for over a decade was also due to the difficulties the Soviet judiciary had in recognizing the existence of a serial killer. By moving the plot to the 1950s, the era of Stalinism , Smith increased the pressure on his investigator, who puts his and his family's lives at risk with his opposition to the official line. A deliberate irony of the novel is that Marxism tries to explain people as the product of historical forces, but the serial killer Andrei is precisely such a product of historical events that have their origins in the Holodomor , which was partly described as the genocide of the Stalinist Soviet Union against the people of the Ukraine is rated. Smith, who took the background of the period from the book Harvest of Death by British historian Robert Conquest , explained: "The real serial killer of the book is the Soviet Union, which killed millions."

reception

The novel Child 44 has been translated into 36 languages ​​and was nominated for 17 international awards, of which it won seven. Among other things, he was on the longlist of the Booker Prize , he won the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and the Galaxy Book Award for best new author. The German translation reached second place in the Spiegel bestseller list in July 2008 in the hardcover / fiction category and 8th place in the 2008 best KrimiWelt list . Also in 2008, the novel was recorded as an audio book, spoken by Bernd Michael Lade .

In April 2015, a film adaptation of Daniél Espinosa's novel was released in American cinemas. The main roles are played by Tom Hardy as Leo Demidov, Noomi Rapace as his wife Raisa, Joel Kinnaman as Vasili Nikitin and Gary Oldman as General Timur Nesterov. In Russia, the screenings were banned just one day before the premiere date, on the grounds that the film would be inappropriate in the run-up to the commemoration celebrations for the victory over National Socialism.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Serial killers under Stalin . Background information on the novel at tom-rob-smith.de.
  2. ↑ Child 44 ( Memento from June 6, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) at the literary agency Curtis Brown .
  3. ↑ Child 44 ( Memento of the original from February 1, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.buchreport.de archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. at book report .
  4. ↑ Child 44 in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  5. ↑ Russia bans American film 'Child 44 ′ because it makes Stalin look bad , Washington Post, April 15, 2015