Kolyma (novel)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Kolyma is a political thriller by the British writer Tom Rob Smith from 2009. The original English title The Secret Speech plays on Khrushchev's secret speech about the personality cult and its consequences on the XX. At the CPSU party congress , in which he distanced himself for the first time from his predecessor Stalin and made his crimes public. As a result, there are a number of attacks on former MGB officers in the novel . By kidnapping his daughter, Leo Demidow is blackmailed into smuggling into a gulag camp on the Kolyma in order to free a prisoner. The plot follows on from Smith's first child, Child 44 . The successor Agent 6 completes the trilogy .

content

In June 1949 the young MGB officer Leo Demidow received his first assignment. He sneaks the trust of the priest Lasar in order to denounce him. Only for his wife Anisja does the loyal secret police develop feelings. To save her from arrest, he proposes marriage to her. But Anisja coolly rejects him, and Leo lets out his anger on the indomitable Lasar, which he brutally beats up.

Seven years later, after investigating a series of murders of children , Leo Demidov is head of the first homicide squad in the Soviet Union . His former supervisor Timur Nesterow is now his closest colleague and friend. His wife Raisa learned to love him after he distanced himself from his past life at the MGB. Elena, who was adopted two years ago, has also found her way into her new family. Only her sister, 14-year-old Soja, hates Leo fervently. She blames him for the murder of her parents and fantasizes about violent revenge.

The speech of Khrushchev at the XX. CPSU party congress and its criticism of Stalinism heralds reforms in the Soviet Union and the beginning of the thaw . But for Leo's former colleagues at the renamed KGB , a period of fear dawns of being held accountable for past crimes. Two secret police officers are driven to suicide. When Krassikov, the patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church , who worked so closely with the Soviet authorities that he betrayed numerous priests, was also murdered , it was discovered who was behind the acts of revenge. It is Lasar's wife Anisja, who has since been released from prison, who now calls herself Frajera and has become the leader of a gang of criminals in the camp, the so-called “ wory w sakone ” or “wory” for short.

Frajera's gang kidnaps Leo's daughter Soja to blackmail her father into freeing Lasar from the Kolyma gulag . With the support of Frol Panin from the Ministry of the Interior, Leo was smuggled into the camp as a prisoner. But Lasar, whose injuries have still not healed, recognizes his former tormentor. As a priest, he holds a prominent position in the camp and lets his fellow inmates harass the exposed “ Chekist ”. Leo also learns about the murder of his friend Timur, who was supposed to support him. Taken between all fronts, he took Khrushchev's speech to the gulag to stir up unrest. In fact, there is a mutiny and the guards are overwhelmed by the inmates. Leo manages to escape with Lasar, who joins him to see his wife again, before the uprising is brutally suppressed. But the exchange of prisoners in Moscow goes wrong: Frajera no longer shows any interest in her husband and shoots him while she is throwing soy in a sack into the Moscow River .

The Moscow homicide squad was disbanded six months later. Not least under the impression of the Frajeras series of murders, which Leo could not prevent, the traditionalists in the Kremlin regained lost ground and stopped many reforms. Leo learns from Frol Panin that he used Frajera to achieve exactly this effect. And Panin goes even further: he deliberately stirs up internal political conflicts among the Soviet allies in order to provoke an intervention by the Red Army and to counteract Khrushchev's disarmament plans. Once again he uses Frajera's services, which is currently active in Hungary . When he reveals to Leo that his daughter Soja is alive and fighting at Frajera's side, Leo and Raisa make their way to Budapest , where they witness the Hungarian uprising .

Indeed, Frajera plays a key role in the insurgents. But she does not act on behalf of Panin, but plays her own game: She escalates the uprising in order to achieve the most bloody intervention possible, through which the brutality of the Soviet Union is to be shown to the world public. Her ultimate revenge is directed not just against the people who once wronged her, but against the whole country. At her side are her foster son Malysch and Soja, who has fallen in love with the boy of the same age. When the Soviet Army marches in, Malysh is fatally wounded in the fighting. Leo and Raisa manage to escape with their daughter, while Frajera sacrifices himself in order to document the fights as vividly as possible.

When they returned to Moscow, the Demidov's family life relaxed. Mentally ill Elena recovered after her sister's return, and Soja and her adoptive father also grew closer. Panin offers Leo to return to the KGB, but the latter prefers to help out in the bakery, which is under the rooms of the disbanded homicide department.

reception

Following the success of its predecessor Child 44 also reached Kolyma , the German bestseller lists of the mirror in the category Hardcover / Fiction and later Paperback / Fiction. The reviews in the German-language feature sections, on the other hand, were rather mixed.

According to Sylvia Staude, Tom Rob Smith dares to venture into "difficult thriller terrain" that is "oppressive" in its richness of detail and plausibility. For Kolja Mensing , the author has succeeded in creating “another intelligent political thriller in a historical guise”, in which “conspiracy theories, fast-paced action and history lessons” alternate. According to Axel Müller, however, after a clever start, the novel "soon developed into a pure set-pushing". The main character's reflections lack “depth and subtlety” and the end is pure kitsch. Similarly, for Rainer Moritz, “an ambitious novel that has been driven for a long time by astonishing narrative energy” ends in a kitschy “chamber play that trivializes political rebellion and evades into relationship melodrama”. For Ingo Petz , Kolyma falls significantly behind Smith's first child, Child 44 . The book consists of "linguistic gross sluggishness, improbabilities and characters with the psychogram of a Colorado potato beetle". The density and depth of the predecessor are "victims of this gimmicky bang-boom-bang-writing". At the end of the trilogy, he would like the author to “return to his old form”.

expenditure

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kolyma (hardcover) ( Memento from April 2, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at Buchreport .
  2. ↑ Kolyma (paperback) ( Memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) at Buchreport .
  3. ↑ Review notes on Kolyma at perlentaucher.de .
  4. ↑ Sylvia Staude: The big brother . In: Frankfurter Rundschau of January 29, 2009.
  5. ↑ Kolja Mensing : In the heart of darkness . On: Deutschlandradio Kultur on January 9, 2009.
  6. ↑ Axel Müller: Everyone is suspicious . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of March 9, 2009.
  7. ^ Rainer Moritz : In the ice block . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from August 19, 2009.
  8. ↑ Ingo Petz : Kalashnikov with a jam . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of July 4, 2009.