Moscow Underground by Catherine Merridale

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Review by Annabel

A crime novel set in Moscow, 1934 – a year in which the Moscow subway is being built under the city – sounded irresistible. Merridale is the author of several nonfiction books on Russia, winning the Pushkin Russian Book Prize and the Wolfson History Prize for her book Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia’s History. Reassured that she knows her subject thoroughly, I knew I’d enjoy her first novel.

The novel is narrated by Anton Belkin, a criminal investigator for the Procuracy. Belkin’s position is difficult – his father was a famed avant-garde painter, with views that don’t match Stalin’s increasing tyranny, but they have the privilege of living in an artist’s colony outside the city which is quiet and peaceful. One day Belkin is up early to go into work, only to find someone waiting for him.

Her car was waiting where our lane joined the Pereyaslavl Highway. She always chose that exact spot, beside a clump of birches at the edge of our old wood. I often wondered how much her driver ever knew. It was almost always the same man by that time: I recognised the shaven neck, the small ears ruthlessly exposed. The rear door opened and I caught a burst of hotter air. Withn, I could just see the outline of a woman, tall and slim, with a streak of silver in her thick, dark hair.

She is Vika, Belkin’s former lover, and a powerful member of OGPU, the secret police. She’s after a favour.

‘There’s been a death. Unusual. I’m going to need your help.’

Belkin prevaricates. There are procedures, he has to keep his head under the radar, but to no avail. Vika persuades him that he is the only man for the job in investigating the death of a prominent archaeologist, who was working with the tunnel engineers building the subway – on Shaft Seven to be precise – the one near the Kremlin. His body had been discovered by a Captain Jansons in the Transport section of OGPU. They’d arrested a person found over the body, a young lad, but the moment Belkin sees him he knows he couldn’t possibly have done it – he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time to get seen by Jansons, who is evasive and argumentative. Belkin feels compelled to try to save the boy’s life.

One step is to visit shaft seven to see where Dovlatov had been working. Elena Kucherenko who’d worked with Dovlatov arranges for him to see his papers, and as her boyfriend iss chief engineer on Shaft Seven, a visit too. All too soon, Belkin will discover Moscow’s hidden underground secrets – that the modern city was built on top of many churches amongst other buildings, and that Dovlatov had found one of the most important in the excavations, and these sites were full of precious items – relics, icons, texts and more – things worth killing for?

The novel takes a distinct turn from engineering towards archaeology and the history of the Russian church, as Belkin starts to investigate Dovlatov’s movements and contacts as discretely as he can, using his friend Misha, a chef, as a bit of a shield. As Belkin delves deeper, he discovers webs of intrigue all around, above and below ground, and also finds himself increasingly a person of interest. Yet he remains determined to free the teenager, Limonchik, who was arrested for Dovlatov’s murder.

Belkin is a well-drawn and sympathetic character. He’s middle-aged, wanting to have a quiet life, to keep his father in check, get on with his work, yet his sense of social justice is never going to let him have all of that all of the time. He so reminded me of De Luca, Carlo Lucarelli’s Bologna-based inspector in the political police at the tail end of WWII between the fascist collapse and the Nazi puppet state in The Darkest Winter. De Luca has to tread a fine line between his bosses and the partisans: Belkin faces a similar challenge. Then there is Vika, who also has to answer to her secret police bosses but has this independent streak that gets the results that keep her in favour.

I hadn’t quite expected the turn the novel took when it went from engineering to archaeology – but rather than stop the dig for the finds as would happen today, Stalin’s machine rolled on giving the archaeologists little time to work on what they found. Merridale has a lot of information and history to build into the narrative, and for the most part, it blends well, if sometimes at the expense of the pace, but it was never less than interesting.

As a quite intense literary crime thriller with many twists and turns, Moscow Underground succeeds, particularly because Merridale’s main protagonist Belkin, and his frenemy Vika are so well drawn, plus 1930s Moscow sounds such a fascinating if dangerous place. I hope that Merridale will come up with another outing for this pairing, and that Belkin can continue to work for justice under tyranny.

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Annabel is a co-founder of Shiny, and one of its editors.

Catherine Merridale, Moscow Underground (Fontana, 2025) ISBN 9780008761530, hardback, 324pp..

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