Old friendships can be hard to maintain. People grow up, their interests and priorities change, they find partners and start families, and life is shaped by bigger forces than whatever threw them together in childhood. And what greater force exists than a communist revolution?
These are some of the problems facing Vasil Murtov, a middle-aged chauffeur to a man who is, on paper, his oldest friend. In “pre” times, Little Lavrushya had been the son of a disgraced anti-Tsarist radical, taken in by Murtov’s wealthy bourgeois family for a chance at a better education and life. A few decades and counter-revolutions later, Murtov’s schoolyard bestie is now Lavrentiy Beria, leader of the Georgian communist state, former chief of the secret police and one of Stalin’s most ruthlessly efficient functionaries.
You don’t need to retain all your high school history knowledge to remember that when it comes to Soviet history, Beria’s name evokes a monstrous legacy: a butcher, spymaster and notorious sexual predator whose victims number in the thousands. Through it all, the fictional comrade Murtov has been kept close to hand – and firmly in his place.
It’s not a premise that screams “comedy” but these are the heightened stakes that the Australian journalist and novelist Malcolm Knox takes on in his equally wry and brutal novel, The First Friend. As a follow-up to 2020’s Bluebird, which explored salty midlife crises and complex communities in beachy New South Wales, 1930s Soviet-era intrigue might seem a dramatic left turn.
But, like Armando Iannucci’s 2017 film The Death of Stalin, Knox’s Soviet saga is a jet-black comedy pitched for our moment of wannabe strongmen, gangsters in chief and clown princes who clutch at power and rule their own realities, egged on by circles of sycophants and opportunists happy to indulge in the shared delusion, whatever its violent outcomes.
We find Murtov and Beria at a moment of ratcheting tension in 1938. The second world war is just around the corner, Stalin’s catastrophic reforms have killed millions and there’s a climate of fear, paranoia and denial after a bloody purge of old Bolsheviks. Beria has been tasked with preparing for the Steel One’s visit to his homeland but it’s a seemingly poisoned chalice: failure might bring humiliation and death – but resounding triumph will also put a target on your back.
As the big visit looms, the toxic relationship between Beria, Murtov and their wider circle lets Knox explore what motivates the loyal apparatchiks, fixers and foot soldiers who enable their boss’s monstrosities, even as each move ensures they inch further down the conveyor belt to their own inevitable use-by date.
Chief among them is Murtov, whose life is “a high wire” act with a co-star who “might at any moment push him to his certain death”. We’re invited to ponder what keeps Murtov under the thumb of his old friend despite years of abject humiliation, and the atrocities Beria carries out just out of eye line and earshot while Murtov is waiting in the car or in the next room.
Is Murtov’s loyalty and wilful blindness led by money and material comfort? Self-preservation? Fear for his family? A genuine belief in the revolution? Or an understanding that Soviet life, and Lenin and Marx’s notions of “who, or whom” and “historical necessity”, have been reduced to a crude calculus of eat-or-be-eaten?
Either way it’s only a matter of time before the other jackboot drops. For Beria we know what history has in store – promoted to the head of the NKVD, architect of the Katyn massacre, among other atrocities, and eventually purged by Khrushchev months after Stalin’s death. But knowing the end does little to alleviate the dread of what might happen in between. The fictional Murtov is no different – Knox opens the book on his deathbed then begins each section of the book with a countdown of days remaining, yet still maintaining suspense and surprise.
The First Friend might share plenty of DNA with the Iannucci school of political satire (in the acknowledgments, Knox credits The Death of Stalin as having a “liberating effect”) but there’s also an unlikely thread of Working Dog-style Australian humour in Knox’s vision of Soviet-era Georgia, and a cast who think and speak like beer-breathed Hawke-era hacks, or back-alley gangsters in federation-era Melbourne (“God strike me pink, Vasil, what a pack of cunts,” exclaims “old mate Beria” early in the book. “Where’s our precious fucking larrikin spirit?”). You almost expect someone to be sent “straight to the gulag”.
It makes for amusingly anachronistic reading but framing a personality like Beria in such familiar, laconic terms also adds an unexpected humanity to a name in a history book who was responsible for incomprehensible acts of violence. Knox’s novel offers a scale model of a totalitarian regime played out in a single doomed friendship and, in the small, private displays of violence, we recognise the kind of carnage such men can inflict on a national scale, with the vast impersonal apparatus of state violence and the people who run it.
With friends like those, who needs despots?
The First Friend by Malcolm Knox is published by Allen & Unwin ($34.99)
