Face of Terror

The year is 1934. Stalin and Hitler are now in power. Peter Piatkov and Lydia Alexandrova, the principal characters in the two earlier novels of this trilogy (see my reviews of `A Death out of Season' and `Blood on the Snow') are now married. Peter is still a senior intelligence officer in the Cheka, now renamed the NKVD, and had just been awarded the Order of Lenin for his years of successful service. He still believes that the execution of former comrades for their Trotskyist connections is justified. Lydia, though still a communist, is sickened by all the killing, by the lies and by the stifling atmosphere of Stalinism. After having worked for the Cheka in the previous volume, she has resigned from intelligence work, for which she had been awarded the Order of the Red Banner. She is now working in Glavlit, the state censorship office (there is some improbability here, I think) and is temperamentally more indulgent and less rigorous in that role than her colleagues. And she is too sensitive in her understanding of literature to pass a grotesque Soviet interpretation of Macbeth. The Party, having liquidated its external enemies in the Soviet Union, is now combing through its own members, however exalted, to detect - or invent - the slightest sign of deviation. It is the time of the great purges after the murder of Kirov. Peter and Lydia have a malevolent enemy in the party, Boris Spichalsky, who had felt slighted by them in the previous volume, and he is relishes it when he is told to keep them under observation. Peter, on one of his missions to Germany, found himself under a chance arrest by the Gestapo who suspected he was spying for the Swiss. They had just started to torture him when a Soviet plant in the SS secured his release, and he returned to Moscow. But there he was now under suspicion of what he might have given away during his interrogation. Peter and Lydia are not attacked directly for a while: instead, a nightmarish web tightens around them as friends, colleagues and acquaintances are arrested, for no other reason that these had had contacts with them. Peter and Lydia know the system well enough to realize what is in store for them. Lydia, so profoundly disillusioned with the system, its hypocrisies and cruelties, abandons prudence and is almost longing for the day when the trap is sprung for her. Peter is more terrified: her arrest would of course implicate him, too. And so the story, and the trilogy, steadily and horribly moves on to its inexorable end. In Stalin's Soviet Union there were no saving miracles.