Deviation Posting – Child 44 and the Underbelly of Stalinism

A slight deviation from China as occasionally happens here. I thought I’d throw in a recommendation and plenty of praise for Tom Rob Smith’s great novel Child 44. It’s a crime story set in early 1950s Soviet Union where an NKVD investigator finds himself on the trail of a serial killer. Of course it’s purge time as usual and officially crime doesn’t exist in Stalin’s worker’s paradise.

From a historical point of view what is really interesting is the book’s attention to little looked at issues of the Stalinist era. Criminals did exist and certainly organised criminal gangs continued to exist that dated back to Tsarist times. This has always interested me as when researching my history of North Korea some time back I came across the existence of criminal gangs in all the DPRK’s major cities. They too are not officially admitted to. The idea that purely criminal gangs can continue to exist, and indeed grow and thrive, under the kind of totalitarianism seen in 1950s USSR or present day DPRK is interesting. Some businesses are just more resilient than others I guess.

Smith’s Child 44 works brilliantly as a novel but also as a piece of seemingly well research social history. Naturally historians have been busy with the massive issues of Stalinism since the collapse of the USSR but I hope more do start to look at social history such as regular crime and its investigation during the period.

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