Smith has painted a portrait from life. He researched the book in two visits to the Soviet Union, in 1989 and 1990, and was guided through Moscow’s underworld by a police detective named Alexander Stashkov, who took him on a tour of black markets and introduced him to real Russian crooks. The end of the cold war did not leave the novelist bereft of conspiracies or bad guys. Smith found pervasive corruption and strong links between the mafias and the apparatchiks of the Soviet Communist Party. “Everything is for sale in Moscow, if you’ve got hard currency,” he said in an interview. “When you criminalize business for 70 years, you end up with businessmen who are criminals and criminals who are businessmen.”
Smith’s Arkady Renko is one of the more memorable creations of cold-war fiction, as clever, guilt-ridden and self-effacing as any George Smiley. He is an honest man in a system that becomes no less crooked as communism fades out. When a Jewish “banker” for the mafiosi is blown up inside his car at an open-air black market, Renko follows a twisting trail to Munich and Berlin and then back to Moscow during the attempted coup against Gorbachev. The novel ends with the coup still unresolved–a hollow note of suspense, given that we all know how the plot against Gorbachev came out.
Will the new order be much different from the old one as crooks and commissars transform themselves into putative democrats? Smith is not optimistic. “There are hundreds of thousands of sincere democrats,” he says. “But in the confusion to come, they will be overwhelmed. In times of confusion, organization tends to win.” And no one is better organized than the mafias and the remnants of the Communist Party. Between them they perpetuate the U.S.S.R. under another name.
When Smith wrote “Gorky Park,” he did not expect to return to Renko or the Soviet Union. “I thought I had painted a picture of the country,” he says. “The only reason I went back to it is that the picture changed.” It continues to change in the era of Boris Yeltsin. Smith says his next novel will have nothing to do with Russia or Renko. But his head is full of Russian stories, and he thinks he will eventually be back in the U.S.S.R.
