Our only strength is in how strong we seem.
I was a bit apprehensive about picking up this book. On one hand, a friend whose reading tastes often match mine has been singing it praises, and also, I'm morbidly fascinated by the history of nuclear research and related disasters in the Soviet Union, the Kyshtym dysaster in particular. So I was curious about a potential new take on it. On the other hand, at the time when everyone around me loved The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, I couldn't even get past the first couple of chapters, so I thought Natasha Pulley just may not be the author for me. And also, I'm often wary about reading books set in Russia/USSR/any post-Soviet countries written by Western authors, because for some incomprehensible reason, they always get a lot of very basic things wrong and I end up being constantly taken out of the story. I don't know what it is about Russia/USSR that makes it so hard to research. I know we Slavs are weird, but we're not aliens. It should be possible to get the facts straight, the information is out there!
Anyway, I did pick up the book eventually, and I don't regret it. The plot was solid, the vibes were just right, and while I can't say I liked any of the characters, I definitely found them fascinating. The titular Valery is a textbook example of the Well-Intentioned Extremist trope who saves the good guys and mass-murders the bad ones with equal cheer. His friend and love interest, the KGB agent Shenkov, is the kind of character I kind of love to hate: someone who has decided the only way to combat an evil system is by joining it and committing lesser evils in its name: "If I don't do it, a psychopath would do the same thing but worth." Honestly, the only two characters I would actually want to hang out with were Shenkov's wife Natasha and Albert the literal octopus, but I found all the rest of them endlessly fascinating. There were a lot of super poignant scenes here, some of which are definitely going to stick with me for ages, like Valery's conversation with Shenkov's daughter about death, or his and Shenkov's night in Moscow. I also loved the way the science was woven into the plot, and how solid it was, or at least felt to me. This book contains a better explanation of what radiation is than any scientific article I've encountered.
As for the portrayal of USSR... um. Yes, I did get taken out of the story numerous times. The big picture stuff was actually spot on! The dystopian feel of the communist reality, the state's constant reliance on being overrestimated by the evil west while underestimating the enemy like there's no tomorrow, everyone being an unreliable narrator in their own life because you've gotta keep telling lies that you know everyone knows are lies but the point is to keep telling them. Ideas before people. All the interactions with Moscow authorities. The mentions of the famine and the Ukrainian nationalists. All of that was definitely well done and familiar, both through my parents' and grandparents stories and attitudes and to an extent first-hand, because hey, modern Russia isn't exactly far off from its USSR roots, especially nowadays.
But then came the minor stuff that just kept making me facepalm and roll my eyes. Early on, Valery arrives to Sverdlovsk and comments that he's never heard of it, and that alone almost made me drop the book because I couldn't imagine being immersed into a story that treats the facts so damn wrong. Listen. It's absolutely impossible that an educated Soviet man didn't know what Sverdlovsk was. Just 100% impossible, okay? I don't know what the author was even thinking. Maybe that he hasn't ever lived anywhere near it or something, that Russia is huge? But, well, it's an equivalent of a California never knowing of Boston or something. It's ridiculous. The city that was known as Sverdlovsk under Soviets is currently called Yekateringburg. It was also called Yekaterinburg in the past, way before the USSR even existed. It was founded in goddamn 1723. It's been the site of numerous historical events, INCLUDING the establishment of the USSR itself! It's literally where they shot the last Tzar! I... I can't even. This makes negative amount of sense for Valery to never have heard of it.
Or, like, here are Shenkov's thoughts about another prominent city: "Chelyabinsk had no military significance. Its largest industry was tractor-building." Are you kidding me? We're in cold war times, post WW2. It's not what people talked about, but it's what everyone and their dog knew: tractor-building = tank-building and god-knows-what-other-military-shit-building, too. During WW2, it was where plenty of the factories went to make supplies for the frontlines. It didn't just have a "tractor-building" industry, by the by, it also had a railway-building factory that coincidentally (because every industry = military industry in the communist heaven, remember?) was the place where some of the best Soviet tanks of their time were first constructed, and that wasn't even a secret, that was a point of pride. They made artillery there, and missiles, and plenty of other shit, and this was a place where they started training military personnel during WW2 and never, ever stopped, and this is all literally Wikipedia-level research.
There were plenty of other details, like numerous mentions of God/Jesus. I'm not saying that never happened, but people of these characters' age, in these characters' positions, and under these characters' circumstances wouldn't have mentioned God so often. They'd go for equivalents of "damn it" or expletives or literally anything else that didn't go against the Soviet world view, and religion went against the Soviet world view. They literally had a subject called "scientific atheism" in every university. It was a point of importance to eradicate faith. Or, like, the constant presence of tv remotes? I don't know, maybe some top-end tv set's had those, but it's not what I associate with Soviet-made tech at all. I distinctly remember how my entire family was having fun with our first remote for our first non-Soviet-made tv-set in the 1990s. Before that, when you wanted to switch the channel, you got up, went to your tv, and turned a knob to the side of the screen. It wasn't like you'd have to do it often. There were 2-5 channels to pick from at most, depending on the time period and the region you were in.
There's also the matter of the book being written in a distinctly British English with lots of specific turns of spech that make no sense in context when you look at them closely. A random example: "he would ask them whatever they'd been smoking." Using a phrase like that, no matter how jokingly/ironically, implies a possibility of those people smoking something that would alter their minds. I'm not saying there were no drugs in the Soviet Union, but they weren't a thing that popped to mind, outside of specific communities, and mostly at a later time than the book is set in. "Whatever they'd been drinking" or even "how hard they'd been drinking" would have conveyed the same effect without clashing with the realities. Also, there's that detail about Shenkov pronouncing Valery's name without the final sound (й), and honestly... how? Why? With some accents, the й would be a bit shorter, less prominent, but it would still be distinctly there! You don't just drop the final sound like that, it doesn't even sound natural, nobody would do it. Maybe if Shenkov started addressing/referring to Valery as Valera or something without being invited to, that would have conveyed a similar effect without breaking my brain. :D
Also, I'm not sure the characters would have been quite so shocked by the misogyny they saw in the West. Women in the USSR faced their own challenges, which is something Valery does acknowledge at multiple points to be fair. While they were expected to work and had better chances at building careers, especially if they came from sufficiently privileged backgrounds and/or especially after WW2 when the male population suffered a huge blow for understandable reasons, that arrangement Shenkov had with Natasha? Where he was the one to take care of the kids while she delved into science? That was extremely rare. Women were expected to work *and* be the housekeepers for their family. My Grandma was in charge of one of the biggest libraries in her city, a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, she had a great career, and then she came home in the evenings and cooked supper for the entire family before she could sit down. My Grandpa was kind enough to do the dishes afterward and to take out the trash, and on weekends he helped with some of the cleaning. But mostly, keeping house was still firmly a woman's work, and men helped if they were willing to. Admittedly, it was such a natural thing for many that perhaps it was the characters' male gaze that prevented them from seeing that clearly.
I could probably go on, but instead I'll just once again say that yeah, I liked the book as a story. I would have probably liked it even more if I didn't grow up in the realities the author's trying to portray and didn't know how off the portrayal was.
