In the New Russia, old specters still haunt the land

WE are fortunate that Martin Cruz Smith has kept Arkady Renko, his go-to protagonist, in limited circulation the last 26 years. “Gorky Park” (1981) was much too good a novel to be cheapened with gratuitous sequels, and the Russian homicide detective it introduced much too precious a literary commodity to saddle with second-rate cases.

But now, just three years since Renko’s appearance in “Wolves Eat Dogs” found him solving crimes in the radioactive wasteland of Chernobyl, Smith has come up with one of his most accomplished performances yet and, as with each of its predecessors, takes what in essence is a police procedural and elevates it to the level of absorbing fiction.

It’s hard to figure out at first what is motivating Renko in “Stalin’s Ghost.” Is it a desire to solve a series of violent deaths in Moscow that his superiors have made clear are none of his business, or is it to win back the affections of Dr. Eva Kazka, the chain-smoking physician he met in Chernobyl who is now moving in with a colleague of Renko’s, a colleague whose political ambitions place him at the center of the forbidden inquiry?

There is always a compelling back story in an Arkady Renko novel; in this instance, it is how his countrymen are coping in what is euphemistically known as the New Russia. The Orwellian menace of the Soviet Union is long gone, but the widening rift between enormously rich people who keep getting wealthier and the desperately poor who continue to go hungry has caused unrest about the land.

As the novel opens, Renko is given the dubious assignment of investigating reports that a spirit resembling Joseph Stalin is making nightly appearances on a platform at Moscow’s Chistye Prudy subway station. There is no second coming of Uncle Joe, of course -- the ruthless dictator responsible for killing 20 million of his own people remains buried in his tomb, and “miracles only happen on orders from above,” is the way one skeptical police official puts it -- but the ultra-national spirit of his bloody rule has been revived in some quarters to evoke the heroic years of World War II and to effect a course change in the government.

From this disquietude has emerged the Russian Patriot movement, and who better to lead the charge than a dashing veteran of the second Chechen war, a hero, it is purported, who took out a band of rebels during a fierce firefight, a claim that has only one complication -- all of the supposed enemies were shot in the back with single bullets, their bodies gathered around a campfire. The leader of that engagement was none other than Nikolai Isakov, formerly a member of the elite Black Berets and now the detective who is the object of Eva’s affections.

From Moscow the scene shifts to Tver, a gloomy city on the Volga River where thousands of combatants died during World War II and where Isakov hopes to advance his candidacy at rallies mounted by the mass graves of fallen soldiers. It is also a place common to each of the people killed in Moscow whose untimely deaths Renko finds more than coincidental. Smith’s fondness for the surreal is richly evident here, as bands of grave plunderers -- Red Diggers looking for fallen Russians to venerate as heroes of the motherland, Black Diggers looking for rusted German souvenirs they can hawk on the Internet -- provide a dark backdrop for the denouement.

Renko never loses his composure, of course, not when he is being strangled with piano wire by a beautiful sociopath he meets at a gathering of superannuated Communists, not when he is shot at point-blank range by the crazed father of a teenage chess prodigy he has befriended. Death was averted in the first instance by coolness and force of will, in the latter only because the bullet came from a World War II-vintage weapon that had lost its lethality through years of degradation. Renko’s droll perspective doesn’t fade through any of these distractions. “Without vodka and cigarettes,” he muses during a convalescence marked by abstinence from his vices and by hallucinatory visions of his late father, a general in the Red Army during World War II, “life had lost its purpose.” A little later, Renko acknowledges that the near-death experience had made him do some stupid things in his pursuit of the bad guys, a reality not lost on Marat Urman, a ferocious colleague of Isakov’s who is determined to eliminate the troublemaker once and for all.

“You’ve gone mental,” Urman tells him.

“Maybe,” Renko replies. “A funny thing about being shot in the head is -- “

“You should be dead.”

“That’s it. I should be.”

Thankfully, Renko is not dead, and with a resolution that leaves a few matters unanswered, he is sure to return again when the time is right, his forensic skills intact, his wit and wisdom as sharply honed as a Cossack’s scimitar.

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Nicholas A. Basbanes is the author of five works of nonfiction, most recently “Every Book Its Reader: The Power of the Printed Word to Stir the World.”