12 FEBRUARY 1983, Page 21

Good thriller

Richard West

Red Square Edward Topol and Fridrikh Neznansky (Quartet Books £8.95)

A couple of years ago a thriller appeared kr-kcalled Gorky Park, in which the Moscow police attempted to solve a murder involving Communist politics. I found it rather boring towards the end but I enjoyed the details of life in Moscow until I was told that the young American author had been there only once on a brief package holiday. Now there appears another book named after a Moscow landmark, concerning the efforts of Moscow police and a Jewish Special Investigator of the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office to solve a murder in- volving not just Moscow's criminal world and movie world and communist politics but real-life politicians like Brezhnev, Suslov and Andropov. According to the blurb, both authors are Russians who emigrated to the United States in the last five years. Both are presumably Jewish. Moreover, while Topol was once a writer of screen plays, including the Henty-esque Cabin Boy of the Northern Fleet, Neznan- sky worked from 1954 as an investigator for the USSR's Public Prosecutor's Office. This does suggest that the authors know what they are talking about. If I sound a bit cautious it is only because I reviewed a book back in the Fifties purporting to be the memoirs of a Pole in Siberia, who turn- ed out later to have been a fraud. It went in- to paperback with quotes from my review on the cover saying something like 'Patent- ly honest... convincing detail' and so on. I have spent only ten days in Russia, years ago; I hope never to go there again. I know little about its politics, and nothing favourable. Having said all of which, I found Red Square an enthralling and rather convincing book, and much more fun than Gorky Park.

The book begins on 22 January 1982 when Igor losifovich Shamrayev, Special Investigator at the Chief Public Prosecutor's Office, is chosen by Brezhnev to look into the death of Brezhnev's brother-in-law General Semyon Kuzmich Tsvigun, First Deputy Chairman of the KGB. The public were told that Tsvigun died of an illness. The KGB investigation found that Tsvigun had shot himself when the MVD Anti-Fraud Squad showed him proof of his part in a black market swindle. The hero (?) Shamrayev soon finds out that Tsvigun was murdered by officers of the MVD, perhaps helped by some of his own KGB. Quite early on in the book I became aware of my ignorance of the Soviet Union, having always assumed that the KGB was merely a new name for the MVD which in turn was a new name for the OGPU or CHEKA. It seems that the KGB and the MVD and the criminal police all have separate spheres of interest but quarrel among themselves for power and privilege. • As soon as he starts his investigations, Shamrayev is tailed and his flat is bugged by the MVD, who are hoping to use the Tsvigun scandal to ditch the, enfeebled Brezhnev in favour of Suslov (well describ- ed as a monster of satanic stature) or An- dropov. Undeterred, Shamrayev visits the MVD headquarters where he finds the beautiful Colonel Nadya Malenina and her colleagues listening to the bugging tapes of Brezhnev's daughter Galya being serviced by her gigolo. Shamrayev then services Col- onel Nadya, but only once, as he has to save himself for his girl friend Nina, a circus acrobat. Nina is later pushed under a train.

There is an almost friendly description of Brezhnev who has spent his years as the Soviet Premier shamming a fatal illness, on the principle that his enemies will leave him to die in peace rather than try to depose him. If Topol and Neznansky are right, and Brezhnev was merely shamming his fits of illness and tiredness, then Private Eye was wrong to suggest that the old brute was drunk for most of the last ten years.

I could not quite understand the quarrels between the different thugs in the Polit- buro, or the various kinds of gestapo, but I did enjoy the details about the black market. 'Communism is just one black market' as somebody told me in Com- munist Vietnam. The Rossiya Hotel is a favourite meeting place of the Soviet black marketeers. A 'timber procurement of- ficial' takes eight de-luxe rooms and gives receptions, properly booze-ups, to the State Planning Commission, the Forestry Ministry, the Transport Ministry and Galina Brezhnev. 'And after these "recep- tions" whole train-loads of scarce saw- timber roll out to Central Asia, where it goes on to the unofficial market at speculative prices, and all parties to the operation earn a million each.- Or about that black caviare which was going to the west illegally in cans labelled "Herring" or "Sprats" ...'.

The Moscow thieves live off burglary from the flats of the huge corrupt oligarchy that runs the Soviet Union. Nobody dares to report the theft of gold bars, diamonds or foreign currency, in case they are asked how they came to afford it. In Red Square the burglars are tipped off, instructed and organised by a gipsy fortune-teller whose services are in great demand with the new bourgeoisie. The translation is rather ar-

chaic ('Have you flipped?', 'I could eat a horse' and so on)but nevertheless I enjoyed this book. If I say that I found it convincing and accurate, it will no doubt appear that `Topol Neznansky' are really the pen- names of Jeffrey Archer and Barbara Cartland.