Archangel: A Novel by Robert Harris

Present-day Russia is the setting for this stunning new novel from Robert Harris, author of the bestsellers Fatherland and Enigma. Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives. One night, Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook. Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase across nighttime Moscow and up to northern Russia--to the vast forests near the White Sea port of Archangel, where the final secret of Josef Stalin has been hidden for almost half a century. Archangel combines the imaginative sweep and dark suspense of Fatherland with the meticulous historical detail of Enigma. The result is Robert Harris's most compelling novel yet. Editorial Reviews Archangel is a remarkably literate novel--and simultaneously a gripping thriller--that explores the lingering presence of Stalin amidst the corruption of modern-day Russia. Robert Harris (whose previous works include Enigma and Fatherland) elevates his tale by choosing a narrator with an outsider's perspective but an insider's knowledge of Soviet history: Fluke Kelso, a middle-aged scholar of Soviet Communism with a special interest in the dark secrets of Joseph Stalin. For years, rumors have circulated about a notebook that the aging dictator kept in his final years. In a chance encounter in Moscow, Kelso meets Papu Rapava, a former NKVD guard who claims that he was at Stalin's deathbed and says that he assisted Politburo member Beria in hiding the black oilskin notebook just as Stalin was passing. Before Kelso can get more details, Rapava disappears, but the scholar is energized by the evidence Rapava has provided. As Kelso begins to pursue his historical prize, however, his investigation ensnares him in a living web of Stalinist terror and murder. It soon becomes clear that the notebook is the key to a doorway hiding many secrets, old and new. Harris's understanding of Soviet and modern Russian is impressive. The novel rests on a seamless blend of fact and fiction that places real figures from Soviet history alongside Kelso and his fictional colleagues. Especially disturbing are the transcripts from interrogations and the excerpt from Kelso's lectures on Stalin; the documents provide chilling evidence to support Kelso's claim: There can now be no doubt that it is Stalin rather than Hitler who is the most alarming figure of the twentieth century. --Patrick O'Kelley From Publishers Weekly As in his first thriller, Fatherland, Harris again plunders the past to tell an icy-slick story set mostly in the present. Readers are plunged into mystery, danger and the affairs of great men at once, as, outside Moscow in 1953, Stalin suffers a fatal stroke, and the notorious Beria, head of Stalin's secret police, orders a young guard to swipe a key from the dictator's body, to stand watch as Beria uses it to steal a notebook from Stalin's safe and then to help bury the notebook deep in the ground. These events unfold not in flashback proper but as told to American Sovietologist C.R.A. Fluke Kelso by the guard, now an old drunk. Following a lead from the old man's story as well as other clues, Kelso, soon accompanied by an American satellite-TV journalist, goes in pursuit of the notebook and, later, the explosive secret it contains; others, including those who cherish the days of Stalin's might, are on the chase as well. With this hunt as backbone, the plot fleshes out in muscular fashion, fed by assorted conspiratorial interests and a welter of colorful, if sometimes too obvious (Stalin as madman; Beria as sadist), characters. The crumbling ruin that is today's Moscow comes alive in the details, which continue as Kelso's search moves north into the frozen desolation of the White Sea port of Archangel. Sex, violence and violent sex all play a part in Harris's entertaining, well-constructed, intelligently lurid tale, which, along with his first two novels, places him squarely in the footsteps not of Conrad, Green and le Carre, as the publisher would have it, but of Frederick Forsyth. And, like Forsyth, Harris has yet to write a novel without bestseller stamped on it?including this one. Simultaneous audio book; optioned for film by Mel Gibson. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Harris's first novel, Fatherland (LJ 4/1/92), an international best seller, supposed that Hitler had won World War II. His second, Enigma (LJ 10/1/95), another success, hinged on code-breaking in the same war. In Archangel, Harris switches to modern, unstable Russia and raises another what-if?suppose a very real pro-Stalinist cult wanted to bring back to power one of Stalin's sons. A discredited Oxford historian and an American TV journalist stumble over papers suggesting such a possibility. They stay barely one jump ahead of sinister competing forces in pursuing a twisting tale that keeps the reader turning pages almost past the bizarre surprises at the end. A former journalist and author of several nonfiction works, Harris skillfully mixes historical detail and fiction. This is likely to be as big a hit as the earlier two suspense tales, and libraries everywhere should be prepared. -?Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist A possible Communist (or Facsist) restoration in Russia furnishes promising material for fictional espionage (witness Frederick Forsyth's Icon, 1996). Harris posits the existence of hitherto-unknown papers belonging to Stalin, which vanished into the hands of the notorious secret police chief, Beria. This intriguing curtain-raiser is confided to historian Fluke Kelso by Beria's bodyguard. Sensing a historical coup, Kelso finds confirmation of the missing papers in Dmitri Volkogonov's biography of Stalin (Triumph and Tragedy, 1991) and interviews one of Volkogonov's sources, a cagey ex-KGB operative. Kelso also tries to recontact Beria's bodyguard, who had held back on the location of the papers, by looking for his daughter. He finds both: the father has been butchered, but the daughter is alive, and she leads Kelso to the papers. They are curiously innocuous, alluding only to a young girl from Archangel. Kelso's digging has by now attracted heavy surveillance from Russian intelligence, as well as an unwanted partner in the form of nosy, obnoxious TV reporter R. J. O'Brian, who's itching to break the story of Stalin's nubile paramour. So, everyone's off to Archangel, whose dilapidated state Harris evokes as well as the increasing tension of Kelso's search for the now-elderly girl. Instead of the girl, they turn up her mother, whose story of a baby--the son of Stalin--raised in the surrounding taiga diverts everyone, tailing off into the forest for the blazing conclusion and revelation of Joe Junior's political significance. Building on his accurate historical sense, Harris inveigles readers with intricate plotting and concrete descriptions of Russia's contemporary look, rewarding them with a thoroughly thrilling tale. Gilbert Taylor From Kirkus Reviews Lg. Prt. 0-375-70412-4 Top-flight thriller, something of a variation on le Carr's The Russia House, as an American historian tracks down a MacGuffin of far greater value than the Maltese falcon. Fluke Kelso, having published two books about the fall of the Soviet empire, finds himself invited to a symposium in Moscow that will supposedly focus on newly released archival material. Some think Kelso will reveal yet another bombshell. And that might be true, since he has secretly interviewed elderly Papu Rapava, bodyguard of KGB chief Lavrenty Beria, about the night that Stalin died. Rapava observed all as Beria took a key from Stalin's neck and stole from a safe an oilskin pouch holding the dictators memoirs (an improvisation on the theme of Harris's first book, 1986's Selling Hitler, about the faking of the Hitler diaries). Later, the pouch was buried in Beria's backyard. The ever-avid Kelso goes ferreting through some recently declassified papers in the Lenin Library, then hunts up Vladimir Mamantov, a Stalinist fanatic he'd interviewed years ago for his big book about the Soviet collapse, a book sneered at by Mamantov because it painted Stalin black. Mamantov concedes that in Western terms the man was a monster, but avers that by Soviet standards he lifted the USSR from the tractor to the atomic bomb. And Mamantov opines to Kelso that Stalinism will return: some 20 million Russians still believe Stalin was the greatest figure of the centurya rather large bloc should some other charismatic figure rise anew to lead it once again. After Kelso makes a secret trip to Beria's house and discovers freshly turned earth, he falls in with an American TV reporter while being tracked by the RT Directorate's chief. Deaths ensue as the trail leads to the White Sea port of Archangel, where Kelso does indeed make a momentous discovery. No personal demons here to soothe, but Harriss (Enigma, 1995, etc.) knack for re-creating historical events puts him in very select company. -- Copyright 1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. Review Praise for ENIGMA Elegant, atmospheric . . . a tense and thoughtful thriller. --San Francisco Chronicle Literate and savvy . . . It's always a pleasure to encounter a historical thriller this subtle and detailed. . . . [ ] brims with wartime intrigue and paranoia. --The Washington Post Book World FATHERLAND A stunning debut. --Boston Globe An elegant thriller, a thoughtful, frightening story of complicity. --San Francisco Chronicle An absorbing, expertly written novel. --The New York Times From the Inside Flap Russia is the setting for this stunning new novel from Robert Harris, author of the bestsellers Fatherland and Enigma. Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian, who is in Moscow to attend a conference on the newly opened Soviet archives. One night, Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief Lavrenty Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook. Kelso decides to use his last morning in Moscow to check out the old man's story. But what starts as an idle inquiry in the Lenin Library soon turns into a murderous chase From the Back Cover Praise for ENIGMA Elegant, atmospheric . . . a tense and thoughtful thriller. --San Francisco Chronicle Literate and savvy . . . It's always a pleasure to encounter a historical thriller this subtle and detailed. . . . [ ] brims with wartime intrigue and paranoia. --The Washington Post Book World FATHERLAND A stunning debut. --Boston Globe An elegant thriller, a thoughtful, frightening story of complicity. --San Francisco Chronicle An absorbing, expertly written novel. --The New York Times About the Author Robert Harris has been a television correspondent with the BBC and a newspaper columnist for the London Sunday Times. His novels have sold more than six million copies and been translated into thirty languages. He lives in Berkshire, England, with his wife and three young children. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. To choose one's victims, to prepare one's plans minutely, to slake an implacable vengeance, and then to go to bed . . . there is nothing sweeter in the world. --J. V. Stalin, in conversation with Kamenev and Dzerzhinsky Olga Komarova of the Russian Archive Service, Rosarkhiv, wielding a collapsible pink umbrella, prodded and shooed her distinguished charges across the Ukraina's lobby toward the revolving door. It was an old door, of heavy wood and glass, too narrow to cope with more than one body at a time, so the scholars formed a line in the dim light, like parachutists over a target zone, and as they passed her, Olga touched each one lightly on the shoulder with her umbrella, counting them off one by one as they were propelled into the freezing Moscow air. Franklin Adelman of Yale went first, as befitted his age and status, then Moldenhauer of the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz, with his absurd double doctorate--Dr. Dr. Karl-bloody-Moldenhauer--then the neo-Marxists, Enrico Banfi of Milan and Eric Chambers of the LSE, then the great cold warrior Phil Duberstein, of NYU, then Ivo Godelier of the Ecole Normale Suprieure, followed by glum Dave Richards of St. Antony's, Oxford--another Sovietologist whose world was rubble--then Velma Byrd of the U.S. National Archive, then Alastair Findlay of Edinburgh's Department of War Studies, who still thought the sun shone out of Comrade Stalin's ass, then Arthur Saunders of Stanford, and finally--the man whose lateness had kept them waiting in the lobby for an extra five minutes--Dr. C.R.A. Kelso, commonly known as Fluke. The door banged hard against his heels. Outside, the weather had worsened. It was trying to snow. Tiny flakes, as hard as grit, came whipping across the wide gray concourse and spattered his face and hair. At the bottom of the flight of steps, shuddering in a cloud of its own white fumes, was a dilapidated bus, waiting to take them to the symposium. Kelso stopped to light a cigarette. Jesus, Fluke, called Adelman, cheerfully. You look just awful. Kelso raised a fragile hand in acknowledgment. He could see a huddle of taxi drivers in quilted jackets stamping their feet against the cold. Workmen were struggling to lift a roll of tin off the back of a truck. One Korean businessman in a fur hat was photographing a group of twenty others, similarly dressed. But of Papu Rapava, no sign. Dr. Kelso, please, we are waiting again. The umbrella wagged at him in reproof. He transferred the cigarette to the corner of his mouth, hitched his bag up onto his shoulder, and moved toward the bus. A battered Byron was how one Sunday newspaper had described him when he had resigned his Oxford lectureship and moved to New York, and the description wasn't a bad one--curly black hair too long and thick for neatness, a moist, expressive mouth, pale cheeks, and the glow of a certain reputation--if Byron hadn't died on Missolonghi but had spent the next ten years drinking whiskey, smoking, staying indoors, and resolutely avoiding all exercise, he too might have come to look a little like Fluke Kelso. He was wearing what he always wore: a faded dark blue shirt of heavy cotton with the top button undone; a loosely knotted and vaguely stained dark tie; a black corduroy suit with a black leather belt, over which his stomach bulged slightly; red cotton handkerchief in his breast pocket; scuffed boots of brown suede; an old blue raincoat. This was Kelso's uniform, unvaried for twenty years. Boy, Rapava had called him, and the word was both absurd for a middle-aged man and yet oddly accurate. Boy. The heater was going full blast. Nobody was saying much. He sat on his own near the back of the bus and rubbed at the wet glass as they jolted up the ramp to join the traffic on the bridge. Across the aisle, Saunders made an ostentatious display of batting Kelso's smoke away. Beneath them, in the filthy waters of the Moskva, a dredger with a crane mounted on its aft deck beat sluggishly upstream. He nearly hadn't come to Russia. That was the joke of it. He knew well enough what it would be like: the bad food, the stale gossip, the sheer bloody tedium of academic life--of more and more being said about less and less. That was one reason why he had chucked Oxford and gone to live in New York. But somehow the books he was supposed to write had not quite materialized. And besides, he never could resist the lure of Moscow. Even now, sitting on a stale bus in the Wednesday rush hour, he could feel the charge of history beyond the muddy glass: in the dark and renamed streets, the vast apartment blocks, the toppled statues. It was stronger here than anywhere he knew, stronger even than in Berlin. That was what always drew him back to Moscow--the way history hung in the air between the blackened buildings like sulfur after a lightning strike. You think you know it all about Comrade Stalin, don't you, boy? Well, let me tell you: You don't know fuck. Kelso had already delivered his short paper, on Stalin and the archives, at the end of the previous day: delivered it in his trademark style--without notes, with one hand in his pocket, extempore, provocative. His Russian hosts had looked gratifyingly shifty. A couple of people had even walked out. So, all in all, a triumph. Afterward, finding himself predictably alone, he had decided to walk back to the Ukraina. It was a long walk and it was getting dark, but he needed the air. And at some point--he couldn't remember where; maybe it was in one of the back streets behind the Institute or maybe it was later, along the Noviy Arbat--but at some point he had realized he was being followed. It was nothing tangible, just a fleeting impression of something seen too often--the flash of a coat, perhaps, or the shape of a head--but Kelso had been in Moscow often enough in the bad old days to know that you were seldom wrong about these things. You always knew if a film was out of synch, however fractionally; you always knew if someone fancied you, however improbably; and you always knew when someone was on your tail. He had just stepped into his hotel room and was contemplating some primary research in the minibar when the front desk had called up to say there was a man in the lobby who wanted to see him. Who? He wouldn't give his name, sir. But he was most insistent and he wouldn't leave. So Kelso had gone down, reluctantly, and found Papu Rapava sitting on one of the Ukraina's imitation-leather sofas, staring straight ahead, in his papery blue suit, his wrists and ankles sticking out as thin as broomsticks. You think you know it all about Comrade Stalin, don't you, boy? Those had been his opening words. And that was the moment when Kelso had realized where he had first seen the old man--at the symposium, in the front row of the public seats, listening intently to the simultaneous translation over his headphones, muttering in violent disagreement at any hostile mention of J. V. Stalin. Who are you? thought Kelso, staring out of the grimy window. Fantasist? Con man? The answer to a prayer? The symposium was scheduled to last only one more day--for which relief, in Kelso's view, much thanks. It was being held in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, an orthodox temple of gray concrete, consecrated in the Brezhnev years, with Marx, Engels, and Lenin in gigantic bas-relief above the pillared entrance. The ground floor had been leased to a private bank, since gone bust, which added to the air of dereliction. On the opposite side of the street, watched by a couple of bored-looking militiamen, a small demonstration was in progress--maybe a hundred people, mostly elderly, but with a few youths in black berets and leather jackets. It was the usual mixture of fanatics and grudge holders--Marxists, nationalists, anti-Semites. Crimson flags bearing the hammer and sickle hung beside black flags embroidered with the czarist eagle. One old lady carried a picture of Stalin; another sold cassettes of SS marching songs. An elderly man with an umbrella held over him was addressing the crowd through a bullhorn, his voice a distorted, metallic rant. Stewards were handing out a free newspaper called Aurora. Take no notice, instructed Olga Komarova, standing up beside the driver. She tapped the side of her head. These are crazy people. Red fascists. What's he saying? demanded Duberstein, who was considered a world authority on Soviet communism even though he had never quite gotten around to learning Russian. He's talking about how the Hoover Institution tried to buy the Party archive for five million bucks, said Adelman. He says we're trying to steal their history. Duberstein sniggered. Who'd want to steal their goddamn history? He tapped on the window with his signet ring. Say, isn't that a TV crew? The sight of a camera caused a predictable, wistful stir among the academics. I believe so . . . How very flattering . . . What's the name, said Adelman, of the fellow who runs Aurora? Is it still the same one? He twisted around in his seat and called up the aisle. Fluke--you should know. What's his name? Old KGB-- Mamantov, said Kelso. The driver braked hard, and he had to swallow to stop himself from being sick. Vladimir Mamantov. Crazy people, repeated Olga, bracing herself as they came to a stop. I apologize on behalf of Rosarkhiv. They are not representative. Follow me, please. Ignore them. They filed off the bus, and a television cameraman filmed them as they trudged across the asphalt forecourt, past a couple of drooping, silvery fir trees, pursued by jeers. Fluke Kelso moved delicately at the rear of the column, nursing his hangover, holding his head at a careful angle, as if he were balancing a pitcher of water. A pimply youth in wire spectacles thrust a copy of Aurora at him, a...