Books: Crime in Soviet Russia

PETROVKA 38 by Julian Semyonov. 205 pages. Stein & Day. $4.95.

Russia produced the first great thriller, Feodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment—but times have changed. In contemporary Soviet society, crime reporting is permitted only where it serves the state, and by such standards, Petrovka 38 is a veritable revelation. The story describes two murders, daring daylight holdups, drug addiction, even a soupçon of illicit sex. In permitting the book’s publication abroad, Soviet authorities may have been disarmed by its moral: Russia’s GUMshoes are efficient, decent. and humane. After deciding that one of the outlaws, a 17-year-old poet, is guilty of nothing more than an immoderate dose of vodka, they talk the public prosecutor’s office into letting him go. Relentlessly methodical police routine brings the other culprits to book.

Semyonov’s uninspired story will not engage Western readers—who will be too busy, anyway, watching for those occasional and probably deliberate glimpses of life in Russia as it really is. Kostyenko, one of the detectives, has been separated from his wife and daughter for years while waiting impatiently for the state to find him an apartment commodious enough to unite them. Telephones don’t work; elevators crawl; a refrigerator freezes butter solid.

Eventually, the authorities must have caught up with these subtle gibes at the regime and had a word with the author, a 34-year-old Moscow writer, playwright and film scenarist. In Semyonov’s next novel, a paean to the Russian Revolution titled No Password Needed, the bad guys are mostly Americans and Englishmen. The world being what it is, Password will not be made available in the U.S. Publisher’s reaction: “Quite unusable.”