When we think of great Russian storytellers, a few familiar names come to mind: Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov. In his two most recent novels, the Australian writer Malcolm Knox nominates two more compelling contenders – men whose skill for plotting, world-building and spinning narratives achieved greater influence than most authors could dream of.
We’re talking about Joseph Stalin and his longtime sideman Lavrentiy Beria.
“They fictionalised their country first, and made it into a kind of make-believe,” Knox says. “Not only ideologically, but in the small matter of daily life; people had to negotiate not just what is real and what is fake, but what we’re meant to pretend is real and what we’re not.”
As a journalist, Knox has a deep backlist spanning cricket, corporate Australia and ice addiction, and won a Walkley for exposing a literary fraud. When it comes to the Soviet Union he stresses he is “not a historian”, but says the “outrageous invention” of the regime – with its decades of purges, propaganda and personality cults – grants novelists special liberty to muck in.
He did it first in 2024’s The First Friend, largely set in 1938 Georgia and following the fraught relationship between Beria, then newly appointed as head of the NKVD secret police, and his childhood friend turned valet, the fictional Vasil Murtov.
Once a fearsome figure in Stalin’s orbit, Beria’s dark reputation – from his role in the 1940 Katyn massacre to his prolific record as a murderous sexual predator – is complicated by how he, Stalin, and their allies and enemies alike used history as another lever of power. “So little is definitively known about [Beria], and much of what we know about him was constructed by his enemies after they had assassinated him,” Knox says.
The First Friend was playfully anachronistic; like an episode of House of Cards overdubbed by the makers of Bargearse, where “old mate” is as common as “comrade”.
Even before its release, Knox was hearing comparisons to the Armando Iannucci school of political satire, particularly his black comedy The Death of Stalin. Its distinctly Australian language and comic sensibility also brings to mind the recent “bogan Australian translation” of Tolstoy’s War and Peace.
This tonal transplant reflects a nuanced observation: Georgia’s relationship to Soviet Russia mirrors modern Australia and the United States. Both are vassal states at once glamorised and talked down to by their imperial superior, that occasionally hold outsized influence via homegrown big-noters like Stalin, Beria, or in Australia’s case, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and box-making billionaire Anthony Pratt.
“Georgia was the Australia of the Soviet empire,” Knox says. “It’s like there was this imaginary Georgia in the minds of people in the heart of Russia, that they needed as a kind of counterweight to the nature of their own country.
“When I talk to people in the US or Britain, Australia tends to hold that idealised place for them.”
Knox and his Stalinist strine are now back for another fair shake of the vodka bottle: his new novel The Second Child picks up the story with Murtov’s daughter Melor, who has returned to the fold of her father’s old frenemy Beria as his adoptive daughter and confidant.
Set in the final months of the second world war, Melor’s story of adventure and revenge grants her a first-class berth through some darkly comic chapters “cherrypicked” from history. She’s there for the Red Army’s brutal conquest of Berlin, the subsequent attempt to secure Hitler’s remains and the narrative around his death, and the proto-cold war power plays between Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry S Truman at the Potsdam conference.
“It’s bursting with incident and stories that are too good to leave out – and too true, too resonant to the current time,” Knox says.
As with The First Friend, the extended Trump metaphor is plainly apparent, from references to “making Russia great again” to a leader whose foreign affairs policy is summarised as: “Fuck him, fuck them, fuck you.”
“When I was writing The First Friend, I certainly thought that we’d seen the last of Trump as a president; we were in the post-Trump era, [but] writing about dictators still felt very relevant because of all the others,” Knox says.
The Second Child now arrives after months of destabilising and often opaquely reasoned international conflict, where moments of farce at the top are no less serious for those facing the consequences. Knox says the book’s period setting is “like a key to understanding the present, because the present is so hard to come to terms with; everything is galloping so fast, and the outrage moves so quickly.”
Despite its wicked humour, The Second Child takes care to capture the sheer scale of brutality and death that occurs while the strongmen stage-manage their public image and rewrite events to their liking, detached from reality – “Like Trump sitting in his bed watching footage of people getting killed on his order,” Knox adds.
While some might find the cyclical nature of history – and its tendency to elevate certain kinds of characters to the highest levels of power – dispiriting, Knox finds hope.
“I do have a sense of optimism in that they will reap what they sow in terms of the way they are remembered,” he says of dictators both past and present. “Stalin was exactly the same as Trump, wanting to put his name on everything, creating this cult of personality, this striving for permanence.
“Nobody did that more than Stalin, nobody had the power to do that more than Stalin. And yet, a year after he was dead, it was all being unwound – it all turned to shit. The sun will come up, the sun will go down, and Trump’s name will turn to dust, just as every other dictator’s name has.”
Two books in, Knox concedes he’s not quite finished with his Soviet era. He intends to follow Beria and Stalin to the bitter end – where even post-truth despots, like great novelists, can no longer control the narrative.
The Second Child by Malcolm Knox is published by Allen & Unwin in Australia on 1 September, $34.99. The First Friend is out now, $34.99
