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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/aug/31/malcolm-knox-interview-trumps-name-will-turn-to-dust-just-as-every-other-dictators-name-has>
"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.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
