It has taken more than half a century, but at last the Anglophone world has woken up to the fact that 20th-century communist history makes a superb backdrop for fiction. So extreme and dramatic were the Russian revolution, the arrests and the purges, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and the imposition of Stalinism on the eastern half of Europe that all you have to do is write down what really happened and it sounds like fiction anyway. English historians such as Catherine Merridale (Night of Stone) and Simon Sebag-Montefiore (The Court of the Red Tsar) have known this for a while now. Now English novelists, from Martin Amis to Sebag-Montefiore himself, are finally catching up.
The Betrayal is Helen Dunmore’s most recent contribution to this general awakening. It is the sequel to The Siege, Dunmore’s widely admired account of one family’s experience of the siege of Leningrad, and it follows the same characters into the post-war era. Dunmore, who is extremely well-versed in the nuances of Russian history, has again chosen her historical moment well. The Betrayal is set in 1952, the last year of Stalin’s life. In those final months, the dictator’s paranoia reached a new zenith, fixing itself on doctors, Jewish doctors in particular.
This story is essentially that of a couple, Andrei and Anna, who are accidentally caught up in that final wave of suspicion. In the book’s first scene, Andrei, a pediatric surgeon, is asked by a nervous and sweaty colleague if he will give a second opinion on a child patient. The twist: the child, who is the son of Volkov, a powerful secret police boss, appears to have a malignant tumor, and everyone in the hospital knows that his death might also be fatal for the doctor who attempts to treat him.
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