\u201cThey fictionalised their country first, and made it into a kind of make-believe,\u201d Knox says. \u201cNot 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\u2019re meant to pretend is real and what we\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n
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 \u201cnot a historian\u201d, but says the \u201coutrageous invention\u201d of the regime \u2013 with its decades of purges, propaganda and personality cults \u2013 grants novelists special liberty to muck in.<\/p>\n
He did it first in 2024\u2019s The First Friend<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n Once a fearsome figure in Stalin\u2019s orbit, Beria\u2019s dark reputation \u2013 from his role in the 1940 Katyn massacre to his prolific record as a murderous sexual predator \u2013 is complicated by how he, Stalin, and their allies and enemies alike used history as another lever of power. \u201cSo little is definitively known about [Beria], and much of what we know about him was constructed by his enemies after they had assassinated him,\u201d Knox says.<\/p>\n The First Friend was playfully anachronistic; like an episode of House of Cards overdubbed by the makers of Bargearse<\/a>, where \u201cold mate\u201d is as common as \u201ccomrade\u201d.<\/p>\n \u2018Georgia was the Australia of the Soviet empire\u2019 \u2026 Malcolm Knox. Photograph: Blake Sharp-Wiggins\/The Guardian<\/p>\n 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 \u201cbogan Australian translation<\/a>\u201d of Tolstoy\u2019s War and Peace.<\/p>\n This tonal transplant reflects a nuanced observation: Georgia\u2019s 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\u2019s case, media tycoon Rupert Murdoch and box-making billionaire Anthony Pratt.<\/p>\n \u201cGeorgia was the Australia of the Soviet empire,\u201d Knox says. \u201cIt\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I talk to people in the US or Britain, Australia tends to hold that idealised place for them.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s daughter Melor, who has returned to the fold of her father\u2019s old frenemy Beria as his adoptive daughter and confidant.<\/p>\n Set in the final months of the second world war, Melor\u2019s story of adventure and revenge grants her a first-class berth through some darkly comic chapters \u201ccherrypicked\u201d from history. She\u2019s there for the Red Army\u2019s brutal conquest of Berlin, the subsequent attempt to secure Hitler\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s bursting with incident and stories that are too good to leave out \u2013 and too true, too resonant to the current time,\u201d Knox says.<\/p>\n
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