The files, dated from 1917 to 1921, chronicled events in Kyiv during those turbulent years, which included the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War and a chaotic battle for control of what is now Ukraine. The friend explained that her late father had been a KGB officer and had spirited away the files. An intellectual and an aspiring writer, he had intended to one day write about the documents but never got around to it. Now, it was Kurkov’s turn.
Kurkov, one of Ukraine’s most celebrated novelists and prolific journalists, has long been fascinated by the country’s 20th-century history. One of his first short novels, which has not yet been translated into English, documents how much people’s lives changed in Kyiv after the Bolshevik Revolution and the establishment of communism. His first novel translated into English, “Death and the Penguin,” became an international bestseller and introduced readers to his black humor and his penchant for crime thrillers. More recently, his fiction has explored the evolution of the Soviet mentality and the contemporary war between Russia and Ukraine. “Grey Bees,” published in English in 2022, tells the story of a beekeeper living in the “grey zone” of eastern Ukraine, a thin strip of land separating territory claimed by Russian-backed separatist forces from lands where the Ukrainian flag still flies.
When the tranche of KGB files arrived at his home, Kurkov immediately started going through the illicit archive, reading criminal confessions and witness statements, and noting the pencil marks that his friend’s father had left behind. “These documents returned me to an excited state of discovery,” he said via Zoom from his village house outside Kyiv. (He commutes between there and his apartment in the city center.) “There were lots of handwritten documents written by people who were arrested. They described their days, provided alibis. And the details of their days were so crazy, so surreal. Every six months, there would be a new power taking over Kyiv, new dangers and new difficulties.”
The documents offered a glimpse of a long-forgotten world marked by notable similarities to the present day, when Ukrainians are once again fighting Russian forces in a battle for independence and self-determination. “From one point of view, it’s the same war,” Kurkov said. “Russia is trying to destroy Ukraine, to turn it into a Russian province again, like they managed to do in 1921.” A longtime student of Soviet history, Kurkov thought the files could help him provide readers with a look at how Ukraine emerged as an independent nation in the early 20th century, and evoke all that was sacrificed along the way.
The result is “The Silver Bone,” recently translated from Russian by Boris Dralyuk, and the first installation of a new trilogy by Kurkov called The Kyiv Mysteries. On Monday, the novel was announced as one of the longlist finalists for the International Booker Prize. A gripping whodunnit with surrealist flourishes, the story follows a young Ukrainian police detective named Samson Kolechko as he struggles to survive and adapt to the precarious political conditions in Kyiv in 1919. With “The Silver Bone,” Kurkov brings to life an overlooked and much-contested episode in Ukrainian history, capturing the brutality with which Soviet forces first attempted to establish control over the city.
In the novel’s opening scene, Samson, still a young man, watches as his father is brutally, randomly murdered by a group of Cossack bandits on the side of the road, while Samson himself has his ear shorn off by the assailants. Orphaned and in peril, Samson’s whole world shifts. Soon, two Red Army soldiers posted to Kyiv move into his family’s apartment. To protect and support himself, Samson joins the newly formed Soviet police force and begins investigating crimes in exchange for prized vouchers to the communal canteen. Among his first arrests are the two soldiers living in his flat, whom he had found stealing his family belongings and those of others. Samson has a personal interest in seeing the soldiers behind bars: One night, he overheard them debating whether to kill him.
“He is young, and in order to survive he has to downgrade himself psychologically,” Kurkov said of his protagonist. “This was the rule of survival for many people. They had to pretend they were as simple and as stupid as the majority that took over.”
Kurkov has often turned to history for inspiration. As a student in the ’80s, he hitchhiked across the U.S.S.R. carrying a dictation machine, looking to interview pensioners who had held important positions in the state bureaucracy, to try to understand their mind-set.
“You can see that the Cheka, the police, they made up cases and sent people to be executed or to prison for nothing,” Kurkov said of what he found in the papers his friend gave him. “And because it’s all handwritten, you hear their voices, their intonations. You can imagine their personalities. This is one of the incredible things when you read real documents.”
Alongside the written accounts, he also found photographs of those who were detained and killed. And while the details of the murder mystery at the heart of “The Silver Bone” are entirely fictionalized, the circumstances are true to what Kurkov discovered in the files. Only the questions that Samson asks while interrogating suspects are taken from the documents. (“Which social classes do you have sympathy for?” “Where and from whom did you take these items?”)
The laws and regulations that Samson is forced to navigate are also true to life: At one point, the Soviet government announced that all leather in territories under its control belonged to the Soviet state. Then, all meat. “People were given lists of furniture they were allowed to have in their houses and flats, and everything else was supposed to be confiscated,” Kurkov said. “In Kyiv, an underwear tax was introduced, and every family had to give several pairs of underwear to the Red Army.” Firewood was so rare that people defended their stocks by gunpoint.
Through Samson’s eyes, readers witness the grim precarity of life at that time. As he watches Red Army soldiers gallop toward battle against rebels who dared to oppose their regime, Samson senses how anxiety and fear quickly set into the bodies of passersby on the street. “It seemed to him that they were also in a hurry, intending either to hide or simply to get as far away as possible from what could not be avoided — because no matter where you hide, you can’t escape a collective misfortune,” Kurkov writes. “It will always catch up with you, making sure you get your share.”
“The Silver Bone” and its sequel (which relies even more heavily on the secret police files) were both written before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine two years ago. Since then, Kurkov has barely written any fiction, instead dedicating himself to chronicling the ravages of war. In the last two years, he said, he has written only 30 pages of the planned third novel in the series, but he is now trying to return to it. “I hope it will be more than a trilogy — if I manage to finish the third one, I will think about the next one,” he said. He hopes that “The Silver Bone” will encourage readers to learn more about the history of Ukraine and to think deeply about the causes and consequences of the contemporary conflict.
“The population of Kyiv was divided,” he said of the fractious and dangerous period portrayed in the novel. “Lots of Kyivites were joining gangs to rob the rich. There were unpredictable crime waves at that time. Today, Kyiv, like all of Ukraine, is consolidated, because there is only one enemy.”
Linda Kinstler is a writer who covers European history and politics. She is the author of “Come to This Court and Cry: How the Holocaust Ends” and teaches at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service.