PETROV'S ESCAPE

A young Russian takes his revenge on Stalin’s war machine in Smith’s debut novel.

The devout, humble Petrov grows up in a remote Siberian village where his father, Ankarov, was exiled many years ago by the Soviet government. Now, the Soviets are gone, replaced by the Russian Federation, though Vladimir Putin is displaying the same authoritarian tendencies as the old regime. When the Russian army attempts to draft the mechanically inclined Petrov to fight Putin’s war in Ukraine, Ankarov dies defending his son and Petrov kills three soldiers before escaping down the ice-choked Bureya River. “I am no hero,” he thinks as he considers the irreversible course his life has taken. “Am I really, in my true heart, a self-absorbed coward?” He finds shelter in a remote trapper’s cabin from Soviet times and spends the winter collecting pelts to barter his way across the border. While sleeping one night by the river, he’s nearly killed by a bear, surviving only due to the timely intervention of a Nanai fisherman and his family, who nurse the injured Petrov back to health. In a river town, he meets a Jewish man named Yoni Rabbivinovitz who looks quite a bit like him. It turns out that Yoni is Petrov’s twin brother—Petrov was born to the Rabbivinovitzes and sold to his adoptive parents without the consent of his birth family. Yoni has just been drafted and is to report to training camp. Petrov decides to take his brother’s place, train with the army, travel to the front lines, and defect to the Ukrainian side. He succeeds—though not without taking a parting bullet in the shoulder from his former comrades. Once he’s crossed over to the Ukrainians, Petrov’s wild story draws the attention of the CIA, who are willing to bring him to America with the understanding that he’ll help with “any project that would help defeat Putin’s objectives.” Little does Petrov know just how explosive such a project might be.

Smith tells Petrov’s story in direct, declarative prose that reflects his protagonist’s action-oriented personality. It makes for entertaining reading, particularly once Petrov ends up in the strange land of America: “Stopping for gas at a Chevron fuel plaza on the interstate, Petrov watched as a man in a station wagon pulled up nearby and got out to fuel his vehicle while his wife and two children went inside. The man had a pistol on his hip, while those who were wearing military uniforms were unarmed.” The plot moves so quickly that the author has little time to establish his characters or explore Petrov’s interiority. The result reads almost like an extended treatment for a screenplay rather than a novel as increasingly unlikely events pile up without making any real emotional impact. Upon the story’s conclusion, readers will not be left with the sense that they’ve learned much of anything meaningful about the conflict or the people caught up in it.

A fast-paced but surface-level yarn about a Russian dissident set against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine.