The Dead & the Damned

THE FALL OF A TITAN (629 pp.)--Igor Gouzenko--Norton ($4.50).

Nine years ago Igor Gouzenko walked out of his job as code clerk in the Russian embassy in Ottawa and into world headlines. From his briefcase Gouzenko produced 109 startling documents which laid bare the Russian atomic espionage network in North America and paved the way to the conviction of British Physicists Klaus Fuchs and Allan Nunn May, the Rosenbergs and half a dozen others who stole allied atomic secrets for the Kremlin. Except for acting as a government witness in numerous spy trials, Gouzenko has since shown himself only with a mask over his head, and lived with his wife and two children somewhere near Toronto under a "cover" name known to few save the Canadian Mounties, who until recently guarded him round-the-clock. In his solitude Gouzenko spent four years fashioning a 629-page novel, The Fall of a Titan.

Gouzenko's fiction is not, could not be, as explosive as his facts. The Fall of a Titan, a midsummer choice of the Book-of-the-Month Club, is no literary blockbuster, but it does score a direct hit on modern Soviet man and the system that has shaped him. It reveals, despite occasional amateurish moments, that Gouzenko has a professional flair; he travels this long literary distance at an unflagging and often exciting pace.

Beagle for the NKVD. Feodor Novikov, protagonist of The Fall of a Titan, is only 16 when the revolution comes to Rostov in October 1917 and claims his parents among its first victims. Bent on survival, young Feodor informs on a starving army officer and learns that the way to get ahead in the new people's paradise is to curry favor with the Marxists. Soon he is an unofficial beagle for the NKVD, spying on his fellow students. Later, as a lecturer at the University of Rostov, he keeps tabs on his faculty colleagues. Chafing with ambition, Feodor trumps up some party-line history on the ancient Slavs, and plants the article before propaganda bigwigs in Moscow. It wins him six columns in Pravda, a full professorship at 30 and his toughest party assignment.

Feodor's mission is psychological tug-of-warfare with Mikhail Gorin, an old and honored writer who godfathered the revolution back in Czarist days, but refuses to toady to Stalin. Gorin, the titan of the title, is intentionally modeled on Russia's late great writer, Maxim Gorky, and in chronicling his fall Author Gouzenko stages scenes with other Russian VIPs, e.g., Stalin, Malenkov, Beria (who wears the name Veria, plus the identifying pince-nez).

Gorin likes Feodor, and before long Novikov's subtle brand of doubletalk has the old writer naively whitewashing Stalinist tyranny by eulogizing Russia's mad despot, Ivan the Terrible. The Kremlin bravos. But Gorin is heartsick at betraying his own values, and makes indiscreet remarks about the regime. From Veria, Feodor receives new orders, and he carries them out by smashing Gorin's head against a radiator until it is a bloody pulp.*

This murder comes easily to Feodor, for in the course of the novel's subplots he has already strangled love, honor and his own conscience.

After falling deeply in love with Gorin's daughter Nina (the real Gorky had no daughter), Feodor is warned by his boss: "A Bolshevik cannot mix business with pleasure." Good Bolshevik Feodor drops her and marries a factory manager's daughter, but when the factory manager is denounced as "an enemy of the people" and thrown into a concentration camp, Feodor coolly abandons his pregnant wife.

A Russian Macbeth. In these and half a hundred other scenes, Author Gouzenko makes the point that modern Russia breeds only two kinds of men--the dead and the damned. The Fall of a Titan is doom-laden, a kind of Russian Macbeth with its pages drenched in suicides, rapes and murders. It is a book about the corruption of a nation's soul. Few scenes are memorable in themselves, but the cumulative effect is poignant and powerful. A wisp of a girl in a chemical plant manned by forced labor is raped by the foreman, goes mad, and hangs herself. Gurgling with vodka, the fat cats of the Rostov central committee storm the local ballet school, and as they pinch and paw the trembling girls, tell them the facts of Soviet life: "The Government keeps you, pays you, looks after you without end. Now you're going to pay some of it back."

Gouzenko, 35, intends to go on paying the Soviets back in "one novel after another," and promises to tell more of his personal story in his second novel, built around the mental conflict in a Soviet agent between his duty to Russia and the "emotional appeal of a free society."

Tire Fall of a Titan has already transformed ex-Comrade Gouzenko into a capitalist: in addition to the juicy income assured by the Book-of-the-Month arrangement, Gouzenko a fortnight ago got the nice bourgeois sum of $100,000 for screen rights to the book.

-- More violent than Maxim Gorky's own death in August 1936. At first Moscow reported the old (68) man's death as natural, but in the vast purge trials two years later, the Kremlin charged NKVD Chief Genrikh Yagoda with hastening Gorky's end (enforced exposure to grippe, influenza and the weather) and masterminding the killing of Gorky's son. Gouzenko believes Yagoda killed Gorky on Stalin's orders.

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