Authentic Immediacy—A Tribute to the Political Fiction of Frederick ForsythBy Kevin Mims
February 18, 2022
When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative:
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics … despite its monolithic appearance from outside, has two Achilles heels. One is the problem of feeding its 250 million people. The other is euphemistically called “the nationalities question.” In the fifteen constituent republics ruled from Moscow … are several score identifiable non-Russian peoples, the most numerous and perhaps the most nationally conscious of whom are the Ukrainians. By 1982, the population of [Russia] numbered only 120 million out of the 250. Second in economic importance and population, with 70 million inhabitants, was the Ukrainian SSR, which is one reason why under Tsars and Politburo the Ukraine had always been singled out for special attention and particularly ruthless russification.
The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia, under the rule of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, remains determined to keep Ukraine from being free and independent. Forsyth’s novel, set in the USSR’s final decade, features a fictional Soviet Premier named Maxim Rudin, and offers a prescient overview of the long conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Forsyth notes that those Ukrainians who live east of the Dnieper River are more russified, having lived under Tsars for centuries. West Ukraine, he explains, “formed a part, successively, of Poland, Austria, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Its spiritual and cultural orientation was and remains more Western than the rest of the region. … Ukrainians read and write with Roman letters, not Cyrillic script; they are overwhelmingly Uniate Catholics, not Russian Orthodox Christians. Their language, poetry, arts, and traditions predate the rise of the Rus conquerers who swept down from the north.”
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It might seem odd to recommend a thriller by a British author as a source of information about the ancient enmity between Russia and the Ukraine, but Frederick Forsyth is no ordinary novelist and his books are not ordinary novels. Forsyth is so knowledgeable about so many things that his name appears all over Wikipedia, not just on pages dedicated to his works. For instance, if you look up the Novocherkassk Massacre you will learn that a 1962 strike by factory workers in that Russian town was ruthlessly put down by Soviet troops and KGB operatives, resulting in the deaths of dozens of workers, the arrest and imprisonment of hundreds of others, and the execution, after a show trial, of seven more. The event was never reported by the Soviet press and was not officially acknowledged until several years after the fall of the Soviet Union.
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Source:
https://quillette.com/2022/02/18/frederick-forsyth-and-the-fate-of-ukraine/
