Child 44

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Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith is set in a Stalinized Soviet Russia surrounded by conspiracy, corruption, desperation, and suspicion. While the country is distracted by these four things, a serial killer takes advantage of this system and starts his killing spree. If the reader does not know much about Soviet Russia’s murderers it is easy to think that Andrei, the serial killer, is just a fictional character. However, the book is based on fact, Andrei Chikatilo was a real person and he did in fact have multiple victims. An examination of the novel reveals that the book accurately accounts the corruption, desperation, and suspicion during this time period. through these distractions Andrei Chikatilo took advantage of the system that failed to acknowledge …show more content…
For example, in Child 44, Leo and Vasili are office competitors in the MGB, otherwise known as the Ministry of State Security, because of this Vasili decides to push Leo out of the way by taking control of the security team, and eventually pushing Leo out of the way. “Vasili must have guaranteed the driver immunity, a guarantee that would only hold up if Leo failed. Leo wondered how many other members of his team had more invested in his failure than his success.” (Smith, 72). Vasili also secures his job by accusing Leo’s wife of being a spy and asks him to denounce her, this is something Leo would never do: “If this was a test of Leo’s character then Raisa would also be spared. And she would never need to know. If she was a spy then these men already had the evidence and were waiting to see if Leo was working with her …. The only course of action was to denounce his wife …. —Leo Stepanovich, we have reason to believe your wife is working for foreign agencies. You personally are not suspected of any crimes. This is the reason we’ve asked you to investigate the allegations. Please tell us what you have found …. —Leo? … —My wife is innocent.” (“Child 44.” Pg. 86.) This is corruption because beforehand the only ‘proof’ that they have from this is a false statement from a veterinarian after he had been injected with camphor oil which causes the injected to go into “a seizure. [And while they are in that seizure they] will not have the ability to lie.” (“Child 44.” Pg. 114.) A fact that is most probably fictional. It is not hard to imagine that similar things happened in the real Soviet Russia during Stalin’s rule but have been either long ‘forgotten’ or sealed in documents never to see the light of day again. Due to the fact of the movie of Child 44 is banned in Russia it is not hard to believe that this is the case. Andrei could have easily taken advantage of this
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