Sell Us the Rope

Starred review from November 21, 2022
May’s stellar latest (after Stronger than Skin) chronicles the three weeks Josef Stalin spent in London attending the fifth annual congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party. The conference, held abroad in May 1907 because the party has been exiled from Russian territory, is shadowed by informants from the Okhrana, the Tsar’s secret police, and riven by disputes between the moderate Menshevik faction and their militant Bolshevik rivals. Koba, as Stalin styles himself after a folkloric antihero, plays a negligible role in official events, but his tactical genius and willingness to murder and rob for the Bolsheviks win him approval from fellow party members Ulyanov and Yanovsky (later Lenin and Trotsky), who scheme privately with him to continue the illegal operations the congress votes against. As Koba attempts to keep his footing amid the party’s sometimes lethal power struggles, he grapples with his dangerous status as a secret informant for the Okhrana. Meanwhile, he finds surprising comfort as protector to preteen Arthur Bacon, the son of the boarding-house owner from whom Koba rents a room and, like Koba, is the victim of a father’s violent abuse. He’s also romantically drawn to spirited Finnish delegate Elli Vuokko, despite having a wife and son at home. With a spare, sardonic style, May probes Stalin’s childhood trauma, sense of charisma, and brutally violent side, humanizing him without sentimentalizing. Secondary figures, too, are incisively evoked—German revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg is particularly vivid—as are the party’s petty squabbles and the reeking, begrimed London the characters move through. This is superb.

January 15, 2023
Fiction mingles with fact in this offbeat account of the young Joseph Stalin rubbing up against leading Marxists in London in 1907. Turned away by Denmark and Sweden, Russian revolutionaries including Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, and Maxim Gorky have converged on foggy and filthy London for the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. Stalin, going by the name Koba (after the Robin Hood of Georgian folklore), is a monster in the making at age 29, "eyes burning from beneath a perpetual frown." His words to live by: "Don't allow yourself the luxury of mercy." But he also can be, of all things, a mensch in protecting an abused boy in whom he sees reflections of his own childhood. And he's a lovable loser in his flirtation with 19-year-old Elli Vuokko, a (fictional) Finnish lathe worker who is funny, spirited, and possibly more calculating than him. "Free nations can only evolve out of streams of blood!" she declares, playing to the crowd. But though the novel exposes the stark contradictions of communism at every turn, May is less interested in political theory than comic spectacle: "The future is arriving and it is wearing skirts and knows how to dislocate your shoulders." That said, Koba's past deeds, one in particular, darken the narrative. "The living come and go, but the dead never leave you," he says. "Everyone you kill hangs around, plucking at your sleeve, wanting to be acknowledged, refusing to be forgotten." A subtly menacing portrayal of the future tyrant and mass killer.

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February 15, 2023
The fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party is being held in London, of all places. Koba--"you know him as Stalin," the reader is blithely informed--arrives in England with a brace of comrades to represent Georgia at the congress. There he encounters Elli Vuokko, a fresh-faced 19-year-old doing her revolutionary bit for the lathe operators of Finland. The Okhrana (Tsarist secret police) threaten, Mensheviks and Bolsheviks squabble, and Ulyanov and Yanovsky (Lenin and Trotsky) appoint Koba to ferret out party traitors. Despite the 1907 setting, May's London feels Dickensian with its urchins and pervasive filth, a setting competently evoked through impressionistic sentence fragments ("Smuts in their eyes"). Koba takes advantage of the vulnerable (Elli and an abused child) with boundless anger, employing mantras like "no better time to kick a man than when he's down." This inventive literary work takes an interesting look at an interesting historical time through interesting characterization while daringly taking a darkly comedic approach to an historical monster responsible for the deaths of millions.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.