Reading Night Soldiers, the first in a long series of Alan Furst's historical WWII spy novels. So far nothing of the usual cat and mouse capers; it's a thorough submerging of its characters into the developing spy networks of the time (mid-1930s). Anyone who has spent time in Europe will appreciate how atmospherically Furst writes the winding settings of life along the eastern Danube, the Spanish Civil War, and underground Paris pre-Nazi invasion.
Read Night Soldiers again, for the fourth time, and for a lengthier reflection—
With good reason, the word panoramic is a popular descriptor for Alan Furst’s
Night Soldiers. Across the sprawling canvas of Europe’s descent into WWII,
Night Soldiers starts behind the scenes inside the Soviet’s NKVD, where spies are trained for clandestine work in conflicts abroad. It also operates in the prelude of WWII, as Spain’s costly civil war draws in foreign powers until Madrid finally falls. And with WWII coming into full swing,
Night Soldiers operates on the periphery with the French Resistance to Nazi occupation.
Night Soldiers is a WWII novel that is ultimately more of a spy novel, seeking the shadows of the war’s preliminaries and peripheries without ever diving headlong into the bloodier, better-known movements of Barbarossa or D-Day.
Because of this,
Night Soldiers can evade a baseline conception of WWII. It does not begin from an American perspective but rather from the other side of Europe, with Khristo Stoianev, a young Bulgarian from a fishing family, who is recruited to Moscow for training as an operative for the NKVD (now the KGB). What follows is a privileged look inside the Soviet spy machine, and because of how incredibly well researched
Night Soldiers is, not only are its historical particulars worth appreciating, such as NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda making an appearance at a drinking send-off for his agents, but Russia’s atmosphere of pervasive fear under Stalin is also well observed:
“There was a woman, probably going to work, coming toward him down the street…She had seen the black Pobieda, Mitya at the wheel, Sascha in his leather coat sprawled in the back seat, and Khristo, swaying for a moment on the sidewalk. She stopped, then moved around him in a wide circle, walking close to the wall of the building. She kept her eyes on the pavement in front of her, but then, just for a bare instant, she glanced at him, then looked down again, and he realized that she knew who they were. She knew what they were, what he was, and she was afraid of him.”Khristo is soon sent on assignment to Spain as an intelligence operative for the Spanish Republicans against Nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War. There he works with spies from other nations, including Americans, in support of the Republican cause. But as the Nationalists close in on eventually capturing Madrid, Khristo’s cover is blown, while the Soviets, as part of Stalin’s brutal purges, begin targeting their own NKVD agents abroad for imprisonment in the Gulag. Khristo flees into France, capping a lengthy detour through the Spanish Civil War that is again enhanced by Furst’s absorbing use of history. For example, a key plot point involves the Nationalists’ air superiority, bolstered by German and Italian air forces eager to use the war in Spain to gain combat experience and test their aircraft and bombing tactics against urban targets.
In France, Khristo hides in plain sight, living with a girlfriend and working as a waiter amid the fashionable Paris nightlife, until his arrest by French counterintelligence in 1937. Three years into a life sentence, a priest coordinates Khristo’s release because, by 1940, with France under threat of invasion, his clandestine skillset has become one of many resources useful against Nazi occupation.
As WWII fiction,
Night Soldiers never becomes a novel of warfare yet is surprisingly alive with the preliminary and peripheral workings of WWII’s vast espionage networks, as viewed from the spies themselves.
Night Soldiers is an exceptionally well-written and researched journey; an alternative title could just as well be Eternal Strangers, capturing the lonely, wandering existence of spies who are endlessly endangered and displaced:
“Khristo sighed. The night made him sad. The history of Kulic’s nation was like that of his own. The fighting never stopped. The conquerors kept coming. Other Kulics, other Khristos, all the way back through time, wandered the world. Away from love, away from home. They were destined to be eternal strangers. Melancholy adventurers, guests in other people’s houses. From now on, forever, there could be no peace for him, no ease, none of the small domestic harmonies that were the consolation of plain people everywhere. His pleasures were to be those of the soldier in a distant outpost – a woman, a bottle, a quick death without pain. Those he could look forward to. And, though his heart might swell with the poetry at the fire of a perfect sunset, there would never be the special one beside him to share such joys.”
