NIGHT SOLDIERS is the first of Alan Furst's novels set in Europe during the late 1930's until the end of WW II. I have read a couple of his later novels but decided to go back, start over from the beginning and see how I like his complete works. Also, I have forgotten which of his other novels I have read so it won't be a big deal to read them again. The novel begins in a small Bulgarian town in 1934, where the protagonist, Khristo Stoianev lives. After his brother is killed by the local fascists, the Russian CIA called the NKVD, recruits Khristo and to avoid his murder, sends him to Moscow, trains him along with many others, who will later appear in the novel, in the ways of intelligence service, especially loyalty above all to Stalin, and sends him off to fight in the Spanish Civil War in 1936, on the side of the Republicans, who are opposed to Franco's Nationalists. Kristo soon learns that he's just a easily replaceable cog in the great scientific experiment called Marxism, disposed of at will for any sign of treachery, disloyalty, and questioning authority.
When he's told by his higher ups that he's being recalled to Moscow, he knows it's a death sentence and along with an idealistic American women and another Republican fighter, walks out of Spain, ending up in Paris. There is connects with others like himself, falls in love, reunites with one of his Russian friends from Moscow, who warns him that his days are numbered. Khristo, unfortunately, finds his lover missing, asks his friend to help save her life, which he does but it means that Khristo ends up being turned in for murder. His gun was used but he did not do it. He goes to prison for a few years until 1944 when Americans realize he can be useful, if infiltrated in to Germany, and he is given a mission, where he ends up working with another American behind enemy lines, sabotaging when possible, though not enough to incur the wrath of the Nazis, who, if they realize someone is sabotaging them, will execute an entire town to teach the terrorists a lesson...it does not pay to mess with us.
As the war winds down, Khristo takes on one final mission, one involving a Russian dissident who has written a history of the NKVD, the Stalin purges, the banishment's to Siberia, the truth about this 'wonderful experiment.' He travels down the Danube, from Germany, to Hungary, through Yugoslavia, Bulgaria to its mouth in Romania. There he meets up with the dissident, but both are shot by, we assume, communists sympathizers or NKVD. We think Khristo has died, but the final chapter has him limping off an American ship, to the immigration center in NYC, only to be taken by the arm by Faye, the woman with whom he escaped from Spain some six years ago during the Spanish Civil war.
If anything, this book makes you aware of how lucky we are to be American, to have avoided the turmoil of WWI and WWII, especially the atrocities performed in the name of a belief, like fascism in Germany, Spain or Italy, or Marxism in Russia, but also in all of Eastern Europe after WWII. To have lived under this inhumane regimes is mind boggling, especially if you survived WWII only then to be placed under the yoke of Communism for some forty years, till 1989 when the Iron Curtain fell.
Too much happens to write a really thorough summary. It's not a page turner, but it is interesting and worth reading for the madness of those years, the hatred and inhumanity, but also the greatness of some who fought against fascism and communism.
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