Old friendships can be hard to maintain. People grow up, their interests and priorities change, they find partners and start families, and life is shaped by bigger forces than whatever threw them together in childhood. And what greater force exists than a communist revolution?
These are some of the problems facing Vasil Murtov, a middle-aged chauffeur to a man who is, on paper, his oldest friend. In “pre” times, Little Lavrushya had been the son of a disgraced anti-Tsarist radical, taken in by Murtov’s wealthy bourgeois family for a chance at a better education and life. A few decades and counter-revolutions later, Murtov’s schoolyard bestie is now Lavrentiy Beria, leader of the Georgian communist state, former chief of the secret police and one of Stalin’s most ruthlessly efficient functionaries.
