Book review: The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt by Sarah Armstrong

Moscow at the height of the Cold War isn’t an obvious destination for a young woman seeking an adventure, or putting off finding a job. Martha, however, has been flexing her political muscles at Girton College, before finally being sent down for having “brought Cambridge University into disrepute” by protesting Trinity’s refusal to admit female students. At the close of 1972, Martha is back living with her well-off, middle-class parents and looking for some kind of a job in the local area. Her father works for GCHQ, so they take a very dim view of her political activism.

Fed up with living at home, and seeing no interesting prospects on her horizon, Martha finds out that one of her oldest and dearest friends, Kit, is being posted to Moscow, and they agree to enter into a marriage of convenience so that she can join him. Martha thinks living in Moscow will be a terrific adventure and Kit, being gay, feels that a wife will be useful camouflage for him in the diplomatic community.

But whatever Martha’s intentions may have been back in Blighty, once she touches down in Moscow she is rapidly drawn into the orbit of the “embassy wives”, a group in which everyone knows everything about everyone else and whose leader, Emily, likes to keep tight control.

The person they would like to see Martha mixing with is the highly-strung Sandra, who, after making indiscreet remarks at a party, they think should be encouraged back into the fold. However, the one who most fascinates Martha is Eva, an English ex-pat who has embraced Communism and become a stout defender of the Soviet system, making her persona non grata in the eyes of the embassy wives. Martha suspects Eva of being the “E.V. Mann” who wrote a booklet of folk tales which came into her possession back home and which has given Martha the imagery and vocabulary she now applies to Moscow, “the wolves in birch forests” being the omnipresent KGB agents watching over them. But Eva angrily denies ever having written the stories. Sandra, meanwhile, is drawing Martha deeper into the intrigue, explaining that she is being pressured to spy on the Soviets and giving her a letter to pass on to Eva’s Russian lover, Sasha.

The Wolves of Leninsky Prospekt is a Cold War thriller in which little, in fact, actually happens. Look elsewhere for tense interrogations, shoot-outs and frantic chase scenes, for Armstrong’s strength is in her depiction of an insular community in the heart of a paranoid and secretive state which has come to resemble its host. We’re often unsure whether it’s the Soviets or her own husband, Kit, who is aiming Martha “in a specific direction”, and Sandra points out that the methods used by the embassy wives to secure Martha’s loyalty differ little from those used by the intelligence services. In its low-key way, it’s a highly effective, and often disquieting, study of human beings being alienated and remoulded by a climate of constant surveillance, threats and manipulation.

ALASTAIR MABBOTT