Crime and Misdemeanours in Post-Soviet Ukraine

Whiskey Priest, by Alexander J. Motyl

iUniverse Inc., 143 pages, US$12.95.

Reviewed by Olena Wawryshyn

A certain segment of post-communist Ukraine is an anarchic wild West where corruption is rife and organized crime flourishes virtually unhindered. In this brutal world, mercenary killers are hired to settle disputes in shady business deals, and human trafficking is not an uncommon way of making money.

The luxury cars of the new super rich on Kyiv’s streets hint of vast sums made illegally, but the criminal element is largely hidden from the view of tourists.  And, Ukrainian North Americans making pilgrimages to the land of their ancestors, which is at long-last independent, wilfully overlook it because it is too disturbing to confront it directly.

But it is this repugnant side of post-Soviet Ukraine that academic and painter Alexander J. Motyl tackles head-on in his first novel, Whiskey Priest.

At a book launch for Whiskey Priest in New York, organized by the Shevchenko Scientific Society, Motyl admitted that author Graham Greene, who wrote suspense thrillers, was one of his literary influences, and that he reads crime fiction.

No surprise there – as in all ways, Whiskey Priest is a crime-fiction thriller. It even pays homage to the American master of that genre, Mickey Spillane; one of Motyl’s characters, Jane Sweet, reads the writer’s paperbacks.

Like Spillane’s novels, Whiskey Priest contains plenty of blatant sex and violence. Set around the time, though not in the thick of the Orange Revolution, Whiskey Priest focuses on three main characters. Igor Bazarov is a Soviet migr who teaches at an American Ivy League university and, on the side, makes money through a prostitution ring that exploits Ukrainian women. When three of his ex-Soviet colleagues die in quick succession, the action begins.

The second main character is Jane Sweet (Ivanka Svit), a Ukrainian-American from Long Island, New York who works as a diplomat at the American embassy in Vienna.
The “whiskey priest” is Anatoly Filatov, a former KGB agent who used to ferret out Ukrainian nationalists in Lviv before the fall of the Soviet Union, but is now a mafia hit-man.

Calling any of these characters protagonists doesn’t seem quite right as none inspires much sympathy.  Though both Sweet and Filatov develop as characters–Sweet comes to better understand her Ukrainian identity and Filatov, formerly a true believer in communism sheds a tear when he realizes that his life in a post-Soviet society has no meaning–the people Motyl creates have a hard edge.  For this reason, though the book is a page-turner, it’s hard to get emotionally involved.

The staccato style of writing similarly creates a detached tone. The short, clipped dialogue, much of it consisting of smart-alecky quips, has the ring of a Hollywood movie script.

Sweet is probably the closest to being the main hero. To outline her family’s history, Motyl sporadically diverges from the omniscient narrator’s point of view and presents passages that can be described as stream-of-consciousness flashbacks or memories of Sweet’s fami-
ly, interspersed with her own personal thoughts.

This innovative device works as it allows Motyl to present a great deal of historical background without slowing down the novel’s quick pace.

Less successful is Motyl’s portrayal of women; most of them are eye-candy molls.  As for the career-oriented Sweet, I wondered, as a Ukrainian-Canadian woman, whether a Ukrainian-American of roughly the same age would realistically have such a foul mouth. Her wardrobe also seemed incongruous. What self-respecting North American woman would wear white pumps with a red blouse or purple lipstick?!

One has to give more latitude to Motyl’s depiction of academics because Motyl is, after all, a professor of Political Science at Rutgers University-Newark. The author is also the deputy director of the university’s Division of Global Affairs and co-director of the Central and East European Studies Program at Rutgers. He has also taught a course called Theorizing Ukraine: Politics, Theory and Political Theory at the Harvard Ukrainian Summer Institute.

It is Motyl’s interest in political theory that adds a dimension to Whiskey Priest that raises it above a run-of-the-mill thriller. Through Filatov, Motyl explores the repercussions on an individual of the collapse of a political system and, along with it, an entire belief system.  “Belief makes us human.  Without belief we are animals,” Filatov tells Sweet in a climatic moment of epiphany.

In the end, because Filatov has lost his belief and Sweet hasn’t lost all of hers, their fates are different. But we are left wondering whether Filatov’s assertion that “with belief we can choose between right and wrong,” is true.