Moscow Underground

Catherine Merridale

$32.99

Paperback

Forthcoming
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English

Fourth Estate
26 August 2025

Fiction & Literature; War & combat fiction; Historical fiction; Fiction: special features; Criminal investigation & detection; Political oppression & persecution

Moscow, 1934.

Moscow's glittering new subway is under construction at last. The first line will run through the centre of the city, cutting deep through Moscow soil. But futures cannot be created without digging up the past. Though Russia's leaders want to build a glorious Soviet capital, what holds them in a fatal grip is history: old mud and bones.

Anton Belkin is an Investigator at the Procuracy, a sensitive job at a dangerous moment on the road to the Show Trials. He is also someone who needs to keep his head down. His artist father was once the darling of the revolutionary avant-garde, a painter whose work could inspire devotion and great sacrifice. But now his dreams are out of place, too loud and red in Stalin's world of sterile rules and rubber stamps.

Anton is dragged into a murder case. A prominent archaeologist, working alongside the subway dig, has been killed in a deserted mansion. Though Anton doesn't want the job, his former lover, Vika, who is now a powerful member of the secret police, browbeats him into paying a visit to the site with her. Against his better judgement he is drawn to follow though, embarking on investigations that will almost certainly get him killed.

Deep underground, he finds a priceless secret that could genuinely unlock the future but links him to a vicious internecine fight for power in the young Soviet state. In the process, he is forced to reconsider the history he shares with Vika and the bonds that bind them both.

Moscow Underground is a sweeping novel of life, death and politics in the quicksand world of Stalin's tyranny.

By: Catherine Merridale
Imprint: Fourth Estate
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 153mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 270g
ISBN: 9780008761547
ISBN 10: 000876154X
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 26 August 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Catherine Merridale is an award-winning writer and broadcaster with an internationally acknowledged expertise in Russia and the former Soviet Union. A pioneer of oral history in the region, her first major book, Night of Stone (Granta, 2000), won the Royal Society of Literature's Heinemann Prize and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2001. More recently, Red Fortress: The Secret Heart of Russia's History (Allen Lane, 2013) won both the Wolfson History Prize and the Pushkin House Russian Book Prize in 2014. Ivan's War (Faber, 2005) tells the stories of ordinary Red Army soldiers in Europe's last great land-based war, while Lenin on the Train (Allen Lane, 2016) tracks Europe's collective and bungling responsibility for the Great October Revolution.

Reviews for Moscow Underground

PRAISE FOR LENIN ON THE TRAIN: THE TIMES, THE FINANCIAL TIMES AND ECONOMIST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016 'Twice I missed my stop on the Tube reading this book… this is a jewel among histories' David Aaronovitch, The Times 'The suberb, funny, fascinating story of Lenin's trans-European rail journey to power and how it shook the world' Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening Standard 'A brisk and often witty overview for the lay reader of the circumstances leading up to the February and October revolutions' Helen Rappaport, Sunday Times 'With the 100th anniversary of the two Russian revolutions of 1917 around the corner… surely no author will give a better account than Merridale of how, in that fateful year, Lenin made his way with German help from exile in Switzerland to Russia' Financial Times