"Gorlov Deadlock" by Polina Dashkova, summary

The novel, created in 2019, is a large-scale historical detective story whose plot links the Stalinist repressions of the Doctors’ Plot of 1952–1953 with the covert operations of the Soviet intelligence services and the tragic events in Moscow in January 1977.

The background to the conspiracy and the special operation at Gorlovy Tupik

In the fall of 1952, young MGB investigator Captain Vladilen Lyuby dreams of a meteoric rise in his career. He lives in a communal apartment on Gorlovy Tupik and sincerely believes in his own chosenness, a Jewish conspiracy, and Stalin’s greatness. Lyuby begins an affair with his young neighbor, Shura Golubeva, renting a house for her in Tushino, but conceals the affair from his colleagues.

Lyuby’s friend, investigator Fedya Uralets, begins an intimate relationship with his agent, Filimonova, a nurse at the Botkin Hospital. When the woman becomes pregnant and demands marriage, Lyuby helps his friend fabricate a story about an enemy provocation. Filimonova is soon arrested. During interrogation, she admits to consulting with therapist Semyon Efimovich Laskin about the pregnancy.

Anyone will use the evidence against Laskin and develop a covert operation called "Witness." He decides to arrest the doctor’s seventeen-year-old daughter, a first-year medical student named Nadezhda Laskina. The plan is simple: break the terrified girl in solitary confinement and make her the prosecution’s star witness in an open trial.

The resilience of Nadezhda and the collapse of an investigator’s career

In January 1953, Nadezhda was secretly kidnapped on her way to an exam and taken to Lubyanka’s inner prison, No. 53. She was handcuffed, deprived of sleep, and subjected to a series of interrogations, demanding she sign a confession that her father had forced her to poison infants and recruit students. Nadya withdrew into herself, retreating into the comforting memories of her childhood, and refusing to incriminate her father.

Due to exhaustion and constant handcuffing, Nadya begins bleeding and is transferred to the prison hospital. Anyone would be left with nothing.

On March 5, 1953, Stalin died. Realizing that the case was falling apart and that Shura could become a dangerous witness to his machinations, Lyubyi murdered his mistress with an axe in the Tushino house, blaming the owners’ feeble-minded son. After the "Doctors’ Plot" was closed, Nadezhda was released, forced to sign a lifetime non-disclosure agreement, and Lyubyi was dismissed from the state security services amid scandal.

Festival Summer and a Fatal Secret

In the summer of 1957, the World Festival of Youth and Students is taking place in Moscow. Young intelligence officer Yuri Ufimtsev is undergoing operational training disguised as British student Basil Pollitt. On the roof of a high-rise building on the Garden Ring, he rescues Nadya Laskina, whom a frantic Lyubyi is attempting to push into the festive crowd.

A torrid two-week romance blossoms between Yuri and Nadezhda. Nadya is convinced she’s met a genuine foreigner. Yuri hesitates to reveal his real name due to strict confidentiality.

On the eve of the festival’s closing, KGB personnel officer Karp Afanasyevich Tipun blackmails Yuri with photographs of their encounters, threatening to expel Nadya from the institute. Yuri decides to confess to his beloved, but their farewell date is ruined by Nadya’s mother’s sudden heart attack. Nadya never learns the truth, and nine months later, she gives birth to a daughter, Elena.

African secrets and family dramas

In January 1977, KGB Colonel Yuri Ufimtsev served as a station chief in the African republic of Nubairo, ruled by the brutal dictator Ptipu. President Nubairo demanded nuclear weapons from Moscow, blackmailing the Soviet leadership with secret negotiations with the Americans. Ufimtsev flew to Moscow and provided KGB Chairman Andropov with copies of payments from the Swiss bank Dreyfus, proving that the dictator was simply embezzling Soviet loans. The deployment of Soviet missiles was dropped.

Meanwhile, adult Nadezhda Semyonovna works as a leading epidemiologist at a research institute, studying bacteriophages. She suffers from panic attacks and threatening phone calls from unknown individuals.

Nadya’s nineteen-year-old daughter, Lena, is raising her seven-month-old son, Nikita, in their new apartment. Her husband, the unpopular actor Anton Kachalov, is having an affair with student Victoria Galanova, the daughter of a famous literary critic. At the instigation of his mistress, Anton secretly takes the amateur Aurora movie camera, a gift from his grandfather for his son’s birth, from the house.

A new round of Major Lyubov’s mania

Vladilen Lyuby, now a lecturer at the Institute of Social Sciences and a doctor of science, has been plotting revenge for a quarter of a century. He gathers a group of radical youth in Gorlovy Tupik and plans a series of terrorist attacks in Moscow, intending to blame them on the Jewish underground. Under his orders, the militants print anti-Semitic leaflets on Nadya Laskina’s typewriter, having entered her apartment using the keys Anton stole.

Anyone recruits fanatical Palestinian student Amil al-Husseini to help prepare the subway bombing. To document the explosion, he uses Lena Laskina’s stolen camera.

KGB Major General Fyodor Uralets uncovers Lyuboj’s dangerous plans. Realizing that the fanatic has gotten out of control and is a threat to state security, Uralets, through a recruited electrician, Ruslan, arranges for Lyuboj to be fatally electrocuted during a bathroom renovation in Shabolovka.

Tragedy on the stretch and a long-awaited meeting

Despite the death of the organizer, on January 8, 1977, Palestinian Amil left a bag containing a bomb in a subway car on the open stretch between Izmailovskaya and Pervomayskaya stations. An explosion occurred, killing ten people. Yuri Ufimtsev’s mother, Maria Dmitrievna, was also in the car and suffered severe shrapnel wounds while trying to save a doll she had bought for a neighbor girl.

The victim was taken to the intensive care unit of Botkin Hospital. Professor Semyon Efimovich Laskin became her attending physician.

Arriving to visit his mother, Yuri Ufimtsev walks into Dr. Laskin’s office and sees family photographs on the table. Looking at the pictures of a young Lena and little Nikita, Yuri is astonished to recognize the features of his youthful love. The doctor reveals that his daughter Nadya gave birth to a child from a missing foreigner named Basil. Twenty years apart, Yuri realizes that these are the photographs of his own daughter and grandson.