It’s not infrequently said that Adam Smith “invented” capitalism with his publication The Wealth of Nations, but the real truth (one stressed by Matthew Hennessey in Visible Hand) is that Smith reported on capitalism as it was happening. That’s because profit-motivated human action is as natural as breathing, as opposed to something humans needed instruction in.
What arguably drives the mistaken narrative about the greatest economics book ever written (one that is probably the least read economics book ever written relative to purchases of same) is the popular notion that for something like two thousand years economic output was essentially flat, followed by big leaps born of the Industrial Revolution and other brilliant growth spasms. Some will tie the leaps to Smith’s articulations. The view here is they've mis-analyzed things, and not because Smith’s book isn’t brilliant, and not because the Industrial Revolution and what followed wasn’t brilliant. But because economic growth is people dividing up work, and as the world shrank in a figurative sense thanks to profit-motivated advances, more and more hands worked together on the way to soaring productivity. Worthless measures like GDP are near totally unequal to this truth.
Which brings us to Moscow during the Soviet era. What happens when the profit motive is illegal? As in what happens when human nature is suffocated? I found myself asking this while reading the recently deceased Martin Cruz Smith’s 1981 novel, Gorky Park. What inspired a read of what is a nearly 45-years-old book was the obituaries for Smith when he died in July (July 11, 2025), and quotes from individuals like former Washington Post Moscow bureau chief Peter Osnos that with his novel, Smith conveyed “a feeling for the Soviet Union, its capital, its moods and its people.” My interest in Gorky Park was much more rooted in the life and atmosphere of Moscow than it was the suspense within the at times difficult to follow novel.
Which requires a brief return to Adam Smith. While he reported on capitalism in the 18th century, how interesting if Smith had been alive and reporting from within the Soviet Union in the 20th. What would Smith have seen, or not seen? In particular, and since the profit motive or “capitalism” is once again human nature, how much did the Soviet Union’s communism suffocate nature?
No doubt it did and did so substantially. People like Hedrick Smith (The Russians), Cato Institute co-founder Ed Crane (“Fear and Loathing In the Soviet Union”) and Geoffrey Bocca (The Moscow Scene) were all clear about how miserable and opposite of prosperous life was, so for that matter was Osnos in his own memoirs. Still, did they perhaps miss expressions of human nature here and there?
The answer is yes and no if Gorky Park is to be believed. While Smith’s book was decidedly not an apology for the Soviet Union, and certainly revealed its corrupt and backward nature, the feeling I took from his novel was one of a little more life and human nature finding its way into a communist state mostly defined by intense drudgery. To be clear, the previous sentence should in no way be construed as its own apology for the Soviet Union. There will be none. What an evil, awful place it was, or must have been. Still, what interested me most in reading Smith’s novel were the people in it. Life with all its complications surely goes on, though not in the way that it should, even as what makes life worth living (work and the ability to enjoy its fruits) is being cruelly muzzled.
For background on the novel, it begins fittingly enough in Gorky Park with inspector Arkady Renko at a crime scene that includes three dead bodies with mutilated heads, plus “the three victims also all missed the last joints of their fingers, their fingerprints.” They had been ice skating in Gorky Park, and it was quickly deduced that while eating and drinking off the rink (shades of a normal, in some ways luxurious life), they were brutally murdered, only to be left hidden for a long period under yet another snowy Moscow winter. How to solve such a crime? Oh well, that’s the why behind suspense novels.
That’s because in Smith’s telling (this is once again a novel) arrested criminals in Soviet-era Moscow were “ordinarily drunks first and murderers second.” Where economics must come into the story is in the passage that “the entire country was drunk half the time,” and that there were “few more dangerous positions” than “to be the best friend of or married to a drunk.” My take from it was and is that work is life, as opposed to something we balance with other aspects of life, including family. That’s not a knock on family, but it is a comment that work brings meaning to everything else, including family. Which is the problem with attempts by the state to make illegal what is life. Where productive work is suffocated misery is the norm, along with efforts to soften the horrors of the misery in the form of alcohol. We would all probably be a little or a lot less sober, much unhappier, and to varying degrees more violent if we couldn’t productively do what we’re supposed to do each day.
Back to Renko, he’s the wellborn son of a WWII Russian general. He “was from that magic circle of Moscow children of ‘the high ranks,’” a “creation of the same special schools and mutual acquaintances.” If Renko could just look beyond the total corruption of the Soviet state, he could easily rise within the Communist Party and its KGB. Except that he can’t, which means he’s a mere crime inspector in Moscow with a beautiful, but unhappy wife who is unhappy because Renko won’t play the proverbial game, which is itself a sign that the profit motive lives within us even when on the surface at least, there’s no chance for profit. It just reveals itself differently. Members of the Communist Party live better, have better access to goods and services, and even get to travel outside the U.S.S.R. Yet there’s more.
We find in Smith’s description of life in the Soviet Union that markets are at work even when they’re not supposed to be. In a country where nothing works, or certainly doesn’t work as well it would in an economically free country, those who can fix what’s frequently broken can make out quite well. We read that “A repairman makes three times that on the side,” while defense lawyers like Renko’s friend Mikhail Mikoyan “unofficially” were paid double or more than the 200 rubles (one presumes some of the pay comes in real money, or better yet, real things) the state allotted them each month, and the result was that Mikoyan “could afford good suits, a ruby ring on his little finger, furs for Natasha [his wife], a house in the country and a two-door Zhiguli in which to get there.”
It recalls Anya Gillinson’s 2024 memoir, Dreaming In Russian. Growing up in the U.S.S.R., her family lived very well in a fancy Moscow apartment. Her father was known all over the Soviet Union as a doctor capable of curing the sick, and as such had patients coming to him from all over the country. And they were paying him. Different amounts for sure, but they were paying him as their splendor amid generalized Moscow squalor indicated. How did he do this in a country that had decreed profits illegal? Gillinson sensed her father was protected simply because his patients included high up Party members, along with their wives and children.
So yes, per novels thought to depict Moscow life effectively, and through memoirs of real people, we know that human nature wasn’t totally suffocated in the thankfully former Soviet Union. Just the same, policy matters. While the state can’t lift people, it can surely shrink them. And it did.
That it did arguably helps explain why some in Russia didn’t, and still haven’t adjusted to post-Soviet life. While misery rooted in inability to be what you can or should be is just that, for some there’s comfort in the misery. Jack Osborne, Renko’s American-businessman nemesis in Gorky Park, understands the previous truth. When he and Renko first meet in a bath house that only the higher ups and rich businessmen from outside the U.S.S.R. could patronize, Osborne says “I can’t understand why you people ever defect to the United States. For money? You would learn that Americans, no matter how much money they have, always find something finally that they can’t buy.” His point is surely many things, but one of them is that while Americans are always looking up, always yearning for something, “Here you will always be rich.” Yes, for some there’s wealth in not having to keep up, in always having an excuse for why there’s no wealth.
With Renko, his lack of progression doesn't seem to bother him. Which is either a false note in the novel (everyone cares, including those who strive mightily to give off the impression that they don’t), or it’s possible Smith wrote Renko as the true snob: someone born into all the all possibilities and luxuries that could be had in a country with strict limits, but who enjoyed most the luxury of being able to turn his nose up to the bourgeois needs of a people for whom bourgeois yearnings and accession of same was at least on its face, illegal. Which means there are many, many Renkos in the United States.
At one point Renko and his wife travel out to the country to Mikoyan’s dacha, and even as Zoya runs off to get together with a co-worker almost right before Renko’s eyes, he still doesn’t seem to care. Except that people once again care. Was Renko simply deadened to feeling by what the Soviet Union was, or was the marriage itself a big lie in a nation defined by lies such that at least as far as his legal wife, he truly didn’t care? Or was his indifference to Zoya part of his rebellion against the U.S.S.R. and the privileges afforded to him, but that he couldn’t accept? So many questions, and Smith is no longer around to answer them.
Smith’s story doesn’t spare the reader from the endless stupidity that was the Soviet Unions. Since “there were so few gas stations in Moscow,” he describes truck drivers for the state siphoning it off to sell it to private car owners. Dr. Levin, the pathologist tasked with recreating the faces of the murder victims beheaded, was offered an apartment by the state with either a kitchen or a bathroom, but not both. Levin quipped that “For me a bathroom is more important,” but it speaks to the total dysfunction that results from making prosperity illegal. At the same time, it raises questions about how one would eat absent a kitchen.
That’s because in Bocca’s The Moscow Scene, a trip to the very few restaurants in Mosco were quite the awful experience, including surly waiters instructing so-called customers on what they would be eating. How would Levin eat? It’s not said, but at one point Renko buys himself “a supper of meat pies and lemonade” at the entrance of Gorky Park. Was the latter evidence that laws against profit-motivated work weren't absolute, was it just the author telling a story, or did the state actually place street vendors in specific areas of Moscow? Without knowing, the speculation here is that while suffocated, the profit motive was more evident than outsiders at times reported.
What about rubles? Fyodor Golodkin, a minor character in the novel, says “Rubles are for suckers. Rubles are paper, see, and vodka is cash.” Yes. Absolutely. Hedrick Smith made plain that Russia was awash in Rubles that people couldn’t exchange for much. Which tells us what’s known, that in the Soviet Union the illegal dollar had to have circulated. Barring that, barter. Vodka is cash. No one exchanges money, they exchange products for products. Those who had products were far more likely to exchange them for real money over paper, or something real.
It was for real things that Osborne was in the Soviet Union. In his words, “Fur and gold are the oldest Russian items of value.” Osborne’s wealth to a high degree is an effect of the pull he's long had with Russian high-ups to get fur (Sable fur most of all) out of the country, and to rich countries like the U.S. To make money, Osborne exercises his U.S. Army connections to the Soviet state going back to WWII (during which he committed atrocities against German troops in St. Petersburg) to do so. Though communists, those on top don't act like communists. How could they? It’s anti-human, while at the same time it’s human for some to thieve what they can’t, won’t, or are not allowed to get through production.
Regarding the Russian military of the time about which Smith was writing, it’s said that Soviet servicemen are lousy shots, that “they don’t get a chance to shoot anyone, and besides, the training has gone to the devil.” What did Smith mean? It could have been that the country had gone soft relative to Renko’s father’s generation that saw so much war up close, but it was also true what Ed Crane observed in the Soviet Union of 1981: that it had no economy to support a serious military, let alone the soaring cost of war. Crane was right, and we increasingly see how right he was from books looking back on the Khruschev era: Ike, JFK, Khruschev, and all those familiar with the U.S., U.S.S.R., and the militaries of both knew that the Soviets were no threat. They saw in the 1960s what Crane saw just from looking around in 1981: collectivist countries, for being collectivist, lack the means to fight wars.
Thinking more about the murders, though fictional, there was an economic story underlying them. Referencing Osborne yet again, “You’d be as likely to find an unmotivated act here as you would be to find a tropical bird outside your window.” Yes, of course. In locales where profits are legal, there’s all sorts of illegality taking place to make money, including murder. But in a Soviet Union bereft of wealth? Yet as has been made plain in this attempt at analysis routinely, the desire to get reveals itself even when getting is illegal. Osborne’s rich American businessman’s existence in Moscow, including his close ties to Soviet higher ups is evidence of this. Just as we all care, we’re all motivated in some or many ways too.
Looked at through the prism of the murders, we find that Osborne had motivations as did the the two Russians and one American killed. The Russians were desperate to get out of the Soviet Union, and the American was desperate to be the individual who got them out. And no, it wasn’t ideological for the American. It was a desire for notoriety, for personal fulfillment. As always, human needs (the market) reveal themselves no matter the society or its rules against getting in the bigger sense.
Considering the murdered Russians, their desire to exit was arguably greater than those of the relatively “privileged” in Moscow. They had come from Siberia. Smith indicates that Russians weren't Siberians as much as people became “Siberian” through exile.
Irina is Renko’s physical obsession and instrumental human clue into the murders (she knew Valerya Davidov and Kostia Borodin, the two Siberians murdered - Valerya was using Irina’s ice skates), and her grandfather became the “first Siberian” in her family owing to his role as chief engineer of waterworks in Leningrad. The view under Lenin and Stalin was that “All engineers are wreckers” such that he was “put on a train east to serve fifteen years’ hard labor in five different Siberian camps.” Valerya was part of a Jewish family from Minsk, and her family filled the “quota of ‘Jew sophisticates’ to arrest” for exile in Siberia, while Borodin’s great grandfather was exiled by a czar for murder.
What’s tragic about the Soviet Union of old was that it wasn’t just profits that were illegal. Migration was too. And as Irina tells Renko, “Leaving Siberia is the only real crime to a Siberian can commit,” and they commit it by running to Moscow. Which means that Kostia and Valerya in Moscow were “two desperate people running from the law,” only to connect with the American in James Kirwill seeking his own fame by promising to get them out.
Osborne used them to help him get sables to the U.S. from the “world’s oldest monopoly,” but ultimately had to kill them. Kirwill “had an obsession to tell his story” that might reveal Osborne's underlying story of corruption, Kostia would have “extorted money” from him after reaching the U.S., while he regretted his actions with Valerya. As for Irina, she lived. And she lived by giving herself to Osborne. Was the latter wrong and immoral, or is the height of immorality not living? In Irina’s words, “I sold myself [her body] to escape, to become alive.” In a country that suffocates human nature, including the work that makes life worth living, life is found by getting out.
Which means Irina was human. Everyone wants something even where want is illegal. In Osbsorne’s words, even in the wealth-illegal Soviet Union, “everyone is bought, from top to bottom.”
