Sean's Russia Blog

I’ve grown to admire historians like Catherine Merridale. You know, those historians who buck academic conventions to write for a non-academic audience. This was quite a change for me since I used to hold such work in contempt (or was it jealousy) when I was a snot-nosed, snobby grad student. So I jumped at the chance to interview Merridale and talk about the historical craft and its relationship to detective fiction in her first novel, Moscow Underground. As she explains, there’s some liberation in fiction. You can freely develop characters. Imbibe the story with emotions, the sites, the sounds, the smells. And craft a compelling and entertaining story. But creative license has its limits. Historical fiction requires you to stick to the historical record. You have to make sure the history you set your story in is believable, as Merridale does, in her crafting of Moscow of 1934. What challenges does writing fiction present to a professional historian? How does fiction and history intersect? And why a novel at