Dmitri and the Milk Drinkers

From twbooks:Dimitri Kameron is a young lawyer with some status, if lowly, and certainly not as lowly as the poor and oppressed who can have noticed little change in their lot after the Communists took over. The Russia evoked by Michael Pearce in this enjoyable novel is a grim place where corruption is rife. To survive one must fawn and lie and cheat. Dimitri's superior tells him that the second rule of bureaucracy is "make sure that responsibility lies elsewhere". Dimitri is fully aware of that. He is a survivor and "bright" in the view of his superior.He needs all his "brightness" to survive when he is given the unenviable task of finding Anna Semeonova, a beautiful and well-connected young woman who has mysteriously disappeared from the Court House in Kursk where Dimitri is based.Dimitri's journey in search of Anna takes him several months and many hundreds of miles into Siberia. Even when he reaches the camp where she is imprisoned his task is not over. He is obstructed by minor officials at every turn and he begins to wonder whether there is a sinister cover-up. He is forced to mingle with the prisoners and to seek the help of the Molokans or Milk-Drinkers. This is a conservative sect which sprang up in the seventeenth century and is noted for its adherence to the drinking of milk. They are in Anna's words "good" people, very special people who are against "all violence, whether it is the stupid, mindless violence of the criminals or the kind of violence that the Government uses all the time" Moreover they have "to bear witness" and when Anna becomes one of them Dimitri seeks her help to expose a massacre of prisoners.Dimitri and the Milk-Drinkers gives a convincing picture of life in Russia and of the oppressive Tzarist legal regime which Dimitri is forced to circumvent in order to survive. It is also very funny. A most promising precursor of a series.