Sell Us the Rope by Stephen May

First published in the UK in 2022; published by Bloomsbury on March 7, 2023

“When it comes time to hang the capitalists, they will sell us the rope. But first they will lend us the money we will use to buy the rope.” The joke that contributes to the novel’s title is told in 1907 at the Fifth Congress of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party. The Fifth Congress is held in London. Its delegates come from many countries, all (apart from the spies) dreaming of a revolution that will give birth to a workers’ paradise created by a Marxist economy.

Koba Ivanovich is a delegate from the country of Georgia. He is unimpressed by London, where child labor abounds, the homeless are not allowed to sleep at night, and the streets are filled with the stench of human and equine waste.

Koba is working for the Okhrana, the secret police force of the Russian Empire. Koba became an informant after distributing pamphlets calling for a workers’ uprising. Unfortunately for Koba, the pamphlets were printed by the Okhrana as a means of ferreting out potential revolutionaries. Koba avoided prison by cooperating with the Okhrana. Although he adopted the name Koba, his true name is Joseph Stalin.

The first half of the novel establishes the characters and sets up the plot. Delegates to the Congress jockey for power as they debate revolutionary strategies, Menshevik versus Bolshevik. At an evening gathering, Maxim Gorky lectures about the need for a tax on land. An American capitalist who hosts that gathering is sympathetic to the revolutionaries and willing to help finance their efforts, but only by loaning them money with interest — hence the joke about rope. Koba is privy to a plan to secure financing the old fashioned way, by robbing a bank. All of this should be fascinating to history buffs, but it is also essential background to a late-developing plot.

Delegates preach the need to empower workers, but most delegates are men who lack the vision to support the empowerment of women. Two female delegates, Rosa Luxemburg and Elli Vuokko, not only fight for a world in which women and men are equal partners in the economy but are equally free to initiate sexual encounters. Together, they make the point that men have fragile egos who are afraid to ask for what they want. Men are motivated to vengeance by fear of a rejection that might not occur. Rosa and Elli ask why men find it so hard to listen to women, why women are expected to feel gratitude for not being murdered.

Elli is a delegate from Finland, where women have the right to vote. She wonders whether voting matters, as elected representatives rarely deliver transformative change, no matter what the Mensheviks think. Koba is thinking of sex with Elli but is flustered when she makes the first move, as if he finds it emasculating to accede to a woman’s desires. Koba’s relationship with Elli becomes a dramatic focal point as the plot heats up in the second half.

The plot is driven by Koba’s divided loyalty to the Okhrana (a loyalty only of convenience) and to the revolutionaries. To mitigate his risk of being outed as an informant, the Okhrana want him to plant evidence that loyal delegates are working for the Tsar. Evidence is hardly necessary, because the Party will readily accept a pointed finger as proof of guilt. “People — and not just in the Party — love to think the worst.” The story’s tension escalates as Koba tries to play both sides. Is he willing to betray people he has come to care about in order to save himself from the Okhrana? Or does the Party pose an even larger threat to Koba than the Tsar?

Stephen May tells a restrained story, trusting the reader to fill in the sweeping breadth of history to come. His focus on a few days during the Fifth Congress allows him to develop his characters as they exist in the moment. The story combines an intriguing plot with characters who have strong personalities. Elli imagines her future as a factory manager after woman are recognized as equal. She tells Koba that she will take many lovers, will never marry or own a cat. In reality, Elli will become a member of the Turku Female Red Guard during the Finnish Civil War and will be captured, raped, and executed by the White Army in 1918. She played a relatively small role in history, but as she is imaged here, she is a principled and fearless woman who chooses to live her life in full, unshackled by any man or government.

Elli comments that anger is fleeting; she has trouble holding onto it. Koba disagrees; anger fuels him. May imagines young Koba to be a complicated and contradictory man, dangerous but not heartless. Koba tells a story of murdering an entirely family to send a message because the patriarch was insufficiently deferential to socialist leaders. He tells a story of murdering his own father. It is easy to imagine Koba as threatening, given the leader Stalin will become. Yet the story balances Koba’s ruthless nature with his shy approach to Elli and his compassionate response to a helpful child whose abusive father reminds Koba of his own. I admire writers who portray the complexity of human nature instead of focusing on the obvious. My admiration is particularly strong when they do so with graceful prose that makes the novel easy to read.

Koba has a growing premonition of being haunted by the ghosts of those whose deaths he will cause, just as he is haunted by his father. He expects to die from an assassin’s bullet or a rope around his neck, and he does not seem to regard that death as unwelcome. This is the fate he no doubt deserves, but he will die in bed from a stroke at 73. The story ends with a comment upon the unfairness of statues erected to Stalin while Elli enters history with an unmarked grave. Sell Us the Rope invites the reader to remember the forgotten. Strong characterization and the drama of history make it easy to accept that invitation.

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