The opening scene of Child 44, two starving brothers hunting a cat during the Ukrainian famine, establishes the novel’s central pattern: State violence produces trauma that lingers, eventually erupting in violence. This cycle both echoes and reinforces the reprisals, purges, and executions that characterize the inner workings of the security state, suggesting that the novel’s legal and extralegal violence are two sides of the same coin.

The book follows the parallel lives of the killer, Andrei, and the investigator, Leo Demidov, who eventually learns that he is Andrei’s brother, Pavel. Their apparently divergent fates share a common source: their childhood experiences of the Holodomor and, more specifically, of Pavel’s disappearance while out trapping with Andrei. Andrei’s murders grow quite explicitly out of this. Pavel’s disappearance leaves Andrei feeling isolated during a moment of starvation and fear. Years later, Andrei kills children in an attempt to recreate that last shared memory. He chooses the same tools and rituals from their childhood—the string they used while hunting the cat and the bark they chewed to calm their hunger—but rigs the “hunt” so that his victim, who stands in for Pavel as much as for the cat, cannot escape. In this way, he seeks not only to communicate with his brother but also to reassert control over a sibling he feels abandoned him and, by extension, over the broader forces that have victimized him. Bitterness toward the brother who “left [Andrei] behind with […] a village full of rotting bodies” and toward the state that “hated [Andrei] and called [him] a traitor” while lauding Leo as a war hero mingle throughout Andrei’s confession (419, 418), highlighting the extent to which both inflect his violence.

Meanwhile, Leo sublimates his trauma into his career as an MGB officer. As an agent of the state, he is just as violent as his brother, and the novel implies that his violence reflects a similar impulse. After remembering his childhood identity, Leo remarks that he “used to wake up every night—sweating, terrified—worried that [Stepan and Anna] might have changed their minds and they might want to kill [him] again” (420). This fear leads him to a job where there is apparently little question about who is the predator and who the prey.

However, if the regime creates victimizers out of victims, it also does the opposite, as evidenced by Leo’s fall from grace. The novel reinforces this point by invoking Leo’s past “victims” in moments where his own life is in danger: During his torture, for instance, “He [is] secured to the same chair Anatoly Brodsky had been secured to; his wrists, ankles, and neck [are] fastened with the same leather straps” (343). Though Leo is eventually reinstated, the fact that his superior officer has been replaced serves as a reminder that the machine of state-sanctioned violence continues to grind on; as Leo observes, “No one lasted long in the upper echelons of the State Security force” (427).

Small gestures of care appear throughout the novel as faint alternatives to this cycle. Leo and Raisa offer to adopt Zoya and Elena Zinoviev, orphaned after Vasili executes their parents, because they feel responsible for what happened. This choice marks Leo’s attempt to remake the world he once enforced. By raising the sisters, he rejects the state’s brutality and tries to prevent the kind of trauma that defined his own past. However, the episode follows close on the heels of Leo’s killing of Andrei in front of the latter’s daughter, which leaves Nadya “staring at him, her father’s fury in her eyes” (426). Compassion is at best a narrow, uncertain counterweight to the violence that permeates society.