He eventually ends up in the Bering Sea on a fish processing vessel called the Polar Star, gutting fish for a living. Arkady briefly considers defecting to the United States before concluding that American capitalism is equally corrupt.īarred from the privileges he once received as a member of the nomenklatura and worried about violent reprisals from the KGB, Arkady wanders the Soviet Union performing menial jobs in remote areas to survive. After the events of Gorky Park, during which Arkady exposes a corrupt and murderous conspiracy implicating a number of high-ranking Communist Party members, he is dismissed from the militsiya. Despite his own status as a member of the nomenklatura, Arkady commits to exposing criminality within the Soviet elite, at great personal and professional risk. As a member of the Soviet militsiya police force, Arkady becomes one of its chief investigators in Moscow. Arkady is also haunted by the unwitting role he played in the suicide of his mother, who killed herself by walking into a lake while weighed down with rocks collected by her son. In the eyes of his father, Kiril-a remorseless Stalinist nicknamed "the Butcher" for his brutality-Arkady is a failure for having chosen a relatively humble career as a police officer when he could have easily risen through the ranks of the military or the Communist bureaucracy with ease, thanks to his name and status. The son of Red Army General Kiril Renko, Arkady is born into the nomenklatura, the de facto elite class of the Soviet Union whose members fill most administrative positions within the Communist Party's vast bureaucracy. Polar Star is the sequel to the 1981 novel Gorky Park and the second of nine novels by Smith to feature Arkady as a protagonist, as of 2020. Set in Soviet Russia in the 1980s during the period known as Perestroika, American author Martin Cruz Smith’s crime novel Polar Star (1989) chronicles the efforts of ex-police investigator Arkady Renko to solve the murder of a young woman working on a fish processing vessel in the Bering Sea.
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