Arkady Renko, Gorky Park's protagonist, is the alienated citizen of a culture that prides itself upon its elimination of capitalism's exploitative alienation of workers from the fruits of their labor. In a sense, Renko is a model of proletarian consciousness: He performs his police duties conscientiously and well, even though he is poorly paid and has been passed over for promotion despite an excellent record of solving cases. It is precisely his high professional competence, however, which has kept him from being better rewarded by his society, since he has failed to conform to the covert ethos of materialistic selfishness that really governs life in the U.S.S.R.

Renko is certainly aware of the kind of conformist behavior which would earn him a larger slice of the communal pie, but he is also cognizant of the spiritual impoverishment which would result from surrendering to social pressures...