His father is Ukrainian, his mother is Jewish, he was raised in Russia and emigrated alone to Kansas City at 17—the year Gorbachev was overthrown and tanks rolled into Red Square. Crime writer D.V. Chernov (Dennis to friends and family) has written three novels. The first, Commissar, was a finalist for the Hemingway International Book Awards. His latest book, Cold Trace, the second in the Nick Severs Mysteries series is a finalist for the Chanticleer International Book Awards (winners will be announced this month.)
Chernov graduated from high school in Ukraine and earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in English from Truman State University. He lives in Parkville with his wife, Laura, and their daughter, Bayla, 20. Writing happens early in the morning before he turns to his full-time day job working remotely for a global high-tech company.
IN Kansas City recently spoke with Chernov by phone about his Russian childhood, his Ukrainian/Russian/Soviet identity, cultural stereotypes, how history informs his writing and ethical issues raised by AI.
Why is it that nobody likes crime, but everybody loves crime fiction?
I think for many readers it’s about the thrill of solving the mystery alongside the book’s detective. A well-crafted plot can make the process into an enjoyable puzzle. But I also think finding out “whodunit” is only a part of the intrigue. I think finding out “why” adds a whole other layer. And while the justice system does not care much about the motives, I believe readers do. Compelling characters are like people—they are products of their pasts and of their environments. It’s important to give readers some insight into why the characters act or think a certain way. In Commissar and the Nick Severs Mysteries series, character psychology plays a key role.
You can do your day job and your writing from anywhere, so why do you make your home in Kansas City?
My wife’s family is from here, and we love the small feel of Parkville. English Landing Park is phenomenal and the lovely Park University campus is as well. We love all the trails and the proximity to Kansas City while having this abundance of nature and beautifully designed spaces that allow you to experience nature.
What was your childhood in Russia like?
I was born in Omsk, a significant city in the southwest of Siberia. When I was around eight or nine, we moved to the Caucasus Mountains, on the west side of Russia, close to Ukraine and the Black Sea.
What was Omsk like and what were the Caucasus like?
Omsk was a major city on a big river. It was an industrial hub in Siberia and during the Russian Civil War, the time frame of my Commissar book, there was an opposition government set up in Omsk with anti-communist forces battling for control of the country in 1918 and ’19.
What was the weather like in Omsk?
When you say “Siberia” to people in the United States, they imagine snow-filled streets and bears roaming around and the sun never coming out. But Siberia is more than half of geographical Russia. Latitude-wise, it spans from China to the Arctic Circle. Omsk is on the very southern fringe of that expanse, so it had four seasons. It got hot in the summer and cold and snowy in the winter. In winter the river would freeze and in spring people would gather to watch the ice break—that was the big festival of spring.
The Caucasus was quite a juxtaposition. We went from this major city with a million population to a very small place. My parents worked for the Soviet Academy of Science. They supported one of the astronomical observatories in the mountains. We were up in a tiny town with a population of maybe 500, mostly scientists, teachers, and essential service providers.
In typical Soviet fashion they plopped some big five-to-seven-story high-rises right into the side of the mountain. You walk out of that building and you can start hiking. And I did. That gave me a love of nature that I still have today.
How did you wind up in Kansas City?
I don’t know if you are familiar with the program “People to People International.” It originated in Kansas City.
I know it was founded by President Dwight Eisenhower to encourage peace through cultural exchanges and was later run by his granddaughter Mary Eisenhower.
Yes. We lived in a scientific community, and this was at a time when there was a thaw in relations between the Soviet Union and America. Gorbachev was in power. There were a lot of cultural exchanges happening. There was a relaxation of the old Cold War mentality.
So with People to People, we started an exchange program for American kids who wanted to come and study astronomy. They would come to a summer camp in our town and stay with scientists. We hosted several kids and teachers as well. It was a phenomenal opportunity. We had top scientists there, not just Russian but German, French, British.
It was a reciprocal exchange, so then I came and stayed in Kansas City.
Without your parents, at 17?
Yes. I wasn’t intending to stay. I came to study and eventually ended up working here and life just kind of happened.
Did you go straight to Truman State University?
No. Because there are only 11 grades in the Russian school system, they put me in 12th grade at Liberty High School. I didn’t mind. It was a great opportunity to assimilate into the culture and learn the language. I missed the beginning of the school term because that was 1991 and there was a coup in Russia. Gorbachev was ousted and there were tanks in Red Square. They froze all the flights, and I couldn’t get out of the country until October. I stayed with a wonderful family until I graduated, and it was time to go to college.
What did you do after college?
I ended up teaching at Truman State for a year and then I taught at Missouri Western State College in St. Joseph for three years. Then, I was looking for a change, so I joined Cerner and went into the high-tech world.
Where did you meet your wife? Is she Russian?
[Laughs] No, she’s not Russian. We met in Kansas City on match.com, so I’m dating myself there.
How often do you get back to Russia?
I don’t. I haven’t been back since I left. My parents ended up moving to Germany a few years after I came here, so I don’t have any living relatives left in Russia. And honestly, it’s a completely different country now. When I left it was the traditional Soviet Union with a socialist economy and socialist values. It had just gotten its first McDonald’s.
What’s it like watching such big changes in your former country from over here?
It’s bewildering, of course, the magnitude of changes that have happened. But Russia is a country that is accustomed to change. The Soviet regime was only in place for about 70 years. Before that, you had almost two millennia of extreme monarchical autocracy. The Romanovs had been in power for about 300 years at the time of the Russian Revolution [1917], but you had all the wars. Unlike in the U.S. where we’ve enjoyed the relative stability of nobody invading us over the last couple of centuries, in Europe war is something most generations have witnessed. Russia went through tremendous change in 1917 with the Russian Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War.
Coming at the tail end of World War I, it gets forgotten that the Russian Revolution was considered such a threat to the West that the Allied Forces at the time—Britain, France, Canada, Japan and the U.S.—actually landed troops in Russia and were there for several years supporting the anti-communist forces in the Civil War. That was probably the only time in history when American soldiers engaged Russian soldiers in battle. That time was so pivotal, and I think it set the tone for a lot of the anti-West sentiment in Soviet/Russian rhetoric to this day.
You like to work history into your novels. Do you think Russian history can teach us things that apply to the world today?
Yeah. Looking at the period at the end of World War I and the Russian Revolution, I think we’re seeing a lot of the same conflicts replaying today. There was Russian and Ukrainian and German and British and American conflict in Ukraine back in 1918. Ukraine wanted independence in 1918. Russia didn’t want Ukraine to have independence but some of the western countries didn’t either.
We forget how recent some of the borders are in Europe. We kind of accept that these places have been there for centuries, but a lot of the countries in Europe, they’ve only been there since World War I ended. They didn’t exist. They were part of larger empires. Maps were drastically redrawn and not in a way that set us up for continued peace. I think if we approach the problem the same way we did back then, we’re going to get the same results.
Are you an American citizen?
Yes, since around 2012.
After living here for 35 years, how much do you feel like a Soviet, like a Russian or like an American? How do those identities coexist?
It’s such a complex question, you don’t even have any idea. It’s so easy to say, “I’m Russian.” What does that really mean? The Soviet Union stretched over 11 time zones. It had over 100 different nationalities, ethnicities, and languages. It was a tremendously complex world. Even the tsars struggled with it. There were always uprisings, and you had to try to Russify newly founded countries that had been parts of the former Russian empire. Just like other imperial powers, you make your language official, and kids have to learn in that language. My Soviet passport identified me as Russian, but my mother was Jewish, and my father was Ukrainian.
When I think back to my youth in Russia, and when I read the news about the war, my heart breaks. But I don’t have a strong feeling of, “I am Russian” or “I am Ukrainian” or “I am Jewish.” It’s just devastating.
I’ve been in the United States for most of my life at this point. It honestly feels like another lifetime. But there is still a connection—I know what it’s like to be living in that part of the world. I know what it’s like to speak the language and understand the values and eat the food—all those wonderful things. But I dream in English. Like many immigrants, my life is splintered into two parts, and they are not always in harmony with each other, in terms of how I feel about certain events.
Is it challenging to be Russian in the U.S., given Americans’ limited knowledge about other countries?
It can be, but most of the people I meet are extremely educated, and I don’t feel they have a strong prejudice against Russians. But it goes through periods—sometimes it’s not great and other times people don’t care.
Is it weird watching Netflix when Russian characters are usually villains?
That can be irksome, of course. Or you watch a movie where they could have cast a Russian or at least a Slavic actor as a protagonist and they chose not to. I think it’s probably typical in every culture, that they interpret in a way that makes sense to them. But there’s been over a century now of, one way or another, anti-Russian or anti-Soviet propaganda in American culture, just because it’s so different from the American way of life.
From the very first years, the Russian Revolution was seen as a threat. You had American companies advertising paper towels to factory owners (with the selling point being) if you offered your workers better hygiene in the restrooms, they wouldn’t revolt against you. [Laughs] The threat was perceived as very real, and it permeated the popular culture. I think it hasn’t changed that much. Back in the day (1919-1920), you had Palmer raids and then you had McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, and then the Cold War for several decades didn’t help. In some ways we live in a world that’s very small and in some ways very fragmented. That’s an idea that interests me as an author.
Can you give an example of how the world is small, and how it is fragmented?
In my tech job, I’m talking to people in Germany, in Spain, in Italy almost every other day. It’s instant connection. And I think we all realize how small the world becomes when we have an epidemic outbreak, or we realize a cyber-crime here has been committed by someone in Slovakia or Belarus.
But I also think technology can move us farther apart. My daughter was just entering high school when Covid hit, so technology became the way she interacted with the world. It gave her some tools and abilities my wife and I didn’t have at her age, but it also took things away from her. We had just moved back from seven years in Colorado, and she didn’t get to go to that new school and be the new kid and learn to talk to people.
Another theme in your books is how human-to-human contact is declining with the advance of AI.
Yes. Did you know they now have AI dating companions? Instead of dating real people, people are choosing to subscribe to this app and that becomes their digital boyfriend or girlfriend. And I don’t judge. I think to each their own. But it’s an indication that in our society we’re becoming increasingly more comfortable with doing things on our own terms at the expense of a connection to another live human being.
Your protagonist, Nick Severs, is not on the cutting edge of technology and grapples with the pace of change brought on by AI and the ethics around it…
Absolutely. He’s a luddite. I think in some ways he’s like me. Because even though I’m in this world [of AI], I also see the appeal of just unplugging everything.
When you’re writing how do you keep from getting lost in the tech-y details to the detriment of pacing?
It was definitely an effort to make sure the story didn’t get bogged down with too much tech-y detail. I always tell people it’s not a techno thriller. It doesn’t get super geeky. But I do want readers to think about our overreliance on technology and start considering the potential risks of things going too far too fast.
And crime is a good lens to look at technology through. Criminals are early adopters of emerging technologies. It gives them a competitive edge. There is less regulation and oversight over new technologies, and law enforcement is always lagging behind, because they need equipment and permissions and training.
Who do you like to read?
I really enjoyed Stieg Larsson’s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. That struck a really good balance between bringing in some of those tech-y details to give it authenticity and a contemporary feel, but not enough that it’s going to become outdated in ten years. The technology in the book is just a prop.
Your books have received positive reviews and been finalists for prestigious awards. What would it take for you to become the next John Grisholm or Tom Clancy?
I’d love to figure that out. I publish through an indie publisher. Compared to being at one of the Big Five—Penguin, Random House, and the other publishing conglomerates that own the vast majority of titles in airport bookstores—there are upsides and downsides. As an indie, you do pretty much everything yourself, but the flip side is artistic freedom and control. For me, writing is an art. I don’t set out wanting to write the highest grossing book.
Where do you see your writing going from here? Do you want to keep the Commissar and Nick Severs series going, or do you have another book in mind with a new character?
Commissar is the first in a trilogy and I’m almost finished with the second book. The characters in Commissar and Cold Trace end up being connected. Claire’s great-great grandmother in Cold Trace is Anna, the main character in Commissar. I will possibly explore a generational saga about how Anna and William eventually end up in America. Claire’s uncle in Cold Trace was a domestic terrorist in the 1960s. It’s interesting to me to look at what being a revolutionary means. Judgment-free, I’m curious about the mentality when you’re doing it and if that changes with hindsight.
You hint at that in Cold Trace, the question of where you draw the line in a revolution.
Yeah, where do you draw the line? Is it OK to draw a line? Or do we see people who draw a line as people who don’t have what it takes to bring about change?
Interview condensed and minimally edited for clarity.