Commissar

V. Chernov D.

Description

In 1918, the nascent Russian Republic is fighting to retain power against domestic and foreign enemies. In Moscow, Anna Sokolova is a young revolutionary who is working for the newly formed CHEKA state security agency to hunt down a British agent Sidney Reilly. At the same time, a young emissary of Wall Street William Arden sets sail from New York on a mission to Russia that is not what it appears to be, and the true purpose of which even he may not yet fully comprehend.Their paths cross in Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), and they become unlikely allies. As they navigate the ravages of civil war and the rapidly turning political tide in Russia, Anna must decide the price she is willing to pay to preserve her ideals.Meticulously researched and populated with many historical characters, Commissarexplores the little-known period of US and British intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918-22).

Sujets

• Historical fiction

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 novembre 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803138152
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2022 D. V. Chernov

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks


ISBN 978 1803138 152

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd





To my wife and daughter –
two of the most amazing women in my life.






Contents
July 12, 1918
Bloodlines
Moscow
Natalia
New York
Codes
August 3, 1918
The Devil’s Arithmetic
August 12, 1918
Iron Felix
Arkhangelsk
The Ambassadors’ Plot
The Golden Rooster
The Mechanism
Exigencies
Lockhart
August 31, 1918
The Pieces
Citizen Dora
Petrograd
Kolchak
The Winter Palace
The Institute for Noble Maidens
Home
On Reilly’s Trail
Omsk
Sergei
Active Measures
Roads
Somewhere Else
Free Territory
With the Anarchists
The Iron Leviathan
The Big Picture
Accession
Washington
Agent ST1
The Letter


A Historical Note
This novel is based largely on real historical events and people. For more information about this fascinating period in world history and about the characters in this novel, both real and fictional, please visit the author’s official website dvchernov.com .
A Note on Russian Names
Russian first names can have a number of commonly used nickname forms. For example, Anna may also be called Annochka and Annushka by her friends and family. Additionally, Russian last names have both feminine and masculine forms. So, while Anna’s last name is Sokolova , her brother’s last name is Sokolov .


July 12, 1918
The first shipment of dynamite arrived in Moscow last night. Ninety pounds is not nearly enough, but it is a start. V. promised more next week. If he is unable to deliver, we will have to manufacture the rest. Let’s hope it does not come to that – sourcing the materials is risky enough, never mind the process. For now, we stored it in the basement under G.’s office. I’ve forgotten the sweet smell nitroglycerin gives it. And the headaches that come with it. Tomorrow, N. will have an update about the guns.
– Boris Savinkov’s Journal


Bloodlines
Ekaterinburg – July 17, 1918
“Are we going home?” a girl’s voice asked.
Anna gasped, jolted awake into the darkness of the room. The awakening felt like a fall, and her first sketchy flash of awareness was the voices and the heavy steps of the soldiers’ boots approaching in the hallway. The second was her fingers clutched around the checkered grip of the revolver. She held her breath, her pulse thumping furiously at the temples. This wasn’t her room. The steps grew closer and passed, stomping through the slit of light under her door and then down the creaky stairs, growing muffled and fading into the depths of the house.
The memories of the last two days reassembled in her mind. She put the heavy pistol on the bed and lay there in the dark, listening and letting the galloping heartbeat subside. The house was quiet again. In the open window, a warm breeze rustled the leaves in the humid July night. Far off, thunder rumbled – artillery shells detonating in the distance. The frontline was edging closer.
The errand was simple enough in its essence but there was nothing simple about it. Delivering an urgent dispatch from Central a thousand miles away from Moscow was no trivial feat in times of war. But she managed to make it. She made it in just under two sleepless days – by trains and by cars, edging further and further east on the map, and not knowing if each next town had already fallen into the enemy’s hands. She remembered getting in last night and finding the house with a makeshift fence and a guard posted outside. She had spoken with the commandant, and then crashed here, exhausted, still in her uniform, on top of the covers.
Her eyes adjusted to the dark, but remnants of interrupted sleep still lingered in her head like a fog. Somewhere in the depths of the house, another burst of muffled voices rumbled. How long had she been asleep? She squinted at the white face of Alexei’s watch on her wrist. The hands shimmered semi-opaque in the pale light of the window – just past one. What could be going on at this hour? With a sigh, she resolved that sleep was not going to happen now.
Let’s go – she gave a mental mandate to self and sat on the edge of the bed. After the countless short nights, the act of pulling on her boots and standing up – dizzy with half-sleep – no longer took conscious effort. It was just the first step of the now mechanical routine: slipping the revolver into the holster, tugging the heavy belt into place on her waist, and checking for the escaped strands of hair from the dark ball pinned tightly at the nape of her neck.
And yet, there was something not routine about this place. She did not feel it last night, maybe because of the exhaustion, but she felt it now, tugging at the back of her heart like a forgotten warning from a dream. She turned the door handle.
The blinding lights outside the room illuminated a mystery: there were no people in sight. Last night, the guests were here. But now, the rooms stood empty, with the lights on and the doors ajar. The only sound and the only movement in this side of the house came from the empty dining room, where a large clock was still measuring out time with indifference, its brass pendulum aglow with the light from the crystal chandelier.
She followed the thin scent of cigarette smoke toward the murmur of voices coming from somewhere deep in the meander of corners, doors and hallways. The lights were on and the curtains were drawn in every room.
She glanced down the stairway leading to the cellar. The carved handrail curved elegantly in its downward swoop towards the closed double doors. The cool, lacquered touch of the wood echoed a childhood memory: the summers at the family manor. It was much like this one – all parlors, stairs, heavy drapes and crystal chandeliers. Our modest mansion , as her father used to say.
Except this one was worn to the bone. The parquet floors were scuffed and marred, the gilded paint was chipping away from the trim. Elegant, delicate , intricate – all the words that used to describe things in their lives then – now and here were grotesquely out of place. And out of time. Vestiges of an over-turned era. Elegance was now just a specter, like this house – a flaking veneer of opulence revealing the decaying empire underneath – shabby, barren, dirty.
The voices were coming from the drawing room – the front parlor where half a dozen soldiers were congregated, discussing something in half-voices and smoking. They hushed down, seeing her enter. She scanned them with a momentary glance, but the man she was looking for wasn’t among them. They watched her glumly from the smoke. A couple of them looked like they had been digging in the dirt. There was a nervous air of anticipation laced into the cigarette smoke in this room. She wondered what they were waiting for, at this hour.
“Yurovsky?” she inquired and cleared her voice. One of them pointed towards the door to the kitchen. Walking through the parlor, she felt their eyes on her. Was it her uniform or her looks that made them hush? A woman in uniform was still an uncommon sight this far from Moscow. Especially a pretty woman. She knew she was pretty but, unlike some girls, never liked to draw attention to that fact, learning from a young age to be judicious with her glances and her words when she did not care to invite attention. As she did not care to now.
“Did we wake you?” Yurovsky’s raspy baritone rolled towards her as she crossed the threshold to the kitchen.
The commandant sat stooped at the old oak table meant for the servants, cleaning his Nagant revolver. His eyes studied her over the rims of his small glasses. The strapping Cheka officer she met last night now reminded her of some dark creature from an old painting – a Rembrandt or a Bruegel, half-emerged from the semi-shadows, with his army trench coat draped on the back of his chair, falling behind him like a pair of dark folded wings. The seven rounds from his gun stood lined up on the table before him like a formation of toy soldiers awaiting orders, gleaming in the dull yellow light of the kerosene lamp.
His glasses glinted downward as he refocused on his task.
Did he really care if his men woke her? His face was hard to read – thin, with sunken cheeks and sunken, sleepless eyes under a heavy brow. A full, dark beard concealed his lips. Yurovsky was what they called a Starík – an Old Man – a career revolutionary hardened not by his age but by the many years spent in the un