Sashenka: A Novel

This novel has everything - story, history (true), plot (several), suspense, love, hate, violence and so many unforgettable characters that only the greatest director could use it to make either a memorable miniseries or the splendid movie it richly deserves (think of David Lean's Doctor Zhivago.) It is a first novel by an eminent historian whose specialty has been Josef Vissarionovich Stalin and his times; and it is a superb first novel. Written in three sections or parts - St. Petersburg 1916, Moscow 1939 and then the Caucasus, London and Moscow in 1994 - it covers The Revolution of 1916-17, the Stalin Era and, finally, in that third section it looks back over the shoulder to contrast the taken-for-granted world of Communism of 1939 with that of the world in1994. It is a superb story superimposed on what is at bottom an historical indictment of the absolute but well meaning evil which the Bolsheviks imposed on the Russian people in the name of The Communist Party and everything it represented. Death and dishonor were always present. Nothing was what it seemed. As Montefiore has one of his characters put it "One shouldn't think of those Bolsheviks as modern politicians. They were religious fanatics. Their Marxism was fanatical; their fervor was semi-Islamic; and they saw themselves as members of a secret military-religious order like the medieval Crusaders or the Knights Templar. They were ruthless, amoral and paranoid. They believed that millions would have to die to create their perfect world. Family, love and friendship were nothing compared to the holy grail, People died of gossip in Stalin's court...Secrecy was everything" (Page 399 And so it was. Millions did die; and some of them were the people of this book. Now to the book: Were I going to put this sweeping book to the screen I would open with a scene in 1994 in which a most attractive young women in a small village in the North Caucasus opens a letter to find that she has been selected from among many other young historians by Academician Boris Beliakov, Director of the Department of Modern Studies at the School of /Humanities in Moscow University to fill a six month job - all expenses paid - researching family history (lost persons) in London and Moscow. She is Katinka (Ekaterina Valentinovna) Kinsky, the lovely daughter of Valentin Kinsky the respected town doctor. Then I would show her meeting in an exclusive hotel in London with Pasha Getman, a Russian oligarch, from Odessa, and his mother Roza Getman, an attractive widow from Odessa in her late fifties, and where Roza tells Katinka that she was adopted child of the Revolution and wants to find her true family. Pasha says expense is no object; and Katinka goes back to Moscow to see what she can find in the old files Next scene: Katinka is in Moscow in the stacks of the old records of the Stalin era and she is reading a report of an Okrana Captain of Gendarmes named Peter de Sagan, dated November 1916, and having to do with his meeting with a beautiful young revolutionary in St. Petersburg carrying the name of Comrade Snowfox. And now the camera does a "resolve" and it is..... St Petersburg. Deep winter. 1916. The Neva is frozen. There are breadlines. People are hungry. The war is going badly. The Tsar is at the front, but the Empress in Pitir is engrossed by Rasputin the mad monk and living as she always has, surrounded by dissolute, craven courtiers, one of whom is Baroness Ariadna (Finkel Abramovna) Zeitlin, wife of Baron Samuil Moiseivich Zeitlin, a wealthy banker and industrialist, and mother of school girl Sashenka (Alexandra Sanuilovna) Zeitlin a lovely teenager who is by day a student at the exclusive Smolny Institute but who by night is a loyal revolutionary known to her fellows (including Stalin, Vinoviev and Molotov - Comrade Lenin not yet having arrived at the Finland Station) as Comrade Snowflake. On the surface St. Petersburg society is as luxurious as always. There are balls, bright lights, great restaurants; but Sashenka and her loyal friends are doing their work. Soon there are shots at night and then the Revolution begins. Sashenka by now is working in the office, typing articles for Comrade Lenin. She has been arrested by Captain de Sagan but released and is now protected by Comrades Hercules Satinov and a young man named Ivan "Vanya" Politsyn. - Both of whom we will meet later. Skipping along. Book Two - Moscow 1939. Sashenka is married to Vanya and is a loyal Party worker. She's the editor of what in America would be the Ladies Home Journal. Vanya is in the Directorate of Security (one of it's operatives - forcing confessions?). They have two beautiful children - Volya (Snowy) five and Karlmarx (Carlo) three and a half. They are among the Party elite - a dacha, car with chauffeur, best schools. There's a tea where Sashenka entertains the party elite, including Stalin. Then Sashenka, who has always been a Party Faithful and faithful to her husband falls head over heels in love with Benjamin (Benya) Goldman, a writer who has a sense of gaiety, a sense of humor which is so completely lacking in the Party Faithful; and there is an affair. However, there is a slight problem. In his capacity with the Commissariat Vanya had suspected the affair and has taped a meeting between Sashenka and Benya. The taping alone world not involve State Security but there's an accidental glitch which brings the matter to the attention of State Security and both Vanya and Sashenko, always loyal Party members are under immediate suispicion with the near certainty of arrest and the horror which always follows. But what will they do with the children? The common policy is that children of "enemies of the state" are either killed along with their parents or split up and sent to adoption agencies in far parts of the country. Enter their friend Comrade Hercules Satinov who arranges for the children to be adopted through better means into better homes and saves them. But no one can save Vanya and Sashenka. We know Vanya is shot. Sashenka, however, is brutalized and at the close of book two eventually confesses to being a spy. (An aside: Monefiore is particularly expert in Stalin's methods and his description of the Lubianka prison and the means used to extort confessions is great reading - if you like that sort of thing - but one can't help wondering why these people confessed as they did.) Now back to third book: Describing everything with a wealth of detail Montefiore takes us inside the archives of the Stalinist era where Katinka is examining documents in her attempt to find the parents of Roza. What she finds and how she finds it, who she meets from the past - particularly the 93 year old now-Marshall Hercules Satinov - makes this part of the book an exciting story and a literary detective story of the first magnitude and provides a great, surprising and satisfying ending. I won't tell you about it here. You have to read the book. A great book, great story; and it will be - or should be - a great movie! Read it!

Simon Sebag Montefiore's grasp of the Stalinist era is masterful, and it's that historical detail that makes this book work. Alas, he is less adept at the art of fiction.Still, this novel, as the author himself notes in his conclusion/afterword, admirably fulfills his goal of making the horrors of the Stalinist Terror live for the contemporary reader, particularly those who aren't likely to pick up Sebag Montefiore's superb books about Stalin himself,  Young Stalin  or  Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar . For those who have read the superb book about the impact of these years on ordinary Soviet citizens,  The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia , this provides a fictional counterpart, one where imagination takes over and the reader following Sebag Montefiore's plot can transport themselves into the world his lead character, Sashenka, inhabited. Fortunately the reader, unlike Sashenka, can also escape this closed and paranoid world.Sebag Montefiore's strength is portraying that world, from the corrupt decadence of the final years of Tsarist rule (which takes the reader from palaces to prisons) and the claustrophobic paranoia of the 1930s, which Sashenka herself displays almost without realizing it when she discovers that Stalin and his leaders, including Lavrenti Beria, have honored her dacha with a visit on the eve of May Day -- a visit that, on the surface a triumph, will hold unexpected and disastrous consequences for Sashenka and everyone around her.Unfortunately, it's not until that point that the narrative really picks up and starts moving. While the characters and dramas of the first part do prove necessary to the plot (in ways that aren't apparent until much later), at the time they simply feel annoying and superfluous. And however necessary they ultimately become, the initial section is far too long, and many of the characters are too wooden and the dialogue stilted or unbelievable. Had this section been shorter and more tightly written, it would have contributed to the drama without serving as a drag.Leaping forward from 1916, when Sashenka, the daughter of a wealthy Jewish industrialist, is first arrested as she leaves her boarding school and imprisoned for her Bolsheik views, the second part of the book deals with 1939, when she and her Bolshevik husband their two young children appear to have reached the pinnacle of success in Stalinist Russia.This is where the plot and characters alike suddenly grip the reader and don't let go. I read the final 40% of this book in a single sitting, late into the night/early morning. Only days after the May Day party at her dacha, Sashenka's world starts crumbling around her and she can't understand why. Is it her fledgling affair with a Jewish writers who doesn't toe the Party line -- an unprecedented deviation from being the perfect Party loyalist and exemplar of Soviet womanhood? Or is there something in her family's or husband's past that is returning to haunt her?The third section -- told through the eyes of a young historical researcher -- is perhaps the best of the three, however. There are few surprises in what is discovered -- except for the true, relatively mundane cause of the downfall of Sashenka and her husband. It is here that Sebag Montefiore finally wraps up the narrative in one neat package. Had he approached the story from the same persepctive throughout and used flashbacks to explore the historical dimensions, this would have been a far stronger novel, I believe.Still, as it stands, this is an excellent plot that is written adequately, despite Sebag Montefiore's difficulties with character. (Shifting points of view are distracting, and even Sashenka doesn't emerge as a real character until quite late in the 1939 section -- the reader can identify with her intellectually or generally, but the real test -- could you imagine how she looked or how her voice sounded, how she would react in a situation not described in the book? -- of whether a character "lives" isn't one she could pass. (Just apply that standard to Scarlett O'Hara, for instance, and you'll see what I mean.)Very much worth reading, especially for anyone who is interested in the emergence of modern Russia, how and why Communism took root there for 70 years, and the lives of Russians during and after that period, and who would rather read an impeccably-researched novel than a non-fiction work.

First of three volumes. Montefiore is a first class writer

Beware of the man ( or woman) whose God is in the party. Smolny schoolgirl, Sashenka, may have joined the revolutionary Bolsheviks for her own reasons, but over the next three decades Stalin, Beria and other assorted thugs, playing cameo roles gobbled up her friends and most of her family. She still kept her faith, more or less, despite a sexual affair and love for her children showing what the party deprived her of. The two children did escape; others were either lucky or lightweight froth on the communist sludge, lover Golden and good old uncle Gideon amongst these.Montefiore, of course, knows his stuff from Rasputin to the Oligarchs and everything in between , on the streets and in the alleys of St Petersburg and Moscow and the dirty doings, high and low. Being Russian the cast is vast, the resolution of what happened to Sashenka is clever and convincing and horrible as a contrived event. The author is familiar with those Soviet archives

裕福な家庭に生まれたサシェンカは激動の時代、革命に身を投じます。スターリンの恐怖政治の時代、共産党の中で徐々に地位を確立し、同士との結婚で2人の子供にも恵まれますが、ふとしたことから道ならぬ恋に落ちてしまうサシェンカ。そして、この恋が彼女をとんでもない悲劇へと導くことに。1916年から始まる物語の真実が約80年の時を経て明らかになります。最後にはちょっとした謎解きもあり、ボリュームの割にはスルスルと読めます。

I really love this story , simon montefiore is an excellent writer of historical fiction.

Interesting, historically informative and a page turner.