It is the winter of 1920. While the peaceful remote city of Nikolaevsk-on-Amur in far Eastern Siberia is frozen from the world, a band of Bolshevik revolutionaries infiltrates the town and arrests the majority of the population: businessmen, bourgeoisie, foreigners and Jews. Luba’s husband, Ilya, a prominent newspaper editor and lawyer, is among those jailed and tortured. Overnight, her comfortable, upper class life is upended and Luba finds herself on the run with four small children and a mother-in-law.
Pigsties...abandoned warehouses...opium dens--these are just a few of the places Luba is forced to seek refuge as she tries to elude capture and stay alive.
Will her former servants, a Chinese cook and a Russian coachman, help or turn on her?
The little-known history of this exotic time and place is seen through the eyes of a reluctant heroine grappling with adversity and loss during the dangerous political chaos following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II.
"Red Winter is...more than a novel: it's a passionate, revealing memoir of a family's struggle to survival political change and oppression at the outskirts of Russian society in this isolated locale.
No reader of Russian history should be without this thoroughly engrossing, emotionally captivating work which uses the trappings of fiction to round out and emphasize very real events."
“Inspirational…Masterful job…”
- Hadassah Programming Director Judy Robins
(Featured for Hadassah Book Month, November 2016)
"This books is well-worth adding to your reading list."
"A provocative story that makes you take a deep breath, wipe a tear, and continue on. It's beautifully put together and makes you not want to put it down. It gives a unique perspective of survival and terrorizing experiences."
Available in Digital and Print at Amazon.com
© 2016 by Kyra Robinov