Rasputin's daughter, Masha, is sent to live with the royal family after her father's death. Tsarina Alexandra asks her to tend to Prince Aloysha, hoping that she has inherited Rasputin's healing powers. After Tsar Nikolay is forced to abdicate, Masha and Aloysha find solace in each other's company and tell stories as a way to escape their confinement by the Bolsheviks. In the worlds of their imagination the weak become strong, legend becomes fact,...

In a novel that moves back and forth between the Soviet Union during World War II and modern-day America, Marina, an elderly Russian woman, recalls vivid images of her youth during the height of the siege of Leningrad.

Marina Makarova is a woman of privilege who aches to break free of the constraints of her genteel life. Swept up on the tides of the Russian Revolution, Marina joins the marches for workers' rights, falls in love with a radical young poet, and betrays everything she holds dear, before being betrayed in turn. As her country goes through tremendous upheaval, Marina's own coming-of-age unfolds, marked by deep passion, devastating loss, and the private...

St. Petersburg has always felt like an impossible metropolis, rising from the freezing mists and flooded marshland of the River Neva on the western edge of Russia. It was a new capital in an old country. Established in 1703 by the sheer will of its charismatic founder, the homicidal megalomaniac Peter the Great, its dazzling yet unhinged reputation was quickly cemented by the sadistic dominion of its early rulers. This city, in is successive incarnations...

"In a new perspective on the Russian Revolution, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa examines in detail the convulsions of the revolutionary year from March 1917 to March 1918 through the lens of violent crime, police behavior, and the responses of ordinary people in the capital city, St. Petersburg. A frightening rise in crime, especially violent crime, threatened the daily life of ordinary citizens. They often took the law into their own hands, and frequently resorted...