Writing a biography of a man as complex — and elusive — as Boris Savinkov is not an easy task. But Richard Spence has done an exemplary job of this. HIs 1991 book is comprehensive…
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This 1930 book is not about that Russian secret police — the one that comes to mind — but about an earlier one, the one which author A.T. Vassilyev commanded until the collapse of the…
The Socialist Revolutionary Party, like other groups working in opposition to the autocratic regime that ruled Russia until 1917, was rife with secret police agents. The most famous of these, Ievno Azef, rose to become…
This novel by Russian terrorist icon Boris Savinkov is remarkably similar to his final work, Black Horse, leading one to believe that he chose the titles deliberately. The format is the same: short, dated entries…
Boris Savinkov was possibly the most dangerous man in Russia. A leading figure in the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s Combat Organisation, he was the scourge of the Romanovs in their final years. When the tsarist regime…
By the time this book was published in 1934, the name of Ievno Azef had already faded from popular memory. But a quarter century earlier, he had achieved infamy as the most dangerous man in…
Sixty years after Boris Nicolaevsky wrote his account of the notorious Ievno Azef — the most infamous police agent to ever infiltrate a revolutionary organisation — Richard E. Rubenstein took a crack at the same…
Last year, I read Thomas Mullen’s Blind Spots, a novel set in the near future with an intriguing premise. I enjoyed it, and looked forward to reading The Rumor Game. This book is set in…
I admit it: I like reading books about ageing, life extension, and immortality. These seem to fall into two categories. Some authors expect to live forever because of the vitamin cocktails they drink every morning…
Aidan McQuade’s first novel, The Undiscovered Country (2020), was a bit of a hybrid — part crime novel, part history of Ireland in the period just after Partition. It was terrific because McQuade is both…