Blood on the Snow (Faces of terror / Emanuel Litvinoff)

This book is the second volume of a trilogy called `The Faces of Terror'. It begins with the murder of the Tsar and his family; and its first part is set in the period of the Civil War that followed the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks. The first volume, `A Death out of Season' (see my review) was about some anarchists who were active in London in 1910 and 1911. Their leader was believed to be Peter the Painter, who also had many other names, among them Peter Piatkov. It appears that Peter the Painter really existed, and a forthcoming book by Phil Ruff is about to reveal that he was actually a Latvian revolutionary called Janis Zhaklis. He was never caught in the showdown known as the Siege of Sidney Street. Anyway, in this second novel Peter Piatkov appears again, this time as a Bolshevik and a prominent member of the Cheka. He first turns up in Ekaterinburg just after the murder of the imperial family. Another character in the first book, the beautiful Lydia Alexandrova, is entirely Litvinoff's invention. In the first book she, too, had been an Anarchist, though born a Countess; and Peter the Painter (like many men in her life) had fallen in love with her (though not she with him), and had tried to find her after the debacle of 1911. Now Lydia also turns up in Russia, as a tough Bolshevik guerilla commander. She is recognized by a mutual friend who informs Peter, and so they meet again. The second part of the novel is set in the years immediately after the end of the Civil War. Peter now works for that part of the Cheka which deals with supporting subversive activities outside Russia. It leads him to travel in England, France and Germany. In England he meets an old anarchist friend who is still an anarchist and is scathing about what Bolshevism has become. Peter remains committed in thought and deed to the ruthless Cheka philosophy, but not without being aware of the tensions between that and the idealism that had inspired the communist cause. He is taut, disciplined, but tense and fighting against his emotions - a fine and complex portrait. Lydia is perhaps even more sensitive about the tension between ideology and humanity, as comrade turns on comrade, when, for example, during the Kronstadt Mutiny, Trotsky massacred those same sailors who had set off the Revolution by firing on the Winter Palace. But Lydia accepts a mission from the Cheka to go to Berlin after the Rapallo Agreement between the Germans and the Soviets, by which the German government helped the Soviet Union economically in return for the Soviets allowing German soldiers to be trained secretly in the USSR. The Cheka has reason to believe that among the Germans involved in this scheme are some who want to use it as a cover to work against Russia. Lydia is to infiltrate this circle, resuming her old identity as the elegant Countess who is now a refugee from the Bolsheviks. She enjoys working for the Soviet Union, while at the same time being financed by the Cheka to resum