Sashenka

A Novel

By Montefiore, Simon Sebag

Publishers Summary:
In the bestselling tradition of Doctor Zhivago and Sophie's Choice, a sweeping epic of Russia from the last days of the Tsars to today's age of oligarchs -- by the prizewinning author of Young Stalin.Winter 1916: St. Petersburg, Russia, is on the brink of revolution. Outside the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls, an English governess is waiting for her young charge to be released from school. But so are the Tsar's secret police...Beautiful and headstrong, Sashenka Zeitlin is just sixteen. As her mother parties with Rasputin and their dissolute friends, Sashenka slips into the frozen night to play her part in a dangerous game of conspiracy and seduction.Twenty years on, Sashenka is married to a powerful, rising Red leader with whom she has two children. Around her people are disappearing, while in the secret world of the elite her own family is safe. But she's about to embark on a forbidden love affair that will have devastating consequences.Sashenka's story lies hidden for half a century, until a young historian goes deep into Stalin's private archives and uncovers a heartbreaking tale of betrayal and redemption, savage cruelty and unexpected heroism -- and one woman forced to make an unbearable choice.

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ISBN
978-1-41659-554-0
Publisher
Simon & Schuster


REVIEWS

Library Journal

Reviewed on November 1, 2008

Through the prisms of the years 1917, 1939, and 1994, Montefiore digs into the tribulations of one family as it strives to survive the upheavals of 20th-century Russia. The pampered darling of a bourgeois Jewish family, Sashenka converts to Bolshevism in her teens. She becomes a highly placed apparatchik, but that does not save her from the 1930s Stalinist purges. By 1994, families separated by war an...Log In or Sign Up to Read More

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