Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution - Softcover

Milton, Giles

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9781620405703: Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620405709 ISBN 13: 9781620405703

Publisher: Bloomsbury Press, 2015

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In 1917, a band of communist revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas II--a dramatic and explosive act marking that Vladimir Lenin’s communist revolution was now underway. But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes--starting with the British Empire.

Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia whose mission was to stop Lenin’s red tide from washing across the free world. They were an eccentric cast of characters, led by Mansfield Cumming, a one-legged, monocle-wearing former sea captain, and included novelist W. Somerset Maugham, beloved children’s author Arthur Ransome, and the dashing, ice-cool Sidney Reilly, the legendary Ace of Spies and a model for Ian Fleming’s James Bond. Cumming’s network would pioneer the field of covert action and would one day become MI6.

Living in disguise, constantly switching identities, they infiltrated Soviet commissariats, the Red Army, and Cheka (the feared secret police), and would come within a whisker of assassinating Lenin. As Giles Milton chronicles for the first time, in a sequence of bold exploits that stretched from Moscow to the central Asian city of Tashkent, this unlikely band of agents succeeded in foiling Lenin’s plot for global revolution.

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About the Author:

Giles Milton is a writer and historian. He is the internationally bestselling author of eleven works of narrative history, including Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare and Nathaniel’s Nutmeg. His books - which include White Gold, Paradise Lost and Russian Roulette - have been translated into twenty languages worldwide. Milton lives in London.

From Booklist:

Replete with cloak-and-dagger details, this account of British espionage against the Bolshevik government centers on agents sent to Russia by MI6 spymaster Mansfield Cummings. Including the most famous of them in spy history, Sidney Reilly, Milton traces their aliases and activities in revolutionary Russia in the years 1917–21. While their objectives—procuring political and military information about the radical regime—frame Milton’s narrative, its substance revels in the world of the undercover operative. Milton depicts them undergoing Cummings’ peculiar recruitment techniques, learning about ciphers and invisible inks, and devising cover names and disguises. Once in place, their adroit evasions of capture by the Bolshevik’s secret police propel Milton’s lively accounts. Much of the action occurs in Petrograd, Moscow, and Tashkent, in Central Asia, from where the Communists attempted to foment a revolution in India. Its detection underlies the subtitle’s claim that these spies stopped Lenin’s global revolution (in reality, he pulled back in 1921 for several reasons, including the Red Army’s defeat in Poland). Whatever the actual impact the espionage had on political events, Milton’s vivid presentation of them will entertain aficionados of intelligence. --Gilbert Taylor

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