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

Milton, Giles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1620405709 ISBN 13: 9781620405703

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC, 2015

Synopsis

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."

About this title

Review

"Milton has a rare ability--a talent for sifting fine pearls from faraway sands and transmuting the merely arcane into little literary gems." --Simon Winchester, Boston Globe

"Impressive . . . [an] entertaining history of spectacular, often nasty derring-do by real-life secret agents." --Publishers Weekly

"Giles Milton's research is impeccable and his narrative reads in part like a modern-day Robert Louis Stevenson novel." --The Times on Nathaniel's Nutmeg

Book Description

1917, post-Russian Revolution, an unlikely and eccentric band of British spies are smuggled into newly Soviet Russia to thwart Lenin's plan to destroy British rule in India, as a precursor to toppling the democracies of the West. The spies, under Mansfield Cumming, were the unsung founders of the present-day MI6.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1620405709
• ISBN 13: 9781620405703
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 400