Valery Bochkov

Trilogy Part 3 The Brother of Cain
Political thriller. AST. Moscow 2017. 320 pages.

The third and final novel takes off directly from the shocking end of the “Coronation of the Beast”. Moscow is overrun and terrorized by Muslims who banded together in desperate revenge for the nuclear destruction of Chechnya in the previous novel. Now the Russian state, such as it is, is a near feudal empire with most people living in isolation and fear, roving gangs of criminals fighting in the streets, and foreigners trapped in a heavily armed and walled compound of their own making called “White City” within a post-apocalyptic Moscow. The last shred of power is held by Russia’s morally bankrupt and fearlessly desperate leader who has set up his “government” in St Petersburg and has his hands on the nuclear codes ready to threaten the world to stay in power and rebuild his empire.

One foreign resident of White City is an award-winning American television journalist, Ekaterina Kashirskaya, who has been the face of credible reporting on the turmoil of Russia for the last four years. More than trying to survive and even more than her professional duty, she is forty years old, returned to Moscow to reclaim her Russian heritage through the powerful spiritual connection she has with her grandfather, a peasant of the Don River Basin recruited to join the Cossack army in World War I. Through her investigation of his life and experiences, she explores and feels the competing narratives of the convolutions of Russian history: the victims and the perpetrators; the gaps, omissions, and rewrites; and the twists of fate which left no family untouched. From the revolution through the civil war, collectivization, the brutal purges of the Communist party and the armed forces, the gulag, the devastation of World War II, and ultimately to the collapse of the ideals of her people and the empire of the Soviet Union.

Ekaterina's vivid travels through Russia’s tortured past are derailed when she is abducted by a Muslim gang. Fearful of a ransom that her agency will never pay, she is taken to St Petersburg, to the psychopathic Russian dictator, Sylvestrov. With nothing to lose, Sylvestrov is moving toward a suicidal doomsday threat of nuclear annihilation of the rich nations of the world unless they prop up his regime with food and resources to rebuild – whatever he wants. This is his new world order and Ekaterina is his credible conduit to make his threat real to Western governments. She finds herself in the heart of the plot, in the elaborate underground control center for nuclear launch. Forced to report daily on the demands from Sylvestrov, she uses code and hand motions to secretly convey the location of the site on air. Is it too late when she realizes the essential truth that none of the controls and weapons actually work, that it's all a Potemkin village of blinking lights and flashy controls? But the west has already launched their weapons . . .

The final act in this courageous trilogy is, at its heart, a plea to see and fully appreciate Russia’s history in painful honesty, side by side with this one possible future outcome. Where were the tipping points for different outcomes, for less tragic possibilities, and what role has there been and can there be for Russia’s people to alter the path of history into the future?

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