This colossal shit did not have to happen!

In world history, this particular murderous escapade is usually called either "the October Revolution," "the October coup," or especially cynically in relation to "the workers of the world" - "the Great Proletarian Revolution."

We are talking here about the German operation undertaken to foist a puppet government onto Russia, in order to force Russia out of the war. We might call this process "coercion in the name of peace."

There is nothing worse than the past which was not comprehended completely. Because this past stays in our present and, unnoticed, seeps into our future, poisoning everything around.

This book will be a great revelation. The bombshell for the approaching centennial anniversary of this disgrace. The Apocrypha. I have deliberately chosen to avoid canonical accounts of those events, including memoirs: Soviet memoirs that are outright lies, or foreign memoirs that deliberately omit certain facts so as to fog over the authors' ugly role in the whole business.

So, genre is the political thriller, with all its requisite red herrings, shootouts, car chases, and sex. The main casts of characters are Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Yakov Sverdlov, Pinkhas Rutenberg, Graf von Mirbach and American journalists John Reed and Louise Bryant etc.

And then there is Mikhail Tereshchenko. The golden boy. The dandy. The jurist. The man of industry. Heir to one of the largest fortunes in Russia. Owner of the prestigious Sirin Press, and of the largest blue diamond in the world. The largest steam yacht as well.

As fate would have it, he becomes the Minister of Finance, and later the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Provisional Government, the first democratic government after a thousand years of monarchy. But then he crosses paths with the German candidate to rule Russia: Ulyanov-Lenin.

But underneath all the twists and turns of the politics and plot lies a deeply human story of love and hate, friendship and betrayal. The keyword here is Honor.