Družina: A military unit created in 1914 from Czech and Slovak émigrés and war prisoners in Russia. They were incorporated into the Russian Imperial Army and specialized in reconnaissance work against Austro-Hungarian and German forces.
Kopeck: Subunit of the Russian ruble, similar to a cent in U.S. currency.
Mensheviks: A minority wing of the Russian Communist Party. They were in favor of a gradual development of a Soviet society through democratic legislation rather than through violent revolution.
Naida: A type of slow-burning log fire used by Siberian prospectors.
Proletariat: In Marxist philosophy, the social class whose only asset is its ability to labor and is thus regularly oppressed by the bourgeoisie.
Reds: A term for Communists, especially during the Russian Civil War.
Revkom: Bolshevik Revolutionary Committee. A group that held power in Irkutsk for a time in early 1920.
Ruble: Basic Russian monetary unit. After the fall of Imperial Russia, rubles were printed by the various successor states.
Sokol: A network of clubs and societies built around sports and cultural activities. The movement began with Czechs but spread to other Slavic peoples.
Soviet: A government council in a communist country. At the beginning of this novel, most Soviets were local and decentralized. Centralization increased rapidly during the years this novel covers, as the Bolsheviks consolidated and expanded their power.
Steppe: A geographic area dominated by grasslands and few trees other than those near bodies of water. Similar to a prairie or savannah.
Taiga: A term used to describe the boreal forest covering much of Siberia. Dominated by pine, larch, and spruce.
Teplushka: A train boxcar that offered the most basic passenger service. The Czechoslovak Legion turned them into portable barracks.
Ushanka: A fur cap with flaps for the ears that can be tied up or used to shield more of the wearer’s face from the cold.
Whites: A term for those opposing the Reds during the Russian Civil War. The group included monarchists, militarists, and other groups fighting against the Communists.
Zemlanky: An earthen dugout used as a barrack or as housing for prisoners.
Prologue
All we wanted was to go home.
Most of us hadn’t seen our fatherland since war had broken out in 1914 and we were conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian Army. As Czechs and Slovaks, we felt more brotherhood for our Russian opponents than for our imperial officers, so we hadn’t always fought well. Some of us had been stuck in POW camps in Russia for months, some for years. We longed to go back to our families, our homeland, and peace.
We couldn’t go west because a war was in the way. History called it the Eastern Front, but it was far to the west of places we came to know, towns like Chelyabinsk and Yekaterinburg, Irkutsk and Vladivostok. We never intended to take over the Trans-Siberian railway, prolong a civil war, spark the most infamous tsaricide in history, or end up in charge of the Russian Imperial Treasury.
We just wanted to go home. The rest was forced on us.
But one thing wasn’t an accident. After three hundred years of Hapsburg subjugation, we wanted a country of our own. And this is the story of how we got it, fighting for it half a world away along six thousand miles of snow-covered rail line.
Chapter One
The Ukraine, March 1918
Nadia Ilyinichna Linskaya held her horse steady and strained to hear the Russian officer conversing with her from the overcrowded train carriage. The thrumming of the engine made it difficult to hear, so she leaned as far forward as her sidesaddle would allow.
“Yes, I was in the Eleventh Cavalry Division, but with the Dragoons.”
“Did you, by chance, know Captain Nikolai Linsky of the Hussars?”
He shook his head. “Sorry, miss, I can’t help you.”
The train whistle shrieked, and Konstantin flinched beneath her. Nadia gathered the reins and riding crop in her right hand and patted her horse’s neck with her left. “I see. Good day.” She hadn’t meant her words to be so curt, but a combination of smoke, steam, and disappointment choked her throat.
The train crept forward, and Nadia turned Konstantin away, back to her aunt’s manor. She’d been foolish. A maid had said an officer with the Eleventh Cavalry was passing through, and Nadia had ridden out to search for him. But what had she expected? Even if the man had known her brother, he wasn’t likely to still be carrying around Nikolai’s things, not eighteen months after his death. Any last epistles or personal effects would have already arrived, or they were lost forever.
She glanced back a final time. The officer had disappeared. Other soldiers filled the windows, rode on the roof, and clung to the buffers. All hurrying home now that the Russian Army had collapsed and made peace with the Germans. None of them wanted to be left out of the land redistribution. But if they were from Tambov Oblast, they were too late. The peasants there had chased Nadia’s family off the previous autumn and had long ago divided the stolen land for themselves.
Russia was falling to pieces. The tsar and his family had disappeared, the army was in mutiny, and the provisional government had lost power to a pack of insane men who called themselves Bolsheviks. Nadia’s father mourned the lawlessness spreading throughout the former empire. His fears and his prior service to the tsar meant their family rarely left her aunt’s estate, where they’d taken refuge after the peasants had chased them from Lavanda Selo. But hope for some piece of Nikolai—a friend’s memory or more information about how he died—had been enough to lure Nadia out.
It had all seemed so perfect. A report of an officer from Nikolai’s division on what would have been Nikolai’s twenty-fourth birthday. Papa leaving the manor for the first time in a month, so he hadn’t been around to stop her from riding out. And she’d actually found a man who matched the maid’s description of the scarred cheek and spiky mustache, even after he’d boarded the train. It had felt like a miracle, but it hadn’t mattered, because the dragoon officer hadn’t known her brother.
She’d left to find news of Nikolai, but escaping the manor had been something she’d longed to do anyway. She’d spent too much time hiding away, too much time worrying instead of living. “And you’ve got to feel just as cooped up as I do,” she said to Konstantin. “Since we’re out, we may as well make the most of it.”
She gripped the saddle’s double pommels with her legs and urged Konstantin on, away from the train track and across a wide Ukrainian field. A gallop across the countryside wouldn’t completely assuage her disappointment, but it might help.
The wind pulled at her clothing, and the scent of snow melting into farmland tickled her nose as they rode faster and faster. For a moment, she imagined both her dead brothers beside her, astride their own horses, laughing and urging her to keep up. And after they rode, they’d return to Lavanda Selo for tea and freshly baked black bread smothered in butter and currant jam.
“Fly, Konstantin!”
The horse did his best to obey. Perhaps he understood that all too soon they would return to the stifling confines of her aunt’s estate. For now, his smooth stride seemed to outrun all Nadia’s grief and disappointment, and she felt as carefree as she had in the prewar days, before events had irrevocably altered her life, her family, and her class. Konstantin galloped across one field, then another. Nadia had never explored this part of the countryside, but they were heading in the correct direction, and Konstantin knew the way back.
A whistle of an undulating pitch rang in her ear. What was that? Artillery? The whine ended in an explosion of fire, dirt, and feather grass. Konstantin reared in alarm and swerved into a ditch. Then, despite her best efforts to hold on, Nadia was flying.