Mary Nichols - The Kirilov Star

She put it on her bedside table, while she prepared for bed, then she climbed between the sheets and wriggled down on the pillows. Alex wouldn’t come to her tonight but it didn’t matter. There were lots more nights to come. The rest of their lives.

I would like to acknowledge the invaluable help given to me by Sir Rodric Braithwaite, British ambassador in Moscow 1988–1992, author of several books, articles and reviews on Russia and the international scene, who kindly agreed to read the manuscript and set me right on Russian spelling and points of fact. Any errors that remain are mine.

I read many, many books in researching The Kirilov Star. Here are some of them:

Beevor, Antony, Stalingrad (Viking, 1998)

— The Mystery of Olga Chekhova (Penguin Books, 2005)

Braithwaite, Rodric, Moscow : 1941, A City and Its People at War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

— Across the Moscow River: The World Turned Upside Down (Yale University Press, 2002)

Buber-Neumann, Margarete, Under Two Dictators : Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler (Pimlico, 2008)

Dimbleby, Jonathan, Russia: A Journey to the Heart of a Land and Its People (BBC Books, 2008)

Erickson, Ljubica and Erickson, Mark (eds.), Russia : War, Peace and Diplomacy – Essays in Honour of John Erickson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2005)

Figes, Orlando, Peasant Russia , Civil War: The Volga Countryside in Revolution 1917–1921 (Phoenix Press, 2001)

— The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (Allen Lane, 2007)

Hughes, Michael, Inside the Enigma – British Officials in Russia 1900–1939 (Hambledon Press, 1997)

Klier, John and Mingay, Helen, The Quest for Anastasia: Solving the Mystery of the Lost Romanovs (Smith Gryphon, 1995)

Matthews, Owen, Stalin’s Children: Three Generations of Love and War (Bloomsbury, 2008)

Pares, Bernard, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy (Phoenix Press, 2001)

Thomas, D.M. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: A Century in His Life (St Martin’s Press, 1998)

Steinberg, Mark D., Voices of Revolution, 1917 (Yale University Press, 2002)

Zinovieff, Sofka, Red Princess: A Revolutionary Life (Granta Books, 2007)

Helen Dunmore, The Siege (Penguin, 2002)

— The Betrayal (Penguin, 2010)

Alexander Mollin, Lara’s Child (Doubleday, 1994)

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago , trans. Max Hayward and Manya Harari (Collins & Harvill, 1958)

The Summer House

The Fountain

The Kirilov Star

Allison & Busby Limited

13 Charlotte Mews

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Copyright © 2011 by MARY NICHOLS

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

First published in hardback by Allison & Busby Ltd in 2011.

This ebook edition first published in 2011.

All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978–0–7490–4006–2