Dear friends,
I’m humbled and excited to share the news of my novel The Lives and Deaths of Vladimir Lenin upcoming in July of 2025 from Nat 1 Publishing.
After a century of brooding and talking telepathically to his Mausoleum janitor from his glass coffin, Vladimir Lenin awakens—alive and bewildered in the modern world. While his sudden resurrection sends shockwaves across the globe, nobody is really sure what to do with him, and it doesn’t take long for Lenin to realize he has no place in Putin’s Russia. Determined to reclaim power in the name of the workers and peasants—erm, middle-class citizens—he sets his sights on an unlikely new goal: the American presidency. As for Article II, Section 1, Clause 5 of the US Constitution. “No Person except a natural-born Citizen shall be eligible to the Office of President,” let his supporters take care of that.
Armed with old ideals and a flair for reinvention, Lenin becomes a sensation—part political maverick, part global spectacle. While his rise captivates the masses and brings on board of his election committee American billionaires and ordinary mortals attracted to him like a moth to the flames, not everyone is thrilled by his resurrections. Among them is Dr. Litvinova, a brilliant scientist obsessed with Lenin’s image, who may hold the key to both his miraculous revival and his ultimate downfall. But Lenin is a new and old phoenix. He emerges from ashes again and again and burns others to ashes in the process.
I grew up in the shadow of Lenin back in the Soviet Union. That novel was in the making my entire life, or at least since I learned how to write.
You can pre-order the Kindle version here:
The opening:
Chapter One
On the evening of January 21, 1924, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was busy dying. The bog of unconsciousness kept sucking him in, filling up his mouth and nose with corrosive muck the color of the Soviet flag. After much hand and leg flapping, he would resurface, but each time he remained under longer and longer, and each time the burning became more intense.
A squad of his closest comrades, a platoon of doctors, a company of nurses, and a battalion of Latvian rifles, the Bolsheviks’ most loyal troops, surrounded Lenin’s bed in concentric circles in a suburb of Moscow. He, the Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, the founder of the Soviet Union, the beacon for mankind, was the stone thrown in a pond, and they were the ripples. He was the summit, and they were the surrounding hills. He was the sun, and they were his rays.
The comrades sighed and whispered. The doctors and nurses injected him, massaged him, fed him pills and tinctures, and measured his temperature. The guards declared, albeit with a Latvian accent, their willingness to sacrifice their collective life for Lenin. They ground their teeth and clutched their rifles so their knuckles turned the same color as their mortal enemies: the counter-revolutionary White Guards.
Nothing helped. The bullets of Fanya Kaplan, that hysterical maiden, that Social Revolutionary party terrorist, had brought irreparable damage to Lenin’s formerly handsome, well-built, and invincible body.
Perhaps Fanya mistook him for another incarnation of the Czar or his prime minister. Perhaps she dreamed of martyrdom, a concept as outdated as smelling salts for her kind. Lenin couldn’t see anything wrong with shooting or blowing up a few overly oppressive bourgeois leaders, in moderation, of course. But killing Lenin? A catastrophe! Workers and peasants all over the planet needed him—the light of the
world. The poet Mayakovski said, “He carried a billion and a half people in his skull.” Or how Lenin himself wrote in his diary coming home from kindergarten: “If diseases offend the body, then death displeases the mind.”
Who would dare to shatter Lenin’s magnificent skull and spill this multitude of people?
Yet that was exactly what the terrorist did. First, she offended, and now was about to spill and displease. She took Lenin’s health away and forced him to leave the workers and peasants alone in the dark and move into nothingness.