Yankees in Petrograd (MIT Press / Radium Age)

When a capitalist cabal plots to assassinate Lenin, can quick-witted American workers ride to the rescue before it's too late?—a new translation.

In Yankees in Petrograd, the Russian author Marietta S. Shaginyan (writing under the American nom de plume Jim Dollar) gives us a riveting crime and espionage adventure with science fiction elements. Despite having awesome technologies such as public transportation that bends space and time and electrical forcefields protecting Soviet Russia against its foes, the world’s first proletarian state is threatened by a fascist organization that will stop at nothing—including kidnapping, mesmerism, and infiltration—to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Communist leaders! Enter Mike Thingsmaster, American tradesman and leader of a secret global organization defending the interests of the proletariat, who tasks his network with foiling this nefarious plot.

Shaginyan’s novel, serialized in 1924 with covers decorated by Alexander Rodchenko’s photomontages, proved wildly popular with the Soviet reading public, which followed its dizzying plot breathlessly. Settings constantly shift and characters assume multiple identities, and scenes of danger, intrigue, and melodrama are interspersed with moments of comic relief. Can Thingsmaster and his allies—including a robber baron’s scion who converts to the cause of Revolution, an alluring masked woman, a doctor investigating a disease that causes fierce anti-communists to revert to proto-human form, a chimney sweep, an intelligent dog, and the General Prosecutor of Illinois—succeed in thwarting the fascists? You’ll have to read until the final chapter to find out.

A satire of the sort of thrillers then appearing in Black Mask and similar American pulps, Yankees in Petrograd is an over-the-top, pro-communist thrill ride.

Marietta S. Shaginyan was a Soviet writer, historian, and activist of Armenian descent. She was one of the “fellow travelers” of the 1920s led by the Serapion Brotherhood and became one of the most prolific communist writers experimenting in satirico-fantastic fiction.