The Last Red August

The failed coup of August 1991 serves as a backdrop for the relationship between an industrialist caught up in the conspiracy movement and his son, a reformer

This fast-paced, highly engaging political thriller begins on the eve of the attempted coup against President Gorbachev in August 1991. Written by a policy analyst, and briskly translated by the author of the Russian detective Ivan Duvakin series, this thinly disguised roman a clef probes into the backgrounds of those responsible for the abortive coup and the frantic events that led to their downfall. A secretary who discovers a discarded planned announcement of the impending military takeover is found out by the KGB and winds up dead. Andrei Alekseevich, a young "half-wild intellectual" and Yeltsin supporter, also inadvertently learns about the planned coup from his father, Georgi, a hardliner and high-ranking military officer. Andrei is eventually kidnapped and confined to a plush dacha to sit out the coup--but not before he can pass on what he knows to an American journalist and to a former classmate who works for a Moscow paper. Malashenko does a smart job depicting the psychological strain between Georgi Alekseevich and his son and in showing the greater tensions between the coup plotters--aging generals more interested in their limousines, perks and speciality stores than in planning a decisive military action--and the "new" Russia--the idealistic, yet unformed generations which rally to protect Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White House.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A comic-opera primer on the anti-Gorbachev coup in August 1989. Boris Kulik's secretary Nadya, poking around in her boss's wastebasket, finds papers speaking of an impending coup and swipes them to give to her boyfriend, liberal journalist Oleg Bukin. But she's observed, apprehended, and killed before she can pass them on. Oleg's Democratic Russia colleague Andrei Georgievich, inferring from his old-guard Papa, Georgi Alekseevich, that Gorbachev's days are numbered, meets with Oleg to compare notes, but Oleg's run down by a car on the way out of his meeting with American newspaperman Dale Cooper, who's mugged and drugged in a hospital before he can investigate. As Andrei and his girlfriend Tanya are being arrested and held outside Moscow (but not killed, thanks to Papa's frantic deals with his fellow-conspirators) by the men who killed Nadya, Cooper manages to pass the word to Marina, his nurse, who manages to alert academic deputy Vikenty Udaltsov before she's locked up. Then the story turns from satire to outright farce. The coup starts; the coup ends (in drolly successive chapters); the conspirators (after first taking to the airwaves looking like ``a bunch of kids chasing out-of- bounds soccer balls for a professional team'') scramble for shelter, unaware that nobody cares who they were; Papa, despondent because Andrei will have nothing to do with him, throws himself in front of a train; and that's all, folks. Aided by spy-novelist Olcott's deadpan translation, Malashenko generally succeeds in balancing melodrama with comedy, though there are times when this first novel reads an awful lot like Friday the Thirteenth for grown-ups. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.