General Wrangel

The memoirs of General Pyotr Wrangel

As World War I drags on, political turmoil slowly paralyzes the Empire. The Czar abdicates. His replacements are ineffectual and incompetent. Violence sweeps the country. One by one, institutions collapse under the weight of chaos and terror. The Bolsheviks, a small group of communist radicals initially supported by German intelligence, launch a revolution that sends the country into a tailspin. The nation is plunged into a terrible civil war which by its end will leave over 10 million Russians dead, with millions more scattered across the globe. Leading the anti-communist "White" forces against the new "Red" army to the end was Pyotr Wrangel. Wrangel, a career cavalry officer who fought with distinction in the Russo-Japanese War and World War i, found himself at the center of various intrigues in the early stages of the Russian Revolution. After narrowly escaping death at the hands of a Bolshevik execution squad, Wrangel joined the Volunteer Army of General Denikin. Although Wrangel accomplished the impossible repeatedly, leading his tiny cavalry force to victory over communist units many times its size, he was unable to persuade Denikin to abandon an ill-planned assault on Moscow. After that offensive failed, the Volunteer Army collapsed. Widely recognized for his tactical brilliance and unimpeachable character, Wrangel accepted the burden of command over the last remnant of anti-communist forces. Under his leadership the outnumbered and out-gunned White Army launched a devastating counterattack, retaking Crimea and the surrounding area from the Reds. There, he and his remaining men staged a heroic defense while attempting to obtain international support. After Russia was abandoned by its former allies and his position became untenable, Wrangel personally directed the evacuation of his Army and thousands of civilian refugees.

This account of the Russian Civil War, originally published in 1971, combines a vivid narrative of the military events with a biographical discussion of the White Generals, figures of the former Imperial Russian Army offices who led the separate campaigns against the Red Soviets - men such as Kornilov, Alekseev, Kolchak, Denikin, Wrangel, Yudenich and the Finnish Yudeniol Marshal Mannerheim. Despite their shared designation, the White Generals had no common programme. Their tragedy was that Lenin's dogmatism, intransigence and ruthlessness, all essential qualities in a country which had never known anything other than autocracy, were alien to their characters.

For more than a decade, actor John de Lancie has delighted and provoked audiences as Star Trek®'s most unpredictable antagonist, the enigmatic cosmic entity known only as Q. Now de Lancie has turned his talent and imagination to the creation of a whole new world, a startling vision of Earth on the brink of an evolutionary leap in human consciousness.... It is the day after tomorrow, early in the next millenia, and all over the world people begin experiencing bizarre mental transformations. The majority of men and woman find their minds shutting down, but a handful develop astounding new psychic abilities. They are the adepts. An ordinary family man. An autistic child. A beautiful Guatemalan revolutionary. A mysterious European traveler with vast ambitions and a secret agenda. As society breaks apart and new alliances form, these strangers become locked in a crucial battle to determine the future of a brave new world. But more than human minds are at war here, for deep beneath the earth, an alien intelligence, dormant for thirty million years, is stirring once again, and sending its psychic tendrils into the minds of a vulnerable multitude. This inhuman entity has its own plans for the Earth, and they do not include Homo sapiens. Fighting amongst themselves, the adepts can scarcely imagine the awesome and ancient intelligence that will ultimately test a new breed of humanity. Soldier Of Light is a profound and mind-warping exploration of the outer limits of the mind's potential -- written by innovative and always surprising personalities.

Can we ever really understand the present without first understanding the past? From the winner of the 2019 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Prize, and the author of the multi-award winning Laurus, comes a sweeping novel that takes readers on a fascinating journey through one of the most momentous periods in Russian history. What really happened to General Larionov of the Imperial Russian Army, who somehow avoided execution by the Bolsheviks? He lived out his long life in Yalta leaving behind a vast heritage of undiscovered memoirs. In modern day Russia, a young student is determined to find out the truth. Solovyov and Larionov is a ground-breaking and gripping literary detective novel from one of Russia's greatest contemporary writers.