The lovely and talented Lynda Filler was kind enough to feature Cold on her blog. Please check out her novel, Lie to Me, on Amazon.
Today I’m thrilled to introduce you to the talented author Victoria Dougherty. The following is a piece written by Victoria called Herein Lies the Truth. You can find more stories in her book linked at the bottom of this blog called COLD, Essays on Love, Faith, Family and Other Dangerous Pursuits
Herein Lies the Truth
By Victoria Dougherty
I have a close family member who tells a lot of big, whopping lies. Lies about the past, about emotions and their impact on her and others, lies about what she had for breakfast, for heaven’s sake.
When I was a kid, this family member – let’s just call her Marta – told me a heartbreaking story about her very painful, difficult childhood.
She had been abandoned by her family, you see. Then tossed out of her grandmother’s house because the woman simply didn’t want another mouth to feed. Somehow, Marta…
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To commemorate the one hundred year anniversary of a truly morally and intellectually bankrupt system – one that cost the world somewhere in the realm of one hundred million souls through systemized starvation, random executions, gulags, balls-out genocide and other forms of creative murder, I thought we’d take a few minutes this week to sit back and reflect on the twenty-eight years since the beginning of the fall of the Soviet Union.
You know, just to feel good about ourselves in these trying times and all that.
While it’s true that we still have some hold-outs – namely Cuba and North Korea, who are trying to remain “pure,” whatever that means – the fact is that things in the former Eastern bloc are nearly unrecognizable from just a few of decades ago.
The general vibe in the region, even on the heels of a massive global recession, is now more like Vanity Fair’s Oscar night to-do, where attractive up and comers nibble on truffle puffs and drink rose champagne. It’s a far cry from the droll, mid-level office party reminiscent of the way things used to be. You know the one. It actually takes place in an office under fluorescent lighting with that sickly greenish tint. No music, no spouses allowed, and the deli tray comes from the local discount supermarket and would otherwise go untouched if people didn’t need to find something to do with themselves other than talk about needing a new color copier.
In my own Iron Curtain experience, I remember the dismal slop-cafeterias that served – honestly – some of the worst food I’ve ever encountered. Stews with thick layers of grease that floated over gristley meat and old potatoes like the Exxon Valdez oil spill.
The spirit of customer service that inspired insult, indifference and even contempt. A waiter actually once snarled “blow me” after I asked him for a menu, and what’s more…I wasn’t even surprised.
There was a sense of style that can only be described as “failure chic.” Poor quality textiles that not only trapped, but enhanced stale, unpleasant body odors, the casual don of oily, dandruff-speckled hair, and a perfume of alcohol and cheap cigarettes that clung to nearly everyone’s breath and general aura like a silent but deadly fart.
Let’s not forget the architecture that made you want to kill yourself.
All of this was wrapped up in a culture of paranoia and oppression that dissuaded intimacy and even broke family bonds. Impelled people to plaster book covers made of paper bags onto their reading materials – you wouldn’t want anyone to know what types of fiction you liked, God forbid – and pad their doors and walls with cushions, so as not to be overheard by spying neighbors. In a culture where the government openly advocates snitching and cultivates envy, no one is safe.
But much of that is over now in what used to be called the Soviet Union.
The young people are hip, favoring craft beers and barbecue joints. The cafes are a twitter with conversations about popular culture, travel and politics. Nobody makes their own book covers anymore and flagrantly reads whatever the hell they want. I can no longer tell the difference between an Eastern and Western European based on dress, posture and general disposition. Even the waiters seem jolly.
So, despite the uncertainties of our age – the terrorist plots, wacko gunmen, partisan divisions and IQ crushing media culture – we have a lot to be optimistic about. A mere thirty years ago, the dominant belief was that Communism was not only here to stay, but would ultimately prevail, so we’d best get used to it. East Berliners had to reconcile their own grimy and tedious lifestyle with the bright lights and festive bustle that they knew to be bursting like a star from every bar and boutique just steps away in West Berlin. Few of them ever thought their city would be whole again, let alone their nation. We were all sitting around waiting, just waiting, for Russia to finally make her move and put us out of our suspense.
But no bad party goes on forever. The most desperate, diehard revelars – the ones who want to bed the girl everyone’s had a go at, who need to at least be able to say they did something on Saturday night – eventually go home. Sick of the wrong music – too, loud, too weird. Bored of the small talk. Done with the Everclear punch and Coor’s Light. Even they can’t take it anymore.
Let’s remember that as we fret over our problems of the day.
And to celebrate the end of the aforementioned bad party, i.e. the Communist Party, please enjoy my friend Mark Baker’s new travel blog centering on Central Europe. Mark makes his home in Prague and has been in the region a long time, critter-crawling through little-known towns, haunting eccentric-looking cafes, taking gorgeous pictures, and writing for publications like Lonely Planet. He has such an artistic eye and knows a great story – the kind you’ll rarely find in mainstream publications. Click here. I think you’ll love it.
This is one of Mark’s photos
And just for fun, Cold-reader and author Anne Coates is “celebrating” one hundred years of Communism by offering her very anti-communist book, Eagle in the Fridge for .99 cents on Amazon US.
Eagle in the Fridge is the story of the breakup of the Soviet Union, told by someone who lived behind the Iron Curtain. It’s an account narrated by a woman whose breath is taken away when the impossible dream of Baltic independence moves from fairy tale status to one that’s close enough to touch. Eagle in the Fridge is for anyone who wants a behind the scenes look at living behind the Iron Curtain, and an aftermath of independence that brought with it yet more challenges. It’s a testament to the courage of everyday people under extraordinary conditions. It’s a reminder that history isn’t made by generals. It’s made by normal people merely living their lives.
Click here to get Eagle in the Fridge for .99 cents
Click on this before reading my post, please! Won’t take long – swear.
Coming from a family of Czech political refugees, I have to say that my favorite quote from the article I asked you to click on comes from a Russian-speaking commentator who reacted to immigre artist Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi’s paintings by saying: “Why do all these people nostalgic for the U.S.S.R. move to Berlin and Israel, and not to North Korea?”
That being said, I love these paintings. They are a Slavic DNA splicing of Norman Rockwell and Charles Schultz, representing – pretty accurately in my experience – some of the more charming aspects of Soviet life. And yes, nearly every era has its charms, even if I’d never go so far as to declare that the Soviet regime was charming in and of itself. Let’s just say it for the record – communism sucked.
What enchants me about Nnadi’s work is her nostalgia for the textures of childhood. The colorful incidentals that aren’t so incidental after all, as we often recall them more vividly than the bigger events.
From my own young life, it’s things like feathered hair styles replete with split ends, shiny new Chevy Nova’s, and performing random tasks in Six Million Dollar Man slow-motion. They create a collage as powerful as any individual vignette.
Like when my much older step-sister confided to me about losing her virginity – this was back in 1979. I remember her shimmery, overly-glossed lips far better than her description of how things went down (salacious as it was, I’m sure). The way they cupid-curled and puckered as she applied what looked to me like the most glamorous goop I’d ever seen. I’m not even sure I remember the boy-in-question’s name. Might’ve been Bob. Or Randy. I do recall the lip gloss, however. It was called Kissing Potion for sure, and came in a variety of roll-on flavors – grape, bubble gum, orange and of course…cherry. I later stole one from her make up drawer and hid it inside my worn and seam-split stuffed koala bear.
Nnadi gets this.
Her paintings take us into moments of pithy loneliness punctuated by cringy fashion trends… and then beyond, into a realm that is so stylistically Slavic she makes me ache. Not only for my childhood, but for the very specific children’s storybooks I used to thumb through after school. Ones that chronicled where my mother and brother grew up – in a small, Czech village called Klobuky.
In the pages of my Czech storybooks, I could find scenes that I would never personally experience, though they were captured in the black and white photos framed on my mother’s vanity table.
My mom, pensive-faced, riding her rickety bike down a cobblestone street.
My brother playing naked beside a stream. All curly hair, toddler’s belly pouch and uncircumcised penis.
Slavs have an innate capacity for conjuring home life nostalgia. Of stripping politics and current events from a scene and leaving only the little things that make up our day-to-day lives, and bring essentiality to our existence.
Josef Lada, an early twentieth century Czech artist and children’s storybook illustrator, was a master at this. I can’t imagine Nnadi wasn’t inspired – if not by him, then by Slavic artists like him. His work always celebrated the quieter moments, the minutiae that in hindsight spins a magical longing for the commonplace.
Watching an old man smoke a pipe…
Riding a makeshift wooden sled…
The raucous, smoke-filled excitement of a night at a local pub…
The beauty of Lada was not that he painted a bucolic picture that never truly existed except in our hearts, but that he painted precisely what had existed, but what we may not have appreciated at the time. Tiny glimmers of nothingness present in almost any child’s world.
More so, they remind us that those events continue on in our adult lives – changed perhaps, but nevertheless there. They are happening in our children’s lives and we are cautioned not to take them for granted.
It’s not about the fancy vacation, Lada and Nnadi are telling us. Or the enrichment activities and birthday parties. Or even about who was elected president. It’s about riding around on a hand-me-down skateboard wearing tube socks and piped shorts. Hiding behind the patchwork sofa, making Malibu Barbie and Malibu Ken make out. Eating bread smeared with margarine dyed a cheerful daffodil hue.
And speaking of Cold War nostalgia – The Hungarian, my latest Cold War thriller is free this weekend only on Amazon. Get it while it’s cold…
Click here to download The Hungarian
One of the hardest parts about writing a love scene is letting go. Allowing yourself to experience the same feelings of bonzai-passion, trembling-fear, vein-popping love, and button-exploding lust in which your characters are awash during their most intimate moments.
A lot of my non-writer friends think this is precisely why writing erotica must be hard. Because its very nature lays you bare to the bone. Leaves you, quite literally, naked and suddenly no longer alone in your fantasies – many of which are cringe-inducing, right? Or downright dangerous.
They scratch their heads a bit when I tell them how – hands down – I find erotica much easier to write than a truly emotional love scene.
With erotic scenes, I can separate myself, float above my own thoughts, looking down on my body like a spirit. “It’s not really me,” I can tell myself, as I endeavor to take my characters through a gauntlet of sexual behaviors that I myself might have no interest in exploring.
Truth be told, it’s this taste for the exotic, the edge of rational behavior, that I can write about until the cows come home.
Yet, while writing scenes drenched in explicit, perhaps deviant sexual behavior might compel me intellectually, I’m unmoved for the most part. Those animalistic, choreographed encounters are often as distant to me as a group of prehistoric cave-dwellers. Interesting, sure, but they just don’t stick in the craw of my heart.
It is in writing the love scene – the one that is sensual, not sexual, brimming with real emotion – that I am truly left exposed to my core elements.
Such encounters tease where two thundering hearts will be willing to go, once they finally do fall into a carnal embrace. So that when the inevitable happens, it’s not merely a consummation of burning lust, but a promise, a vow, a sacrament. An act of consequence and conscience that will change the lives of our lovers forever. They’ll remember every moment in vivid pantomime for the rest of their lives – because they had to court, seduce, prove their worthiness to the other. To us. It must be an act of imagination and feeling that will leave me, as both writer and reader, wistful for days.
A true love scene is difficult precisely because a writer can’t fall back on sex. We hold a reader’s very essence in our hands and must speak in the language of raw tenderness in order not only to hold their attention, but help reveal to them what is lurking in their own blood…what will make them gasp, curl up like a snail-shell, and ponder just how they’ll be able to face the world now that they’ve been changed by a few well-chosen – no, well felt – words. They might approach their spouse with more than pragmatic necessity – perhaps fearful of rejection, or just as leery of their gesture being returned in full force. Something as simple as a purposeful touch can open up a whole can or worms… as much as a garden of delights.
“To love another person is to see the face of God,” says Victor Hugo.
Yes, sex is easier.
That’s why I decided not to write direct sex scenes in the new novel I’m working on. It’s not that the flesh isn’t an intrinsic part of love and loving. It most certainly is. Nor am I against sexy novels with a high erotic content. Truth be told, though, I am a little bit sick of them. They need to keep dialing up the action – like a Hollywood thriller – until the scenes themselves become almost comical in their content. How many gizmos, fetishes and come-hither outfits (or lack thereof) can you actually fit into a story about two mere human beings, after all? Even this guy looks bored.
Sensual scenes, love scenes, can’t get away with being merely novel or clever. They can’t fall back on a chorus of moans and groans. The heart has to work with the flesh and the mind, leading a reader to a place of yearning that is so much bigger than libido. A climax that satisfies the soul before the body.
Compare your average scene of heavy breathing and dutiful grinding with this:
Four of his fingers – three calloused, one as supple as moss – drummed over my brow. Light, wispy. Like the sweet and silly kisses of the tiny fish Yina used to keep for my father. Those would nibble at the skin of my toes when I dangled my feet in their pond.
Gliding down the slope of my nose, his only silken finger landed at its tip before moving lower. My lips quivered as he touched them, caressing their every bend and bow. Wetting the pad of his fingertip with my juices, I heard him bring it to his mouth and taste me.
Before I could let the air from my lungs, or close my mouth – laid open in awe – he took my head firmer in his grasp and lifted it just off the stone. He expelled his breath in a slow hiss, letting it linger over the skin of my face. Warm and damp. So unlike the desert.
P.S. Please have a look at my video diary, Love at First Write. It will be an ongoing series that will chronicle my efforts to write a great romance. I’d love to hear your comments.
One of the more disturbing stories to come out the Cold War, and certainly the most horrific – if indeed true – to emerge from the space race, is that of the “lost” (and by lost, I mean dead) Russian cosmonauts.
It has been alleged by a number of credible sources that the Soviets launched not one but several failed attempts at manned space flight before Yuri Gagarin survived his 1961 mission to become the first Russian in space. The Soviet Union denied these reports when they first began to surface and Russia continues to deny them today.
While I have no idea if these stories are actually true, in my experience of the Soviet Bloc, they are highly plausible. It’s hard to forget that the Soviet Union committed many worse crimes against its own citizens – so much so that the alleged horrors done to their MIA cosmonauts seem almost quaint.
Space travel is dangerous. There is no doubt about that. The United States has had its share of casualties in our harrowing quest to voyage beyond the relative safety of our planet and into the universe at large. Devastating tragedies like the Challenger explosion come to mind. Then there are the nail-biting, snatched-from-the-jaws-of-death missions like 1970’s Apollo 13, when NASA came together in what has been called its finest hour. With little more than passion, commitment and ingenuity, NASA engineers brought a spaceship full of stranded astronauts back from the Moon and from what looked like certain death.
A truly breathtaking and inspirational feat that struck at the core of who we were and clarified for us Americans just what we were risking, and what we were willing to do in order to bring our star-explorers home safe and sound. Shaken from this narrowly averted tragedy and buoyed by our mastery over the Soviets, the U.S. put manned missions largely on hold until recently.
Mission Control, Apollo 13
While both the Red and the Red, White and Blue space programs were dangerous and audacious, there were several distinctions between the Soviet space program and the one executed by the U.S. during the Cold War space race. The first and most important contrast was that American astronauts competed like mad for the job. They most definitely wanted to blast off into space – risk and all.
In the Soviet Union, cosmonauts were chosen. Did they feel honored and thrilled to be plucked from their lives and hand-picked for such an adventure? We’ll never know, and they certainly would not have felt at liberty – without serious repercussions like being sent to a gulag – to divulge any misgivings on their part.
If you’ve read THE HUNGARIAN , my new historical thriller which centers around Cold War spies and the 1950s space race, you may remember quirky, Russian double-agent Fedot informing Lily that President Eisenhower had placed significant restrictions on our American team of scientists. This was truth, not a fiction of my imagination. Not only were our physicists, engineers and the like asked to develop flawless technology, but Eisenhower would not allow them to use any military launchers for United States satellites for fear of looking like a warmonger. As a result, our scientists had to develop non-military launchers that were just as effective as the military ones. No easy task, and one that cost us. The Soviet Union placed no such restrictions on their scientists and designers, giving them a distinct timeline advantage.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 exposed the single-minded recklessness and carelessness with which the Soviets pursued a crusade to crush enemies and expand their power. Nuclear energy and space travel were executed with the same vicious resolution as their illogical and mostly failed Five-Year Plans regarding agriculture and economic development. If the statistical comparisons between Soviet/Russian fatal airline crashes and those of Western carriers are any indication of how the Soviet Space Program was conducted, then the words myopic, hostile, sloppy and inhumane come to mind. As late as 2011, Russia snagged the title as the most dangerous country to fly from, according to The Wall Street Journal. A rash of fatal accidents there prompted investigations into its airline industry, which found “ineffective regulation, inefficiently small airlines and poorly trained pilots not following modern safety procedures,” according to The Journal.
While airline safety and space travel precautions may or may not have mirrored one another in Mother Russia at the height of the space race, it’s hard not to draw a comparison. Especially since what we do know for sure is that the Soviet Union, throughout its relatively brief reign, were open about valuing the State over the individual. It was one of the few things they were actually open about. As a result, millions of innocents died of starvation, or were worked to death in labor camps, or were simply victims of grotesque forms of criminal negligence.
Chernobyl comes to mind. It’s hard to fathom that the Soviet government did not warn the locals of the nuclear disaster that had occurred in their backyard. Not until it was too late and the whole world had already discovered their dirty little nuclear secret.
Chernobyl Kindergarten
The only heroes in Chernobyl were the brave nuclear power plant workers who died in order to try and avoid even greater collateral damage from the meltdown. According to Knowledge Nuts, “During the well-documented Chernobyl nuclear disaster, a pool of water used for emergencies in case of a break in the cooling pumps or steam pipes became flooded with a highly radioactive liquid that was in danger of blowing up. The size and specific conditions meant it could have caused virtually the whole of Europe to be enveloped in radiation. Three divers equipped with wetsuits and a faulty lamp dove in to allow the water to drain, with full knowledge they’d die as a result.”
The three engineers were Valeri Bezpalov, Alexie Ananenko and Boris Baranov. They were buried in lead coffins that were soldered shut. We should always remember these men as having given their lives in order to save perhaps hundreds of thousands. They made their choice freely and without the help or scrutiny of their government, who continued to deny the disaster.
If the stories of the lost cosmonauts are true, they deserve to be remembered as well. In absence of their names, let’s simply pray for their souls.
If you can’t get enough of whiskey, bad women, great stories, and the general mayhem of writing about love and war and passion and art, visit my Patreon page for exclusive content on just about everything I write. This includes essays, articles, a forthcoming video diary, and vintage photography – curated just for you!
For a donation as small as a dollar, you’ll not only get access to original and interactive content, but 1/3 of your donation will go to Camp Holiday Trails, a wonderful summer camp for kids with special needs!
My mother-in-law in her birthday hat
Last week my family and I went to St. Louis for my mother-in-law’s 92nd birthday. We had a terrific time visiting family and friends, swilling a bit of whiskey in old haunts, and walking (or driving) down memory lane.
On one of these jaunts into the past, we drove our children through Ferguson, MO. Yes, that Ferguson. Ground zero, essentially, for the Black Lives Matter movement. The place where Michael Brown was shot two years ago and riots ensued. Coincidentally, we were there on the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death, and on the eve of the riots that would break out in our adopted hometown of Charlottesville, VA, where we’ve lived for the past thirteen years. We stalked the ghosts of one tragic event, as another was beginning to unfold.
Our kids had been to Ferguson before – both prior to and after the riots that trashed its main drag, leaving its residents heartbroken, and the country stunned. They know the old-fashioned store front strip – once a staple of middle class prosperity, the Dollar General, McDonalds, and the tiny, brick bungalows with signs reading We Must Stop Killing Each Other and We Must Start Loving Each Other pierced into their lawns. These are all familiar sights.
My husband grew up only a short bike ride from where most of the violence and tear gas and looting took place. In a small, three bedroom house with no air conditioning. One shared by ten people, who in the midst of a hot, humid Missouri summer, shared a single squeaky, oscillating fan.
But he and his seven older sisters talk with a hearty fondness about their hard-scrabble childhood. The white-labeled, generic cans of “near beer” lined up in their fridge, and the butcher scraps their dad would bring home from his job behind a meat counter at a local grocery chain. Their’s was a mixed race working class neighborhood. Mostly peaceful and dignified. And most of his friends – ones from both black and white families – made it out of there, too.
Ferguson when my husband was growing up
It’s been hard watching our country stumble, especially with our home towns at the epicenter of our foibles. It has caused us to turn inward, searching our souls and looking for historical parallels that might teach us something, give us an idea of where we could be headed and how we can avoid a crash and burn. How did we get here? My husband and I pose that question at our dinner table often. Because it didn’t happen over night, and it didn’t start with the election of Donald Trump. Love Trumps Hate may be today’s slogan, just as Make Love Not War was popularized during the turmoil of the late 1960s, but it can’t begin to explain what is happening now. “Hate” doesn’t score a win just with the election of a divisive candidate. In a democracy, the state of politics and public discourse is a bipartisan endeavor – much like a marriage. Hate scores a win only when we turn on each other.
Ferguson during the riots
I was reminded of that, when in another coincidence, I came across an old journal entry from my days when I was living in Europe. It was spookily analogous in regards to some of what we’re experiencing today, so I think it’s worth sharing.
Back in the mid-nineteen nineties, my friend Kate was in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, directing Romeo and Juliet for the Slovak National Theater. In the world of Shakespeare, Kate is this really big deal and gets to fly all over the world doing this sort of thing. It’s a great gig and she’s a wonderful woman.
But at the time, Slovakia was going through a difficult period and Kate found the cultural and political climate a bit challenging.
Eastern Europe was exploding with growth and democracy, while Slovakia was stuck with a third-rate quasi-socialist thug in power and was enjoying none of the optimism and opportunity that was sweeping through its neighboring countries with gale-force wind.
Perhaps not surprisingly, a noticeable subset of Slovak youth found power and solace in the neo-Nazi movement.
One day, Kate was sitting at a cafe with the director of the Slovak National Theater when a teenage neo-Nazi stomped into the place and thunked down next to them – feet spread wide, hands drumming on the cafe table top. When he heard the women speaking English and surmised – correctly – that Kate was American, he began acting out. He started making all the cracks you’d expect him to make – about the filthy Jews controlling the U.S. and well, you get the picture. It was an ugly scene and Kate would have none of it. She scowled at him, picked up her chair and turned it around, putting her back to him – loudly, angrily. It felt good, she said.
Amen, sister, I thought as she described the scene.
“Kate, what are you doing?” her Slovak friend asked her.
Kate told her how disgusting she found this young man’s views, and the woman nodded, in complete agreement. But then the woman leaned forward and said with sadness, kindness, “Kate, our young people are lost and you are a great teacher from America. Please teach them. Don’t turn your back.”
That story had a tremendous impact on me, and I suspect it did on Kate, too. I remember she told her Slovak friend that she’d been given a lot to think about and dissected the experience in her journal that evening. Knowing Kate, who is one of the best teachers I’ve ever met, she internalized this incident and wrote down all of the things she should have said to the young man. Maybe, if she had a do-over, she would’ve started with, “Won’t you join us?” That seems like something Kate would do.
As for me, I’d like to say that I’ve so taken Kate’s story to heart that whenever I hear a smug politico or a chauvinist or racist or elitist or even an entitled millennial say something that makes my blood boil, I attempt to engage and teach them the way I’ll bet Kate has done going forward. But the truth is, I usually don’t. I take the easy road, what makes me feel good and righteous, but in truth doesn’t do a damn thing to actually try to bridge a gap and help the situation. I turn my back loudly, angrily. I glare, condescend or insult. Then I blame the pundits and the politicians and all the “stupid” people for our state of discourse.
But even if I haven’t lived up to my potential as a proud citizen in this great country, as a participant in our increasingly global culture, all is not lost.
Maybe, after reading the story of my friend Kate, someone will endeavor to use his brain and his heart to do better. And it will be people like him who will be able to soften us towards one another again.
Hot air balloon flying over Charlottesville, VA
“See the good in people and help them.” — Mahatma Gandhi
The space race is back…along with Dior dresses, stiletto heels, secret agents, double dealers, smoky rooms and bullets meant just for you!
Get a load of this short excerpt:
Lily held in her hands Fedot’s translation of the Sputnik papers Pasha had squirreled away from his office in Moscow. In the spiritualist’s direct language, he distilled highlights of the emerging Soviet space program along with factoids of his own meant to help clarify the situation for Lily.
“1955 – In announcements made four days apart, the United States of America and the Soviet Union publicly state they will launch artificial Earth satellites by the end of the 1950s decade. This was the starting shot, as Tony Geiger might say, and was preceded by the pillage of the Nazi German V2 ballistic missile program after the war. Liquid-fueled rockets capable of flying long distances at high altitudes, they are the very foundation of astral voyaging.
Von Braun, a German, heads the design team for United States, while a man whose identity is a state secret heads the Soviet design team. His name is Sergei Korolev and he was recently brought out of retirement after spending many years imprisoned in Siberia; a victim of Stalin’s Great Purge in 1938.
Eisenhower will not allow Von Braun to use any military launchers for United States satellites because he fears looking like a warmonger. As a result, Von Braun must develop his own, non-military launchers for his satellites. Soviet Union places no such restrictions on their designer, giving them a timeline advantage.
It is known by Pasha Tarkhan that propaganda is not the only victory Soviet Union hopes to gain. If the Sputnik launch is successful, Soviet Union hopes by end of decade to launch the first of a secret nuclear arsenal into space.”
Lily put the papers down and folded her hands. She couldn’t bear sitting for another moment. Tucking Fedot’s Sputnik translation into her coat pocket, Lily ran outside. There, in the front yard of the library, she found shelter under the very stars and moon the Soviets and Americans were hoping to claim. She located Venus immediately, and the planet stared back at her while the surrounding stars twinkled. The moon, nearly full, was bone white. It was an unspeakably clear and beautiful night. Serene. Deceptive. Lily had never wanted the dawn more.
THE HUNGARIAN, my new historical thriller set in 1956 Europe, Russia and the Middle East, is now available.
Click this link to buy THE HUNGARIAN today!
If you can’t get enough of the spy vs spy world at the height of the Cold War, please visit my Patreon page for a photographic and historical exhibit on The Space Race! And for as little as a $1.00 donation, you can read my original essay on The Missing Cosmonauts of the Soviet Union, which includes a nearly sixty year-old audio clip alleged to contain the final moments of the first Soviet woman in space.
Click here to visit Victoria’s Patreon Page
добрый вечер!
Victoria
