The Drau River Flows to Siberia: The Victims of Victory by Marina Osipova
My score: 3 of 5 stars
3.5 stars
The Drau River Flows to Siberia: The Victims of Victory is ready in Russia and follows the occasions of a few of the lesser identified info in regards to the fall-out of the 1945 Yalta settlement.
The e book has 4 particular elements and opens within the early Nineteen Forties when, as a younger woman, Anna has nowhere to show after her aunt disappeared. Anna is left in an space of Russia that the Germans now occupy; persuaded by propaganda she believes that her solely choice is to volunteer for work in Germany.
Actuality is way from what was promised and Anna is not more than a slave. She is taken to work on a farm in Austria, spending the following three years there. With the top of the warfare looming, the information that Russians are being welcomed again to the Motherland seems to be promising. Anna leaves her Austrian life and hopes to be reunited along with her father and brother in Moscow, however a really totally different actuality awaits Anna.
Alongside Anna’s story is that of former Cossack Zakhary; an interpreter through the warfare, Zakhary additionally will get caught up within the fall-out from the Yalta settlement. Though the vast majority of the primary third of the e book offers with Anna’s story, the reader is given breaks with slightly backwards and forwards to 1955. Anna and Zakhary are two folks ready for a ship and whereas they wait Anna tells him her story. Because the e book continues, we learn chapters from Zakhary’s experiences they usually usually alternate with Anna’s. The thought is that Anna tells her story from the final fourteen years over the house of some hours.
The historic particulars of this story are vital and it’s good that they’re uncovered. Nevertheless, I discovered the story slowed in locations and thought that it might profit from reducing down with out shedding any of the vital occasions.
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E book description:
February 4–11, 1945. Yalta, a resort city on the Crimean Peninsula, Soviet Union. The Huge Three are posing for a digital camera. Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. All smiling. Stalin, his head is half a flip away from the opposite two. A shrewd smirk is hiding behind his walrus mustache. He appears to be happy. Why wouldn’t he be? The Huge Three signed the settlement that can form the destiny of Europe and . . .
In 1941, Anna is sixteen, nearly an grownup but nonetheless a toddler, craving independence and eager to turn out to be an operetta actress. Her rosy aspirations are disrupted by the warfare. When Krasnodar is taken by the Wehrmacht, she is likely one of the populace who’re ordered to restore roads for the occupants’ vans and automobiles and, in fall, to toil within the fields for the sake of sending the harvest to the enemy’s land. A dire occasion coerces her to go to Germany the place she is auctioned as a slave employee.
Born in Berlin into an émigré Cossack household, younger Zakhary is extra all in favour of books and archeology than within the warfare that’s raging via Europe, even much less in the reason for his mother and father and their buddies, which is to overthrow the Bolshevik regime within the Soviet Union and revert to Imperial Russia. He simply doesn’t wish to be part of it. That’s, till he finds himself among the many Cossacks combating alongside the Germans in opposition to the Allies.
In Italy, he meets Marishka, a younger lady of Cossack heritage who fled the Soviet Union with different anti-Soviet Cossacks and departing German troops underneath the push of the Crimson Military. They fall in love and marry. After which, on June 1, 1945, Lienz occurred.
After the warfare, a ghastly destiny propels every of them to the cruel land the place skies are leaden grey, frosts plunge beneath -60°C in winter, and the woods are impenetrable and so huge, there isn’t any escape from there.
Anna and Zakhary carry with them their private wounds, on the identical time haunted by insufferable guilt, which they will’t undo or repair. In 1955, destiny brings them collectively on an remoted peninsula of the Ob River, linked to 1 one other in inextricably entangled methods they don’t but understand. Greater than a decade later, can they bury the merciless previous and construct a future for themselves within the nation with out Stalin however sealed behind the Iron Curtain?
That is their story, relived in sooner or later.
