Islington author Ralph Boulton Remembers Stalin’s Forgotten Foreign Victims in a Gripping novel.

Young British miner Harry Speares is no admirer of Josef Stalin. But when, in the late 1930s, his communist father is invited to work at the headquarters of Moscow’s global subversive network, the Comintern, he reluctantly accompanies him – lured by promises of an education denied him at home.

In the Hotel Lux, foreign communist leaders live alongside exiled revolutionary fighters, teachers, writers and spies. Here, Harry meets Rosa Zander, a beguiling German woman who verses him in the mysterious rites of his new home. Rooms hum with debate, laughter and music. Children play in the corridors. But for Harry, the outsider, there is something unsettling about those ‘believers’ so set on remaking the world.

As the threat from Nazi Germany escalates, Stalin turns against his loyal servants in the Lux. Rosa struggles to explain a bloody betrayal that bewilders and infuriates Harry. But Harry’s fascination with her grows, along with his fear of her power, as she draws him into the darker corners of the Comintern. Is she friend, sweetheart or jailer? Desperate to escape Russia, Harry embarks on a perilous journey into Moscow’s criminal underworld that leads him to the gates of the British Embassy. Where he goes, Rosa follows.

Ralph Boulton worked for many years across Europe and the Middle East as a foreign correspondent and editor. In Russia he reported on the collapse of the Soviet Union, Moscow coups and armed conflicts in the Baltics, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Ukraine. He spent three years working in East Berlin and then five as Reuters Bureau Chief in Turkey, covering the rise of political Islam. More recently, he was Reuters World Desk Chief and Political Editor for Europe, Middle East and Africa. He is now based in Islington.

Ralph explains: “I first heard of the Hotel Lux as a young journalist in Moscow in the 1980s, sitting at a kitchen table with Soviet human rights campaigner Yelena Bonner – the wife of banished dissident Andrei Sakharov. She’d lived there as a child in the 1930s. One night, the secret police came for her father, a senior Comintern official. Months later, he was shot and her mother was sent to the Gulag.

In researching my book, I drew on the written accounts of foreign communists who’d lived in The Lux as adults and as children. I listened to the voices of some on audio tapes I found in several archives.

Though situated on a busy Moscow avenue, the Lux was shrouded in secrecy. British intelligence intercepts of encrypted Soviet radio messages to Comintern agents in the field offered me a glimpse into the activities of couriers, liaison officers and subversive networks around the world.

Many Lux residents risked their lives on overseas missions for what they saw as a noble cause. The more ruthless survived the purges by denouncing their comrades and neighbours. Some went on to positions of power in the post-war communist world. The Champagne Wagon describes, through Harry Speares’ eyes, the tragedy of people who thought they could change the world but were ultimately destroyed by that world.”

RELEASE DATE: 28/09/2024 ISBN: 9781805145387 Price: £10.99