cover image The Last Red August: A Russian Mystery

The Last Red August: A Russian Mystery

Alexei Malashenko, A. V. Malashenko. Scribner Book Company, $21 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-684-19571-1

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. (May)