Review: Eye of the Red Tsar

Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What happened to the last Tsar and his family is a recurring mystery of the 20th century. It is, for all intents, completely resolved, and yet we keep going back and trying to figure out details.

Pekkala is a Finnish man who become's Tsar Nicholas' bodyguard and confidante over the 20 years prior to the Russian Revolution. Ten years after the Revolution has been decided, he is in a Siberian prison when he is 'rescued' by a man who works for the organization that will eventually become the KGB. They need him to find the Tsar's stash of money, still missing after all these years.

Good story, full of memories (good and bad) and horrors and family secrets and existential pain. So, a Russian novel in truth. Having watched closely over the past 20 years as the Soviet era disappeared, I am fairly clear on the events of July 1918, so some of the details in this book are just slightly off, though necessarily so to make the book work. And it does work.

I won't be reading more of this series. The end, while realistic enough, puts Pekkala in a situation that I'm not at all comfortable with. There are some famous names that crop up in the book as characters, and one of them... I just do not want to know about, no more than we as historians know IRL.

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