Devil's midnight

the long version

"August 1919-March 1920. The Red Army is making its final, triumphant surge across the tortured remains of the old Russian Empire. For the defiantly apolitical artists and aesthetes at the heart of Devil's Midnight, it is a time of disruption and apocalypse, their lives pulled between narrow escapes, desperate intimacy, and horrific violence." "There's Alexey Lebedev, the son of a celebrated Russian painter recently martyred by the Bolsheviks, who is driven deep into the conflict by a dizzying spiral of chance encounters and impulsive decisions. There's Colonel Yuri Skatchko, a former stage director who has abandoned the theater to serve as the brave but reckless commander of "Our Homeland," a battered ammunition train that comes to represent, both symbolically and literally, the last hope of the White resistance. And there's the glamorous and seductive Nata Tai, the former queen of Russian cinema, who is busy waging her own private war with the ruthless remnants of a notorious satanic cabal."--Jacket.