Author Description

In the last days of 1917, a fugitive Cossack captain brashly led seven nervous cohorts into a mutinous garrison in an isolated bordertown on Russia's frontier with Manchuria. So began the frenzied rise and fall of Captain Grigori Semenov and his fellow Cossack atamans who became warlords along the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the Russian Far East during the violent revolutionary upheaval of 1918-1922. Blood and gold, treachery and treasure... Cossack pirates aboard fleets of armored trains... Jewish Cossacks, Tibetan cavalry and pressgang cannon fodder, do-gooders and mercenaries from a dozen lands, legions of prostitutes and spies... Historians have long recognized that Ataman Semenov and Company were a nasty lot. This book details precisely how nasty they were, and even includes the Cossacks' ever-changing order of battle, key officers and armored trains. Ataman Kalmykov, Baron Ungern-Shternberg, the American Expeditionary Force-Siberia (AEFS), Czechoslovak Legion, Japanese Army, Russian Railway Service Corps (RRSC) and Reds of every stripe play central roles. It's the story of a forgotten Russia in turmoil, when the line between government and organized crime blurred into a chaotic continuum of kleptocracy, vengeance and sadism.