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Saving Ivan by Alexander Nekrassov Saving Ivan is a fast-moving thriller set against the political background of post-communist Russia, dominated by high-level corruption, murder and intrigue. An international team of professionals gathers in the Russian Capital to take on a powerful criminal gang and save the son of a Russian diplomat, only to find a sinister trail that leads to London. In a desperate race against time they try to prevent a major crime being committed in the heart of the British capital.

The plot twists and turns, switching from the streets of Moscow to the London social scene; from the office of the President of Russia to Mafia-controlled turf; from the headquarters of the former KGB at Lubyanka to ‘millionaire’s row’ in Kensington, W8.

From the very beginning, things are not what they seem and each player in the drama has his own secret agenda. Former KGB agents operate alongside Russian gangsters, aided by top Kremlin officials, and there is a hit squad on the loose in Moscow, carrying out murders on the orders of someone at the very top of the political ladder.

Saving Ivan is available from all good bookshops, and also on-line from Amazon.co.uk.

To download a preview of Saving Ivan, please click here.

The Debt Collector is a futuristic political thriller set in post-Putin Russia. The year is 2012 and Russia is still run by powerful business groups consisting of billionaires who amassed their vast fortunes by dubious means in the years of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.

As a result of the sudden death of the Kremlin’s preferred election candidate, a former Army General, Vladimir Abramov, becomes the new Russian president. He vows to fight corruption and crime and openly challenges the KGB mafia. But these people are not ready to go away without a fight.

A fierce gun battle erupts on one of Moscow’s main avenues as a group of assassins dressed as policemen attack an official motorcade carrying the Russian president. By pure luck he survives the attempt on his life. The nation is in shock and rumours abound as to who could have been behind the attack. Then an obscure Chechen terrorist group called The Grey Eagles, with links to al Qaeda, posts a message on the Internet taking responsibility for the assassination attempt. The secret is apparently out.

Chechen terrorists strike once again and nearly manage to deliver a fatal blow to Russia by eliminating its elected leader. But President Abramov’s closest ally, General Alexander Komarov, has other ideas. Komarov, who heads a task force investigating serious financial fraud, makes it his top priority to find out who was really behind the attack on the president. Knowing how widespread corruption is in the Russian police and intelligence services, the General hires an eccentric London-based multi-millionaire, Daniel Gold, who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a young man in 1989 and settled in Britain. Gold dabbles in freelance investigations for Omega, a private detective agency, pursuing criminals involved in money laundering, extortion and drug trafficking.

Gold is no ordinary investigator. Wealthy, intelligent, cunning and with a remarkable talent for disguise, he uses unorthodox methods to track down criminals. Even more unusually, he writes thrillers about the cases he handles, which are published under assumed names.

Gold is given a codename, ‘The Debt Collector’, to protect his identity, and is soon operating undercover in the murky world of Russian business and politics as he tries to trace the people responsible for launching a war against the new Russian leader. To penetrate the secretive world of the Russian super-rich, he comes up with some spectacular stunts.

The novel is a roller-coaster ride of fast-changing situations, double-dealings, high-level corruption, contract killings and betrayals. In the background, international terrorists are trying to get their hands on a nuclear bomb, and crooked Russian financiers are plotting a massive worldwide economic meltdown.

At times Gold finds himself absolutely overwhelmed by the odds stacking up against him. But his determination to find the criminals plus some unexpected backup that comes out of the blue, help him to continue his investigation.

Time is running out for Russia. And the one man who stands in the way of apocalyptic disaster is… The Debt Collector.

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union by Martin Macauley – The emergence of the Soviet Union was a surprise to many but its demise amazed the whole world. Why did Imperial Russia fall under the spell of a utopian ideology – Marxism-Leninism? Why were Russians mesmerised by the promise of a paradise on earth? The ideology became a secular religion and promised a scientific guide to modernisation and greatness. Russia was modernising, i.e. industrialising, by 1914 but was drawn into the First World War. This proved fatal, as Russia could not mobilise its resources efficiently to cope with the challenge of Germany, a more developed industrial society. Into the debris of war and defeat stepped a political genius – Vladimir Lenin. He blamed the war on the ruling class – the bourgeoisie – and promised immediate peace to the peasant in uniform. Even more intoxicatingly, he offered them property in the form of land. It was class war and it worked like a charm. A social revolution hit the country and the Soviet Union came into being. Lenin fashioned a political machine, the Communist Party, to effect political, economic and social change. He promised power to the people but in reality it was power to the party. Lenin died in 1924 before the revolution could be completed. He was a Red Tsar, and it was inevitable that he would be succeeded by another Red Tsar. He turned out to be Joseph Stalin. He hit on the concept of ’socialism in one country’ and set about turning the Soviet Union into an industrial giant. Militarily, it had to be capable of defeating all comers. To do this he abolished the market economy and replaced it with a planned economy. Peasants were ruthlessly exploited to provide the capital for industrialisation. They were herded into collective and state farms, and the state seized their output. The first stage of the planned economy can be termed Revolutionary Stalinism, which set impossibly high targets. When revolutionary enthusiasm had run its course, Bureaucratic Stalinism took its place. A huge army of bureaucrats ran the country under the aegis of a master builder – Stalin himself. Came renewed conflict in Europe and in an attempt to prevent war with Germany, Stalin struck a deal with Hitler. He trusted the German Fuhrer to keep his word – a catastrophic misjudgement. Miraculously, the Red Army defeated the Wehrmacht and eventually took Berlin. The Soviet Union was now a superpower and its only challenger was the United States. Two ideological systems – communism and capitalism – competed to the death. On his death, the cautious Stalin was succeeded by the risk-taking Nikita Khrushchev and then by the inadequate Leonid Brezhnev. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985, the country was in terminal decline.

This book analyses the strengths and weaknesses of the communist system and why it failed to adapt successfully to the demands of the modern world. The ideology that had inspired the revolutionaries petrified, becoming rigid and boring. The ruling class was gradually seduced by materialism, and capitalism re-emerged again – as the black economy. It was deformed capitalism because, in order to survive, the new businessmen had to bribe those in power: party officials, government functionaries and the political police (KGB). A huge multi-national empire, the Soviet Union, fell victim to feuding nationalities, each of which believed it could run its own affairs more successfully than Moscow. The book examines this and other reasons for the fall of the Soviet Union and identifies poor political leadership as a key factor. It is an exciting tale and a warning to any politician who aspires to bring about revolution. Revolutions always turn out differently than hoped because people find ingenious ways of outwitting ideologues. The book includes first-person accounts, anecdotes, illustrations and diagrams to illustrate key concepts such as power, authority and legitimacy. This is a seminal history of a twentieth century superpower.

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union by Martin McCauley is available from Amazon.

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