Ron Tufft

Red Cloth, Yellow Cloth Ron Tufft

Kill him, Commander! The Prime Minister's words to Commander Alexander Gerasimov of the Okhrana, or Tsarist secret police, spell death to an Armenian revolutionary called Kamo - Symion Ter-Petrossian - involved in a bank raid in Tbilisi that ended in a bloodbath. As Kamo paces the streets of Berlin with Gerasimov hard on his heels, it becomes clear that a third party - 'Yellow Cloth,' also called Koba - is vital to the Tsar recovering a hoard of his own gold ingots, stolen in the bank raid and hidden by Koba in the mud caves of the Kura River. Only Kamo knows Yellow Cloth's true identity, therefore the Armenian terrorist has to be killed before he can reveal the secret - in order that the Russian empire may survive. This superb fictionalised account of Russia's twentieth-century birth pangs is a masterpiece of action, characterisation and horror. Against the relentless march of history appear creatures of such evil that they barely deserve the name of human beings; Koba, or Stalin as he became known, Britain's one-time ally, was one of these monsters. But the author's skill means that we feel sympathy for both hunter and hunted - for Gerasimov and Kamo - right to the end of the saga, and even retain a kind of understanding for the man of steel himself, Comrade Stalin.