kyra kaptzan robinov

The year is 1920.  While the peaceful remote city of Nikoalevsk-on-Amur in far Eastern Siberia is frozen from the world, a band of Bolshevik revolutionaries infiltrates the town and arrests 90% of the population: businessmen, bourgeoisie, Jews.

Luba’s husband, Ilya, a prominent newspaper editor and lawyer, is among those jailed and tortured.  Overnight, her comfortable upper class life is upended and Luba finds herself on the run with four small children and a mother-in-law. 

Pigsties...abandoned warehouses...opium dens...these are just a few of the places Luba is forced to seek refuge as she tries to elude capture and stay alive.  

Will her former servants, a Chinese cook and a Russian coachman, help or turn on her?  

The little-known history of this exotic time and place is seen through the eyes of a reluctant heroine grappling with adversity and loss during the dangerous political chaos following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. 

Kyra Kaptzan Robinov has woven her family’s history into a fictional narrative. Having grown up hearing her father and grandmother tell of that winter, she felt compelled to capture it in writing. Though their accounts contained villains and executions, peril and pain, they always seemed more like escapades than reality. When Kyra started to research the actual historical events, the gruesome details she uncovered were in such contrast to the quaint tales she’d heard in her childhood that she didn’t know how to reconcile the discrepancy. Had her father misremembered? Had her grandmother blotted out the horrors of her past? How could she ever weave together the conflicting information? 

Red Winter is a story that resonates today where, again, one percent of the population controls all the wealth while dissatisfied masses are poised to revolt and over 60 million people are displaced worldwide, the highest number in history. Like Luba, any of our lives could be disrupted tomorrow; but would we have the grit to survive such a tumultuous turn of events?