I well remember Simon Sebag Montefiore from our briefly overlapping time as colleagues at the Daily Mail in the 1990s. Affable and polished, he had a fixation with all things Russian, and his shtick (which amused us all in the office) was to lope around in a Red Army greatcoat.
In the years since then, he has emerged as an authoritative, award-winning historian, and the biographer of Stalin. And, as well as his enduring fascination with Russian history, this scion of an illustrious British Sephardi family (his great-great-uncle was the financier and philanthropist Sir Moses Montefiore) is equally engaged by his Jewish roots. He combines the two in Red Sky at Noon, the final novel in his Moscow Trilogy.
The story is set during summer 1942, when Hitler launched his “Case Blue” offensive across Ukraine and the plains of southern Russia towards the Don and Volga rivers, and on towards the prize of Stalingrad.
As tanks were in short supply, both the German and Soviet sides deployed cavalries instead. With the Soviets suffering heavy losses, Stalin called upon an additional human resource, the wretched and expendable prisoners of the gulags, to form penal battalions (called shtrafbats). They could “win redemption” by spilling blood — their own as well as the enemy’s — for the Motherland.
One such prisoner is the Jewish writer Benya Golden, serving 25 years after being wrongly convicted of treason. He joins a penal cavalry unit made up of assorted devious criminals and Cossacks. In a dramatic battle, they charge headlong with sabres drawn into the Italian cavalry, who have joined their German allies in the offensive.
Benya is among the handful who survive the massacre of his shtrafbat. Wounded and caught behind enemy lines, he is in danger from all sides — from the Wehrmacht and their Axis allies; from the Soviets who might execute him for “desertion”; and from the SS, who, together with antisemitic Russian defectors, are slaughtering Jews as they find them.
Luckily for Benya, he is cared for by an Italian nurse, the beauteous Fabiana. The pair fall in love and attempt to flee the turmoil together on horseback across the scorching plains, eastwards to the Don and possible salvation.
The book’s historical background is intriguing and, if I found the fictional love story a tad gushy, preferring my history as straight non-fiction, Simon has more than earned his stripes in that department, and if he wants to go a little Tolstoyan (in its fictional implications) that’s fine by me.
Red Sky at Noon is published by Century (£16.99)
Monica Porter is a freelance journalist and author.
