Leah will be sent to live in the lap of tsarist luxury, in St. Petersburg, with her aunt Rasa Poliakov, niece of Samuel and Lazar Poliakov, one who is the railroad magnate of Tsarist Russia, and the other the banker of the Tsar and rumored father of the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. From that lap of luxury in which she literally played with the Tsar’s four daughters and hemophiliac son, Leah will become first disillusioned and then impassioned with Revolutionary fervor. As her uncle’s fortune collapses, at the age of fifteen, Leah will go and live with the factory workers and young revolutionaries in the Vyborg District of St. Petersburg. She will become enchanted with the bohemian revolutionary poets and painters and, on International Women’s Day, she will be thrust into the forefront of history, leading women textile workers out on strike, in contravention of Party orders. The workers on strike will swell into the hundreds of thousands, and Leah will be one of its leaders. Finally, the army will go over to the side of the workers, and one particularly dashing young officer will fall in love with the beautiful, teenaged revolutionary. And the Tsar will be toppled, ending four hundred years of Romanoff rule. As one of the leaders of the Women’s Movement, Leah will be a rising star in the Bolshevik Party. She and her young husband, the former Tsarist cavalry officer, will overthrow the Kerensky government and create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. These will be heady days, when these teenaged lovers and revolutionaries believe they are literally bringing about the worker’s paradise.
That dream will quickly turn to ash. Leah, pregnant with her first child, will travel with her husband, now an officer in the Red Army, to Yekaterinburg to put down a garrison that has risen in opposition to the Bolsheviks. Yekaterinburg is also where the Romanoffs have been imprisoned. The young Grand Duchesses, Olga, Maria, Tatiana, and Anastasia, were literally her playmates. And as Leah is giving birth, she will hear them being slaughtered in the basement of the House of Special Purposes, across the street from the hospital where her baby is being born. Later, her husband will be ordered to put down the rebellion of the Kronstadt Sailors, the Heroes of the Revolution. And, as the Stalinist Era is ushered in, her husband will vanish into the Gulag and Leah, in order to survive, will be forced to denounce him. She will have two daughters. One will become a talented opera star, and the other, her firstborn, a female sniper in the Battle of Stalingrad. Leah will be forced to compromise all her principles in order to survive and keep her daughters alive. At the end of World War Two, she will be dispatched to Czechoslovakia to assist in setting up the new Communist government. And there, she will play a leading role in helping her nephew, Meyer Levy, Davey Boy’s son and a former Marine Corps fighter pilot, smuggle Czech-built Me-109s into the newly-born State of Israel. She will continue to rise in the Party apparatus, through the days of Perestroika, and it will be Leah who learns of a KGB plot to kidnap Gorbachev and his family while they are on vacation and take over the government. It will be Leah who warns Boris Yeltsin that it is about to happen, so that he will organize thousands of people to be ready to take to the streets. She will be with him when he stands atop the tank in Red Square. And she will be there to help topple the regime she ushered in, seventy years before.
