num_pages: 378
description: In 1917 a band of communist revolutionaries stormed the Winter Palace of Tsar Nicholas IIa dramatic and explosive act marking that Vladimir Lenins communist revolution was now underway. But Lenin would not be satisfied with overthrowing the tsar. His goal was a global revolt that would topple all Western capitalist regimes  starting with the British Empire.Russian Roulette tells the spectacular and harrowing story of the British spies in revolutionary Russia whose mission was to stop Lenins red tide from washing across the free world. They were an eccentric cast of characters led by Mansfield Cumming a one-legged monocle-wearing former sea captain and included novelist W. Somerset Maugham beloved childrens author Arthur Ransome and the dashing ice-cool Sidney Reilly the legendary Ace of Spies and a model for Ian Flemings James Bond. Cummings network would pioneer the field of covert action and would one day become MI6.Living in disguise constantly switching identities they infiltrated Soviet commissariats the Red Army and Cheka (the feared secret police) and would come within a whisker of assassinating Lenin. As Giles Milton chronicles for the first time in a sequence of bold exploits that stretched from Moscow to the central Asian city of Tashkent this unlikely band of agents succeeded in foiling Lenins plot for global revolution.
language: English
title: Russian Roulette: A Deadly Game - How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Global Plot
publisher: Sceptre