Dissecting "Cold Peace" Part IX - Characters from the Soviet Union

 The Soviet Union triggered the Berlin Crisis of 1948-1949 by introducing a blockade. Throughout the crisis they remained in occupation of their sector of the city and continued to interfere with the Airlift and the Berliners in a variety of ways. Yet, while I have studied Russian history, my knowledge of Russian/Soviet society is inadequate to build a complete plot line around Russian characters. I thought I would leave the Soviets in the background as merely objects with whom my Western characters interacted as necessary.

And then Russia invaded Ukraine.

 

 

The Russian invasion shamed me into giving the Ukrainians a voice in my "Bridge to Tomorrow" series. As historian Timothy Snyder documents all-too-well, no people -- not even Europe's Jews -- were subject to as much oppression and tyranny as the Ukrainians. Stalin engineered and completely unnecessary famine that resulted in the starvation of 6.6 million Ukrainians between 1930 and 1933. (Yes, you read that correctly: 6.6. million. See: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands, Hatchette Books, 2022, 53.) And that was only the beginning. Ukrainians were again targeted in Stalin's successive "great purges" and "Great Terror" -- and that was all before the Nazis invaded in 1941.

My conscious decision was aided by one of my moments of inspiration, and so a mini-plot line was born. It features two Ukrainian women. One whose father disappeared into a Gulag but who herself escaped to emigre relatives in the West and so returns to the Continent as a British citizen serving as a translator for the RAF. The other, a girl who lost most of her family to the famine, who joins the partisans after the German invasion and becomes one of the famous women "sharpshooters," responsible for the assassination of hundreds if not thousands of Germans.

The two women meet by chance at a luncheon hosted by the British Military Governor, Sir Brian Robertson, when both are in the entourage of their respective commanders. They are the only two women in the room and so gravitate towards one another. They discover they grew up not to far apart. They recognize an affinity that crosses the political borders... They will play an increasingly important role in the "Bridge to Tomorrow" series.