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In a land laid waste by the First World War, the Bolshevik
Revolution, civil war, economic calamity and famine, a young boy tries to cope with a reality of violence and suffering he
could not understand. Together with his friend, he slowly begins to understand the truth of his life in a small, German-speaking
village on the Russian steppes. The two share a friendship deepened by the misery they endure in an adult world gone mad.
Anton's story is rooted in the migration of thousands a century earlier. The settlers were lured from Germany by the rich,
fertile soil of the steppes that stretched north and west from the Black Sea. They were induced by policies that included
free farmland, tax concessions and the promise they could keep their language, culture and religion. For Empress Tsar Catherine
the Great and her grandson Tsar Alexander, the Volga Germans followed by the Black Sea Germans would bring their work ethic
and Teutonic determination necessary to help unlock the untapped agriculture potential of the region. In so doing, they would
serve two important strategic purposes - bring greater economic prosperity to mother Russia and secure the Russian empire
as it stretched eastward. But the German immigrants were never assimilated, or accepted in Russian society. They lived as
a people apart in their ethnic colonies, their success as farmers often resented, but were an integral part of the history
of Russia. More than a century after the first Germans had arrived, and with the outbreak of the First World War,
the upheaval of the Russian Bolshevik revolution and subsequent civil war, the Black Sea Germans became more than outcasts.
They became the enemy. In the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution, and the power struggle between Leon Trotsky and Josef Stalin,
this book tells the story of those years. It is the largely untold saga of Germans from Russia. Much of it is in the voice
of a young boy, whose bond with another young boy grows deeper in the adversity they face. Their friendship becomes a refuge
from the violence and suffering they witness.  Dale Eisler has written two previous non-fiction books. This is his first novel. He
lives in Otawa, Ontario where he is Assistant Deputy Minister/ Energy Security, Prosperity and Sustainability after serving
4 years as Consul General for Canada in Denver Colorado.
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