This is a memoir of a turbulent, persecuted and disturbed Russian life under the Soviet regime and after, by Yuli Nikolayevich Ternovsky. Yuli is a relative of P.A. Stolypin, the last Tsar's reforming Prime Minister, who was shot in a Kiev Opera House. His memoir testifies to the Bolshevik persecution of relatives of Tsarist survivors, the hardships of the Russian Civil War and Second World War, the siege of Leningrad, student and work life in the 1950s and later decades under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev, a life-changing love affair with a Frenchwoman that brings Yuli serious trouble with...