The Forbidden Zone
A Novel
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
The year is 1984. The place, the Soviet Union. A struggling country awaiting the cure of "perestroika." For too many Russians, this land has become the Forbidden Zone.
In the waning days of the Cold War, Victor Perov, a brilliant Soviet scientist, agrees to a joint Soviet-American astrophysics project. Victor's faith in Communism and the Party is unwavering, but his impassioned scientific alliance with Katherine Sears, an American astrophysicist, quickly becomes romantic.
When Katherine learns that Victor's twin brother, Anton, a dissident believed killed in action in Afghanistan, is actually imprisoned somewhere in the Soviet psychiatric gulag, she risks her life to inform Victor. With the KGB hot on her trail and the American Embassy in Moscow powerless, Katherine must flee into the Soviet countryside, and Victor is left to grapple with a truth that pits him against his own mother, a high-ranking Soviet minister known as the Iron Perova.
Everywhere Victor turns, he is met with icy communist silence -- and anyone willing to talk seems to be turning up dead. The further he searches, the deeper he must dig into a painful period of Mother Russia's history. His career, his family and his life at risk, Victor must learn whom to trust in this deadly game of Party politics in order to save the woman he loves and his twin brother.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The founding editor of the first English-language daily newspaper in Russia, the Moscow Times, reveals his formidable knowledge of Russian society in this admirably executed first novel set in the moribund Soviet Union of 1983. To protect their crumbling positions as communism expires, the Old Guard will go to extremes, including claiming that dissident Anton Perov was killed in Afghanistan when he is actually enduring the living death of "antitherapy" in a KGB mental hospital. But those holding Anton have not reckoned on the man's twin brother, astrophysicist Victor Perov, and on Victor's American colleague and friend, astronomer Katherine Sears. These two believe Anton is alive, and in due course find themselves pursuing not only him but a deadly secret he harbors about a Politburo member. Victor and Katherine's major opponent is, ironically, the twins' mother, a powerful Politburo member, while their allies include several high-ranking KGB officers--a startling demonstration of how factionalism and influence made bizarre bedfellows in the waning days of Soviet communism. Even more striking is Hetzer's portrait of a cross-section of Soviet society, including the agricultural settlement that is honored to make the disguised and fugitive Katherine a member of its "collective." The vividly realized setting and skillful handling of a large cast of characters more than compensate for Hetzer's overuse of coincidence and a few Perils-of-Pauline-like sequences. This is a well-written, attentive debut, full of compassion for the Russian people and of pleasure for American readers.
