A Note from the Author
This book turns on secrets.
One secret is buried in the deep, dark forest of Katyn, Poland. The other in the pages of a notebook kept in a modest café in Lwow, an ancient Polish city. The principal contributors to the Scottish Book, as the notebook was called, were professors and several pure mathematicians from the nearby university. While the mathematicians’ musings were dismissed by some as esoteric scribblings, when the Nazis overran Poland in 1939 the Book mysteriously vanished from its hiding place in the café. Some of its authors vanished too, fleeing to America to avoid certain death. With their freedom came recruitment for the Manhattan Project.
Also very real are little-known places like Bad Nenndorf, the British interrogation center for hardcore Nazis before they were sent to Ashcan, the manor house near London for a three-dimensional and certainly more aggressive “debriefing”; Wünsdorf, the principal oversight warren for the Wehrmacht OKW during World War Two and the victorious Soviet Occupation forces in the Cold War Era; and the Hill of Goats located in the chilling forest of lost souls—a place called Katyn. A thought, then, to keep uppermost in your mind as you read this story.
If the Scottish Book was of little importance then why, as a ruthless world war reached its ugly end, did the NKVD, Gestapo and yes, even the Allies, desperately seek to find and secure its contents?
Why has its existence not factored into the telling of Second World War history?
After years of in-depth research, I believe I have discovered an extremely plausible look into what might have been and, in all probability, one of the last great secrets of the Second World War. Until now. Moscow Soyuz Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik (The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) 8 July 1937 Before 1917, Alexander Fedin had been a key activist in the Marxist Underground, personally in charge of smuggling illegal literature between Russia and Europe. After the Revolution, his close friendship with Lenin had propelled him to become secretary to the influential Moscow Party Central Committee and after that to a lofty post within the Comintern, the international organization of the Communist Party. As befitting his status, the Fedins were provided an apartment on the top floor of the House on the Embankment, the principal residence for Party élite, located as it was on the tadpole-shaped island of Balchug, a mere stone’s throw from the Kremlin and the ominous lair of the Supreme Leader. Perhaps what ultimately doomed Fedin had been his speech at the most recent plenum of Central Committee, where he accused the Narodnyi Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (NKVD) of fabricating evidence. He called for a commission to review the overseas work of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it was the private comments he had made to a close circle of friends as he entered the conference hall of the Supreme Soviet for the 1936 Comintern—boldly honest words about the failure of the State to adequately support the struggling comrades of the Republic in the Spanish Civil War at a time when Franco’s Nationalists triumphantly advanced on Madrid.
Perhaps. They came for him near midnight, seven hard-faced men arriving simultaneously in a matching set of Zis 101s, the black-lacquered saloon car so shamelessly modeled on the American Buick Roadmaster, and so capriciously favored by the sinister flying squads of the NKVD. Ironically, the arrest when it came did not shock Batya. He had prepared for it. He had transferred his savings book and valuables to his wife Lara and destroyed some private notebooks. Escorted by the burly agents of the State, he carried with him only a small suitcase containing a dressing gown and toothbrush. The next day the NKVD broke into the apartment and took away family valuables, cash and savings books, a radio, a bicycle, coats, sheets, linen, even teacups. They then sealed the door to Batya’s private study with wax.
On Tuesday the 3rd of August, 1937, along with 126 other prisoners, Alexander Sergeyevich Fedin was tried by a military tribunal of the Supreme Soviet. He was charged with being a leader of a Fascist spy ring of Trotskyists covertly operating within the Comintern. The death certificate, which contained the names of the convicted, had been officially signed before the trial began. At the top of the document there was a brief handwritten note: Za – “in favour” - Shoot all 127. I. Stalin.....
The book is a thriller from every angle and readers will be intirgued how this last great secret is very muh part of Putin's war on Ukraine.
