Alan Furst's novel first reveals the tyranny of Soviet Russia by displaying Stalin's tyrannical behavior regarding members of the leadership of the Communist Party and the NKVD.
And as to that, the official orders to officers serving abroad to return to the Soviet Union, known to all to be orders to return for execution that, in general, no one dared disobey, are a nice parallel to the way things went in the empire of the Turks, its tyranny most neatly depicted in the mind of one of Furst's heroes, early in the book, in the practice of sending an official a garotte, indicating he should kill himself.
Which, generally, he did.
But the difficulty with this view of the situation is that, much like Khrushchev's secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union on February 25, 1956, it hides the inherent tyranny of Soviet Communism behind the tyranny of Stalin, personally, while it hides his tyrannical rule of the entire country behind his tyrannical treatment of party members and officials.
On the other hand, Furst's treatment in the same novel of the Spanish Civil War is almost entirely satisfactory.
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