This novel begins in two cities world famous for their magnificent Muslim buildings: Kazan and Samarkand.

But in her novel “Where maybe life is waiting” Gusel Yakhina doesn't bother with the magic of the capital of Tatarstan and the tourist magnet of Uzbekistan.

Nor is it the right time for what the book tells us: We are in the year 1923, more precisely in the five weeks from October 10th to November 15th, and on almost six hundred pages we follow the desperate efforts of the railway worker Dejew to lead a transport with five hundred starving children from the misery of Kazan, which was hard hit by the post-revolutionary civil war, to the supposedly peaceful and, above all, food-rich Samarkand.

Almost four thousand kilometers by train, but right through the middle of a war zone,

Deserts and ideological disputes.

There is no eye left for show values.

It's about sheer survival.

Andrew Plathaus

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You can take that literally.

The children are sometimes presented by Dejew to the authorities along the route as being even more destitute than they already are.

He marches her stark naked from the train station to her lodgings, knowing that this angelic performance will stir the heart of even the most hardened atheist (in this case, a Bolshevik).

With his rigid approach, however, Dejew sometimes overwhelms his paper: “Do you think you can afford anything because you are transporting starving children?!” a stationmaster in Buzuluk yells at him when the train driver cuts down the only shady tree in the steppe town to get firewood for the locomotive.

There is a lack of everything in the country, including understanding for his unrestrained commitment in the service of those recommended to him.

The Unknown Side of the Civil War

We know about the atrocities of the civil war that followed the October Revolution, but the historical perception on the part of the West is mostly capricious to the metropolises of Petrograd and Moscow or the fighting in the Ukraine, which had become independent in 1918 by German grace, but then in the struggle between the revolutionary Russia and resurrected Poland.

But brutal clashes then also took place beyond the Volga, where white generals and atamans had a vast retreat for their troops from which they attacked the Bolshevik bases that stretched along the few railway lines and some important roads.

The power of the 1917 revolutionaries was still unsecured;

the following January Lenin was to die, already ill and unable to

still holding the reins.

1923 is a key year in the history of the Soviet Union, and a Kindertransport was also highly political.

That is why Deyev is assigned a political commissar on his mission: comrade Belaya (of all things, the Russian word for "white"; we don't find out her first name any more than Deyev's), a former convent student who unconditionally sided with the Bolsheviks.

She knows what she wants: "All relationships with men had remained without unpleasant consequences for her.

Belaja valued this peculiarity of her body more than any other.” Meanwhile, Dejew learns to appreciate other sides of her after the two have gotten together after initial difficulties.

The expected love story is not missing.