“Others,” writes Forsyth, “mistakenly thought a free Ukraine would come through the defeat of Moscow by Berlin, and joined the Ukrainian Division, which fought in German uniform against the Red Army.” One of the main characters of The Devil’s Alternative is Andriy Drach, born in England after the war to a British mother and a Ukrainian father who had fought in the Ukrainian Division for Germany, was captured by British soldiers, and was eventually allowed to stay in England after the war. Some believed that fighting for Russia against the Nazis might encourage Stalin to grant them more autonomy after the war. Their language, poetry, arts, and traditions predate the rise of the Rus conquerers who swept down from the north.”ĭuring the Second World War, Ukrainian men of fighting age faced a dilemma. … Ukrainians read and write with Roman letters, not Cyrillic script they are overwhelmingly Uniate Catholics, not Russian Orthodox Christians. Its spiritual and cultural orientation was and remains more Western than the rest of the region. West Ukraine, he explains, “formed a part, successively, of Poland, Austria, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Forsyth notes that those Ukrainians who live east of the Dnieper River are more russified, having lived under Tsars for centuries. Forsyth’s novel, set in the USSR’s final decade, features a fictional Soviet Premier named Maxim Rudin, and offers a prescient overview of the long conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The Soviet Union is gone, but Russia, under the rule of former KGB agent Vladimir Putin, remains determined to keep Ukraine from being free and independent.

Second in economic importance and population, with 70 million inhabitants, was the Ukrainian SSR, which is one reason why under Tsars and Politburo the Ukraine had always been singled out for special attention and particularly ruthless russification. By 1982, the population of numbered only 120 million out of the 250. The other is euphemistically called “the nationalities question.” In the fifteen constituent republics ruled from Moscow … are several score identifiable non-Russian peoples, the most numerous and perhaps the most nationally conscious of whom are the Ukrainians.

One is the problem of feeding its 250 million people. Consider, for instance, this passage from his 1979 novel, The Devil’s Alternative: The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics … despite its monolithic appearance from outside, has two Achilles heels. That hasn’t turned out to be the case with Frederick Forsyth’s work. When the Berlin Wall fell and the USSR collapsed, one might have assumed that Cold War fiction would become irrelevant.

Icon by frederick forsyth