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The Lockhart Plot: Love, Betrayal, Assassination, and Counter-Revolution in Lenin's Russia Audiobook
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During the spring and summer of 1918, with World War I still undecided, British, French and American agents in Russia developed a breathtakingly audacious plan. Led by Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, a dashing, cynical, urbane thirty-year-old Scot, they conspired to overthrow Lenin’s newly established Bolshevik regime, and to install one that would continue the war against Germany on the Eastern Front. Lockhart’s confidante and chief support, with whom he engaged in a passionate love affair, was the mysterious, alluring Moura von Benkendorff, wife of a former aide-de-camp to the Tsar.
The plotters’ chief opponent was ‘Iron Felix’ Dzerzhinsky. He led the Cheka, ‘Sword and Shield’ of the Russian Revolution and forerunner of the KGB. Dzerzhinsky loved humanity—in the abstract. He believed socialism represented humanity’s best hope. To preserve and protect it he would unleash unbounded terror.
Revolutionary Russia provided the setting for the ensuing contest. In the back streets of Petrograd and Moscow, in rough gypsy cabarets, in glittering nightclubs, in cells beneath the Cheka’s Lubianka prison, the conspirators engaged in a deadly game of wits for the highest possible stakes—not merely life and death, but the outcome of a world war and the nature of Russia’s post-war regime.
Confident of success, the conspirators set the date for an uprising, September 8, 1918, but the Cheka had penetrated their organization and pounced just beforehand. The Lockhart Plot was a turning point in world history, except it failed to turn. At a time when Russian meddling in British and American politics now sounds warning bells, however, we may sense its reverberations and realize that it is still relevant.
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“Bruce Lockhart, debonair British secret agent, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, ruthless mastermind of the Soviet security service, face off in a deadly duel of smoke and mirrors. At stake: the fate of the Russian Revolution itself. It’s an incredible story and Jonathan Schneer tells it with wit, panache and a razor-sharp historical sensibility. A brilliant examination that finally uncovers the mysteries of the ‘Lockhart Plot’.”
— Marc Mulholland, author of The Murderer of Warren Street: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary
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“…a deadly duel of smoke and mirrors. At stake: the fate of the Russian Revolution itself. It’s an incredible story and Jonathan Schneer tells it with wit, panache, and a razor-sharp historical sensibility. A brilliant examination that finally uncovers the mysteries of the ‘Lockhart Plot.’”
— Marc Mulholland, author of The Murderer of Warren Street: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary
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About Jonathan Schneer
Dr. Jonathan Schneer, who received his BA from McGill University in 1971 and his PhD from Columbia University in 1978, is the modern British historian at Georgia Tech in the school of history, technology, and society. He is a coeditor of two books and the author of six more, including London 1900; The Imperial Metropolis, The Thames: England’s River and most recently The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict which won a 2010 National Jewish Book Award.
About Traber Burns
Traber Burns worked for thirty-five years in regional theater, including the New York, Oregon, and Alabama Shakespeare festivals. He also spent five years in Los Angeles appearing in many television productions and commercials, including Lost, Close to Home, Without a Trace, Boston Legal, Grey’s Anatomy, Cold Case, Gilmore Girls, and others.