Leah will be sent to live in the lap of tsarist luxury, in St. Petersburg, with her aunt Rasa Poliakov, niece of Samuel and Lazar Poliakov, one who is the railroad magnate of Tsarist Russia, and the other the banker of the Tsar and rumored father of the prima ballerina Anna Pavlova. From that lap of luxury in which she literally played with the Tsar’s four daughters and hemophiliac son, Leah will become first disillusioned and then impassioned with Revolutionary fervor. As her uncle’s fortune collapses, at the age of fifteen, Leah will go and live with the factory workers and young revolutionaries in the Vyborg District of St. Petersburg. She will become enchanted with the bohemian revolutionary poets and painters and, on International Women’s Day, she will be thrust into the forefront of history, leading women textile workers out on strike, in contravention of Party orders. The workers on strike will swell into the hundreds of thousands, and Leah will be one of its leaders. Finally, the army will go over to the side of the workers, and one particularly dashing young officer will fall in love with the beautiful, teenaged revolutionary. And the Tsar will be toppled, ending four hundred years of Romanoff rule. As one of the leaders of the Women’s Movement, Leah will be a rising star in the Bolshevik Party. She and her young husband, the former Tsarist cavalry officer, will overthrow the Kerensky government and create the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics under the leadership of Vladimir Lenin. These will be heady days, when these teenaged lovers and revolutionaries believe they are literally bringing about the worker’s paradise.

The Kronstadt rebellion or Kronstadt mutiny (Russian: Кронштадтское восстание, tr. Kronshtadtskoye vosstaniye)was a major unsuccessful uprising against the Bolsheviks in March 1921, during the later years of the Russian Civil War. Led by Stepan Petrichenko[1] and consisting of Russian sailors, soldiers, and civilians, the rebellion was one of the reasons for Vladimir Lenin's and the Communist Party's decision to loosen its control of the Russian economy by implementing the New Economic Policy (NEP).[2][3]

The Red Terror was a period of political repression and mass killings carried out by Bolsheviks after the beginning of the Russian Civil War in 1918. The term is usually applied to Bolshevik political repression during the whole period of the Civil War (1917–1922),[1][2] as distinguished from the White Terror carried out by the White Army (Russian and non-Russian groups opposed to Bolshevik rule) against their political enemies (including the Bolsheviks). It was modeled on the Terror of the French Revolution. The Cheka (the Bolshevik secret police)[3] carried out the repressions of the Red Terror.[4] Estimates for the total number of people killed during the Red Terror for the initial period of repression are at least 10,000.[5]Estimates for the total number of victims of Bolshevik repression vary widely. One source asserts that the total number of victims of repression and pacification campaigns could be 1.3 million,[6] whereas another gives estimates of 28,000 executions per year from December 1917 to February 1922.[7] The most reliable estimations for the total number of killings put the number at about 100,000,[8] whereas others suggest a figure of 200,000.[9]