Showing results for title "Archangel", by author "Robert Harris" in Literature & Fiction

When historian Fluke Kelso learns of the existence of a secret notebook belonging to Josef Stalin he is determined to track it down, whatever the consequences. From the violent political intrigue and decadence of modern Moscow he heads north - to the vast forests surrounding the White Sea port of Archangel, and a terrifying encounter with Russia's unburied past.

Archangel tells the story of four days in the life of Fluke Kelso, a dissipated, middle-aged former Oxford historian who is in Moscow to attend a conference on newly opened Soviet archives. One night Kelso is visited in his hotel room by an old NKVD officer, a former bodyguard of the secret police chief, Lavrentii Beria. The old man claims to have been at Stalin's dacha on the night Stalin had his fatal stroke, and to have helped Beria steal the dictator's private papers, among them a notebook.