The Dark Clouds Shining

Historical Note

With historical fiction the question often arises as to where the history ends and the fiction begins, and I feel it is incumbent on authors to at least take a stab at explaining their own approach. The most important thing, to my mind, is that the historical context—by which I mean everything from political events to food and clothing—should be as accurate as possible. Some will disagree with my judgments—history, after all, is often a matter of opinion. Others will gleefully point out the odd mistake, and as someone prone to schadenfreude myself, I can hardly complain when they do.

The plot that forms the spine of The Dark Clouds Shining—the employment of communist dupes by sections of British intelligence to assassinate Mohandas Gandhi—is pure fiction, but the British sense of heightened insecurity in the face of Gandhi’s independence campaign was real enough, and developments in Russia at this time were certainly inviting many veteran activists to seek out revolutionary situations farther afield. The Kronstadt rebellion and Lenin’s introduction of the New (and suspiciously retrograde) Economic Policy convinced many that the Russian Revolution’s progressive phase was over.

Mansfield Cumming was head of the British Secret Service from its foundation in 1909 until his death in 1923 and was often ill in the year in which this book is set.

Several well-known Bolsheviks appear in the novel, but only two play any part in the plot’s unfolding. Felix Dzerzhinsky was the head of the statewide security police (the Vecheka or Cheka, later the GPU and OGPU) from its formation in 1917 to his early death in 1926. Had he lived much longer, he would doubtless have died in the purges that claimed his surviving male colleagues—Stalin of course excepted—from the original Bolshevik leadership.

Alexandra Kollontai was the only woman in that leadership and, during the early years of the revolution, was important for her championing of women’s and children’s rights, and for her support of the Workers’ Opposition, which sought, perhaps unrealistically, a greater role for Russia’s decimated proletariat once the civil war was over. Sidelined by 1923, she accepted the post of Soviet ambassador to Norway, and effectively retired from Soviet politics. Her writings on gender and socialist issues, unlike those of her male Bolshevik colleagues, remain fresh and original a century later.

Jack McColl, Caitlin Hanley/Piatakova, Yuri Komarov, Aidan Brady, and Sergei Piatakov are all complete inventions, but I hope that among them they reflect a range of human responses to that saddest of human situations—the dying of a dream.