THE LAST SOVIET

  A JAMES ACTON THRILLER

  J. ROBERT KENNEDY

  About the James Acton Thrillers

  "James Acton: A little bit of Jack Bauer and Indiana Jones!"

  Though this book is part of the James Acton Thrillers series, it is written as a standalone novel and can be enjoyed without reading the other installments.

  What readers are saying about the James Acton Thrillers Series:

  “A great blend of history and current headlines.”

  “You stop breathing from the first page.”

  “If you like Indiana Jones then you will love these stories.”

  “The Acton series is one of the most entertaining and enjoyable series I have read.”

  “Non-stop action that is impossible to put down.”

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  BOOKS BY J. ROBERT KENNEDY

  * Also available in audio

  The Templar Detective Thrillers

  The Templar Detective

  The Templar Detective and the Parisian Adulteress

  The Templar Detective and the Sergeant's Secret

  The Templar Detective and the Unholy Exorcist

  The Templar Detective and the Code Breaker

  The Templar Detective and the Black Scourge

  The Templar Detective and the Lost Children

  The James Acton Thrillers

  The Protocol *

  Brass Monkey *

  Broken Dove

  The Templar’s Relic

  Flags of Sin

  The Arab Fall

  The Circle of Eight

  The Venice Code

  Pompeii’s Ghosts

  Amazon Burning

  The Riddle

  Blood Relics

  Sins of the Titanic

  Saint Peter’s Soldiers

  The Thirteenth Legion

  Raging Sun

  Wages of Sin

  Wrath of the Gods

  The Templar’s Revenge

  The Nazi’s Engineer

  Atlantis Lost

  The Cylon Curse

  The Viking Deception

  Keepers of the Lost Ark

  The Tomb of Genghis Khan

  The Manila Deception

  The Fourth Bible

  Embassy of the Empire

  Armageddon

  No Good Deed

  The Last Soviet

  Lake of Bones

  The Special Agent Dylan Kane Thrillers

  Rogue Operator *

  Containment Failure *

  Cold Warriors *

  Death to America

  Black Widow

  The Agenda

  Retribution

  State Sanctioned

  Extraordinary Rendition

  Red Eagle

  The Messenger

  The Delta Force Unleashed Thrillers

  Payback

  Infidels

  The Lazarus Moment

  Kill Chain

  Forgotten

  The Cuban Incident

  Rampage

  Inside the Wire

  The Detective Shakespeare Mysteries

  Depraved Difference

  Tick Tock

  The Redeemer

  The Kriminalinspektor Wolfgang Vogel Mysteries

  The Colonel’s Wife

  Sins of the Child

  Zander Varga, Vampire Detective Series

  The Turned

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Table of Contents

  The Novel

  Preface

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  Chapter 77

  Chapter 78

  Chapter 79

  Acknowledgments

  Sample of Next Book

  Don't Miss Out!

  Thank You!

  About the Author

  Also by the Author

  For Walter Gretzky.

  A nation misses its hockey dad.

  “Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution.”

  Vladimir Lenin As written in Lenin’s Testament Written Circa 1922-23 Presented Posthumously May 1924 to the 13th Party Congress

  “Stalin is too coarse and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead…”

  Vladimir Lenin As written in Lenin’s Testament

  PREFACE

  Under the leadership of a former KGB agent and now Russian president, the image of Joseph Stalin has been rehabilitated within Russia, with a 2019 poll of its citizenry indicating a 70% favorable opinion of the brutal dictator. This is up 16% in just four years, illustrating how successful the rewriting of history has been.

  In 2005, in his State of the Nation address, he is quoted as saying, “First and foremost it is worth acknowledging that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” Even at the beginning of his tenure as the longest-serving leader of Russia and the Soviet Union, it was clear he admired the past glory of the USSR. Since then, he has reinstated the Soviet national anthem’s melody, replacing that chosen after the collapse, brought back Soviet-era-style military parades, and even brought back the Hero of Labor award that Stalin himself introduced in 1927, the lapel pin remarkably resembling the original.

  This is a man desperate to recreate the glory years of an empire that was far from glorious, and that history has shown was not only a brutal dictatorship, but an ultimate failure. Yet by rewriting that history and invoking the fading nostalgia in a weary populace, he is successfully guiding his country back to the old ways, with the ignorant citizenry cheering him on.

  Should he succeed, as it appears he will, the world might once again face its old enemy. A Soviet Union 2.0, if you will.

  And if there were a hidden piece of history that could shatter this image of the great dictator who led the Soviet Union during its glory years, what would a man like the Russian president, and former KGB officer, do to stop it from becoming public?

  1 |

  Black Forest, Germany Tomorrow

  Archaeology Professor Laura Palmer grabbed at her ears as her Glock clattered to the floor. The ringing in her ears went almost unnoticed as the spots pulsing behind her eyelids overwhelmed her, the effect of the flashbang tossed in a moment ago making its presence felt. Gunfire pounded the area as she curled into a ball, struggling to regain her senses, the battle almost over, the overwhelming odds proving too much.

  We never stood a chance.

  She forced her eyes open to see her beloved James firing at the blown doorway, his MP5 belching lead at anyone who dared attempt entry, but it was a lost cause. He and the others were merely delaying the inevitable.

  They were going to die.

  The Russians had won.

  And it pissed her off.


/>   She pushed to her knees, staying low behind the half-height wall they had taken cover behind, and picked up her Glock.

  “Are you all right?” asked James, and she nodded.

  “No permanent damage.”

  “Thank God. Next time someone yells ‘flashbang,’ you close your eyes and cover your ears.”

  “Rookie mistake, I know. Don’t tell Leather. He’ll be ashamed.”

  “I’m ashamed.” James flashed her a grin then his face turned to horror. “Grenade!”

  Not a flashbang, but a grenade. She lifted her head above the wall to see the explosive sail through the air and into the room with the young victims they were protecting. “No!” she cried as James leaped to his feet, surging toward the door in a futile effort to save the others.

  She rose to stop him, breaking the cardinal rule just read to her moments ago, and cried out as something slammed into her shoulder, spinning her around so she couldn’t see the massive explosion that tore apart the room her husband had just run into.

  And as she blacked out from the pain, she prayed for death.

  For life wouldn’t be worth living without the man she loved.

  2 |

  State Archive of the Russian Federation Moscow, Russian Federation Today

  He’s wrong!

  Dmitri Volkov flipped the folder shut rougher than he should have considering the age of the documents it contained, but he was frustrated and tired. He leaned back in the unforgiving wood chair, stretching his arms over his head as he yawned, covering his mouth with a fist. It had been months of work, months of sacrifice. He had barely seen his family and friends, and his girlfriend, Katarina Rozhenko, had long since given up on him, their relationship over. But the work was worth it.

  Or at least he thought it was until this very moment.

  The professor had been wrong. The proof of the theory didn’t exist. To say he was disappointed would be understating things, and it wasn’t only because of all the time he had wasted, all the sacrifices he had made—it was because it was an opportunity lost, an opportunity to perhaps save his country from continuing down the rabbit hole its iron-fisted ruler would have them travel.

  The president was a man stuck in the past. Former KGB, he believed the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century was the collapse of the Soviet Union, and was doing everything in his power to restore the former glory of the USSR. But what was most disturbing, and something he hadn’t noticed until his mentor, Professor Arseny Orlov, had pointed it out in a conversation they had before his disappearance, was how history was being rewritten surrounding the Soviet Union’s most famous and brutal leader.

  Joseph Stalin.

  Stalin had been a mass murderer, perhaps even psychotic. Tens of millions had died under his watch through policies he had initiated, but it was also under his watch that the Soviet Union became a superpower, winning the Great Patriotic War, or as the West called it, World War II. He had converted the country from a primarily agrarian society into an industrial one that developed nuclear weapons and rivaled the mighty United States, but more impressively, had kept control of a population made up of 15 republics, often with little in common, by stifling any dissent with a simple signature at the bottom of a page.

  Outright executions as well as deaths in the gulags and by other policies instituted by Stalin were estimated to be over three million. And that didn’t include the famine he could be blamed for—another 5.5-6.5 million people. And there were so many more.

  When he had died, those that followed attempted to maintain his level of control, but most failed for various reasons, not the least of which was the fact they couldn’t replicate Stalin’s viciousness, they couldn’t command the fear that the man from Georgia could, they couldn’t embrace the joy the man had in his brutality.

  According to Professor Orlov, it was the ideals of Stalin, his uncompromisingly focused leadership style, that the current president ultimately wanted to replicate. It was Orlov’s theory that the long-term goal was to reestablish a version of the USSR with the president as the undisputed head, all semblance of democracy removed, with the military might to strike fear in the hearts of any nation of the world, including the United States. He wanted the power, the fear, the glory, the respect the Soviet Union once had, restored upon a nation that had almost collapsed in upon itself after the dissolution of the USSR.

  By embracing a revised version of Stalin, embracing the nostalgia surrounding a false history of life in the Soviet Union, the man was achieving his goals. A significant portion of the population worshipped the man, and were willing to embrace whatever reforms he proposed, in part because the population was eating up the revisionist history surrounding the last iron-fisted ruler of the Soviet Union. Orlov had expressed his concerns that his fellow Russians were embracing a past few remembered, a past that was a lie.

  “There’s only one person that those who embrace our past revere more than Joseph Stalin,” Orlov had said at the time.

  “Who?”

  “Lenin.”

  Volkov’s head bobbed. “I suppose, though the president is certainly doing whatever he can to change that.”

  “He is, and I believe he’s starting to succeed. You are, of course, aware that Lenin and Stalin were bosom buddies, on a first-name basis, and, of course, Stalin was Lenin’s choice to succeed him upon his death.”

  “Yes, pretty much everyone’s taught that in school, though most things are glossed over these days so nothing taints our perfect country.”

  Orlov regarded him. “What if I told you it’s all lies? That almost nothing about that period was true?”

  Volkov remembered leaning back and folding his arms, wondering if his favorite professor was playing games with him once again. As Orlov’s star pupil and prized graduate student, Orlov would often propose something outrageous in the hopes a spirited debate would ensue, allowing him to probe his student’s knowledge of the subject matter by forcing him to state facts that challenged the outrageous contradiction.

  And he had assumed that was precisely what had happened that day, for what he had been told was so shocking, so outrageous, he had refused to participate in an argument so obviously false. For what Orlov had told him had him doubting history, had him questioning everything he had been taught, everything he had believed in.

  And the proof was supposed to have been here in this archive, among the personal papers of Stalin and the inner sanctum that had surrounded him for decades, an archive so secret, it hadn’t been opened until 1995 after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its contents had rewritten the Soviet-style thinking surrounding Stalin, revealing the extent of his brutality and how he had orchestrated it all. The official Communist Party line before the collapse had been that local officials had gotten out of control, murdering millions, and that Stalin had no idea it was happening, though once he did find out, he put an end to it.

  A lie, of course. It had only ended when he died.

  Yet it never really did. It only slowed.

  According to Orlov, there was something in the archive, something he had seen in the early days of its opening that had never made it into the new biographies and the corrected history being rewritten by scholars. It was here, according to Orlov, and Volkov had been convinced it was as well.

  Until now.

  And he wished he could confront his mentor, face to face, over what he now feared was indeed another of his infuriating games. Yet that was impossible. It had been a couple of years since Orlov had disappeared abruptly. A set of artifacts had arrived that Moscow wanted identified. He wasn’t sure what it was all about except that it was related to the incident that almost resulted in war between Russia and Japan. The authorities had arrested Orlov, and his office and labs were emptied of all their contents.

  And then no one had heard from him again. Until three months ago. Volkov had received an email to his personal address. It was from someone he had never heard of and had contained a link with a simple message.