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Set in Ukraine, a terrifying novel of war, occupation and the totalitarian mind in action.
‘Fascinating … Blunden was in Russia during the war, and he was one of the correspondents who entered Kharkov …The Time of the Assassins is history told from the dust’s perspective [with] the truly nightmarish aspect of the experience of the survivors of Kharkov’ New Yorker
In the late fall of 1941 the Germans entered Kharkov, at that time capital of the Ukraine. Sixteen months later the Red Army drove them out – and a new terror was unleashed.
A terrifying dissection of German and Russian psychology, this is the story of the city’s inhabitants, man of whom were hanged. Others lived on with simple survival their only goal. Then, as the tide of war turned westward from Stalingrad, the Communist underground returned surreptitiously to Kharkov – and a new fear was abroad. Already distant artillery fire was heard – and new assassins were soon to come.
Blunden was among the handful of foreign correspondents to return to Kharkov with the Russians. What he saw at first hand, plus his imaginative insight into the complex and desperate forces which had been at work during the German occupation, provided the genesis of THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS.
‘Fascinating … Blunden was in Russia during the war, and he was one of the correspondents who entered Kharkov …The Time of the Assassins is history told from the dust’s perspective [with] the truly nightmarish aspect of the experience of the survivors of Kharkov’ New Yorker
In the late fall of 1941 the Germans entered Kharkov, at that time capital of the Ukraine. Sixteen months later the Red Army drove them out – and a new terror was unleashed.
A terrifying dissection of German and Russian psychology, this is the story of the city’s inhabitants, man of whom were hanged. Others lived on with simple survival their only goal. Then, as the tide of war turned westward from Stalingrad, the Communist underground returned surreptitiously to Kharkov – and a new fear was abroad. Already distant artillery fire was heard – and new assassins were soon to come.
Blunden was among the handful of foreign correspondents to return to Kharkov with the Russians. What he saw at first hand, plus his imaginative insight into the complex and desperate forces which had been at work during the German occupation, provided the genesis of THE TIME OF THE ASSASSINS.
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Reviews
The tone of the story is cool, almost detached, but its tragic quality comes through no less clearly for that ... Blunden has created a large number of vivid people. The most important-and a genuine original-is Dr Karandash, an old Ukrainian radical who had escaped from Russia years before
Fascinating ... Blunden was in Russia during the war, and he was one of the correspondents who entered Kharkov soon after it was first retaken from the Germans. From the things he saw and heard among the ruins, and the things he learned later, he has constructed a convincing account of what happened in the town...If history is a broom, sweeping back and forth through time, then The Time of the Assassins is history told from the dust's perspective [with] the truly nightmarish aspect of the experience of the survivors of Kharkov
A very considerable achievement, possibly a great one ... His commitment is to fact and to essential truth, which he serves no less by his imagination than by his experience and research. There is no page of his work that does not compel our admiring interest