The Last Tsar’s Dragons by Jane Yolen and Adam Stemple

I received an ARC of this book from the publishing company Tachyon Publications in exchange for a fair and honest review.

The Last Tsar’s Dragons is a novella I was pretty excited for, but one that unfortunately really disappointed.

The book is set in the months leading up to the Russian Revolution. Tsar Nikolai’s dragons are being sent to slaughter Jews in the Russian Empire. At court, Rasputin and his enemies plot around each other as they try to influence the Tsar, while Tsaritsa Alexandra frets about her sickly son. Out in the countryside, Lev Bronstein — more famously known as Leon Trotsky — does his own fretting and plotting as he hatches a secret weapon to overthrow the Russian monarchy.

So. This is a book about the Russian Revolution written for Americans. I’m a Ukrainian emigrant. This book was really not written for me. Unfortunately, I can’t get out of my own shoes enough to say how it reads to others. For me, it was a straight-up comedy.

There’s the usual stuff common in American portrayals of Russia. A surname isn’t gendered properly; a person is referred to by their patronymic as if it was their last name; random Russian words are peppered in, not always correctly. The only two Russian folktales Americans know are Koschei the Deathless and Baba Yaga so naturally they get a shout-out. Anastasia is the only one of the princesses to get a speaking role.

I’ve come to expect all that in American books set in Russia, though it does become especially funny when half the characters are high nobility or courtiers. His Imperial Majesty Tsar Nikolai II ponders that he must be “full of batiushka and grozny” — that is, “full of priest/dad and fearsome”. Tsaritsa Alexandra worries whether the barbarian Russians will accept one of her daughters as their ruler if her sickly son dies, forgetting both Russian royal succession laws (the throne would pass to a male relative) and basic Russian history (Russia had five female rulers in the 18th century, e.g. Catherine the Great). Something made me laugh every other page, to the point that I started wondering if the book was a parody.

On a more serious note, I have issues with how the topic of Jewishness, and in particular how one of the main characters, Leon Trotsky, is portrayed. As in the book, the real-life Trotsky was born Lev Bronstein and was ethnically Jewish. However, he repeatedly chose to distance himself from Jewishness. One likely apocryphal but telling story is that a Moscow Rabbi asked him for help when Jews were being targeted by counterrevolutionaries during the Russian Civil War, and Trotsky turned him away with a pointed reminder that he considered himself a communist, not a Jew.

In The Last Tsar’s Dragons, the atheist Trotsky swears by “my God and Marx”, considers Lenin being a quarter Jewish to be a great point in his favour, refers to himself by his original (Jewish) name and disparages the (Slavic) moniker ‘Trotsky’, briefly wants to set dragons to genocide all Russians as revenge for pogroms (to be fair, while possibly delirious), understands that Russian peasants suffer too but dismisses their plight as secondary to that of Jews, and in general thinks “we Jews”. His main interest in overthrowing the Tsar is to help Jewish people. In fact, in the whole book the main conflict is Jews vs Tsar.

So… all this is intensely ahistorical, but I think it’s supposed to make Trotsky sympathetic to Americans? Oh, Trotsky isn’t like them other commie monsters, he’s just fighting anti-Semitism! Thing is, you can’t simply plonk American race relations onto another country. In the (post-)Soviet space, there’s a disgusting, long-held anti-Semitic theory that “Jewish Bolsheviks” — and in particular Trotsky — toppled the Russian Empire specifically to advance the Jewish cause.

It’s been around since the revolution itself: the Jews that Moscow’s Rabbi wanted to protect were killed with shouts of, “You’re getting this for Trotsky!” And it was still around by the collapse of the USSR, when the monarchist, ultranational organisation Pamyat blamed Jews for destroying the Russian Empire and threatened pogroms as revenge. So a book where the Jewishness of people who didn’t particularly identify as Jewish in real life is emphasised above all else, a book where Trotsky’s character can be summed up as “the Jew Trotsky who wants to overthrow the Tsar for the Jews and hang the rest” is, to be honest, exceedingly uncomfortable.

To be clear, I absolutely don’t think the authors are anti-Semitic — in the afterword, Yolen mentions that her grandparents were Ukrainian Jews who emigrated to escape Tsarist pogroms at the turn of the 20th century. I do, however, think it’s important to point out the issues that can arise when people set a book in a foreign culture and twist historical facts without thinking it through all the way.

Anyway, if you put aside both the accidentally hilarious and accidentally horrible cultural aspects, the book that’s left is a bit boring. The Last Tsar’s Dragons bills itself as revolution + dragons. My expectations were thus either long, heated debates about how best to carry out revolution, coupled with backstabbing and political maneuvering, or bloody and desperate battles between dragons and outmatched peasants. The book doesn’t deliver either.

It’s pretty short and there’s six POVs: the Tsar, the Tsaritsa, Rasputin, an unnamed official, Trotsky, and Borukh/Axelrod (a Jewish Menshevik). Rasputin probably gets the most focus as he fulfills his shtick as “Russia’s greatest love machine” and others plot to assassinate him. Altogether though, once the dragons, politics, and anti-Semitism of Imperial Russia are set up between all the POVs, there’s just not enough space to do much with it. The dragons don’t appear much on-screen and the politics are all simplified to the point that it’s hard to say what really motivated Lenin. Except for being one-quarter Jewish I guess, as anti-Semitism seems to be the only spectre haunting Imperial Russia.

Altogether, I don’t know. I can’t say that I didn’t enjoy reading this book: I actually had a ton of fun. I just feel like the fun I was having wasn’t with the authors, but at their expense.

P.S. Can’t think where else to put this, but I immigrated to Austria. The one German sentence is grammatically incorrect too.