Red General of the Empire 3

In the spring of 1896, the Soviet lieutenant general in reserve Sergey Mikhailovich Lopatин falls asleep in a chair over a book about the Russo-Japanese War—and wakes up as Amur General-Governor Nikolai Ivanovich Grodékov in Khabarovsk on May 2, 1900.

In his head—an atheist, a communist, a child of war who lost his father near Kursk and his brother near Vitebsk. In his body—an infantry general, an orientalist, an appointed ataman of three Cossack armies. At his command—an oblast stretching from the Shilka to Kamchatka, twenty-four battalions of riflemen, six Cossack regiments, and fifty-eight days until the first shells fly from the Chinese bank of the Amur to Blagoveshchensk.

His task is not merely to defeat the Japanese five years later. The task runs deeper: by 1917, there must be a circle of people in his hands capable of giving the country a different revolution. No executions on the Lubyanka. No famine of 1932. No 1941, in which, as a boy, he lost everything.