Before you is the novel “Winter Wind,” a work by the famous Soviet writer Valentin Petrovich Kataev. With this novel, the writer completed his long-term work—the epic “Waves of the Black Sea,” which includes “A Lone Sail Whitens,” “A Little Farmstead in the Steppe,” “Winter Wind,” and “For the Power of the Soviets” (“The Catacombs”)—books that won the sincere love and genuine recognition of a wide circle of readers, both young and adult.
In this novel you will meet your old acquaintances—now grown boys Petya Bachey and Gavrik Chernoivanenko, a sailor-hero of Potemkin Rodion Zhukov, and their teacher Vasily Petrovich—Petya’s father, famous fighters of the revolution—Bolsheviks of the Black Sea.
The time described in the novel is full of tense, truly dramatic events. These are the seventeenth and eighteenth years—days when the wind of the October Revolution bursts into southern Russia, and the Bolsheviks of the Black Sea, inspired by the Party and by Lenin, establish Soviet power in their native Odessa.
Vividly portrayed scenes of people’s life carry us into that harsh and wonderful time when the foundations of our Today were only just being laid. The Bolsheviks of the Black Sea face the most difficult trials: the enemies of the revolution don’t give up their positions without a fight—but no matter how they resist and how they run amok, their fate is already decided… People’s power, peace, and labor triumph!"