John Calvin Batchelor "Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing." A Novel.
Batchelor produces his most ambitious novel to date, recreating the dramas of the U.S.-Soviet space race, communist tyranny and complicated personal loyalties.
A year before the first lunar landing, Peter Nevsky arrives at Starry Town, the training center for Soviet cosmonauts. Full of youthful enthusiasm to reach the moon, he soon becomes enmeshed in political intrigue and ruinous romance. Along with the Martian Troika, his three godfathers, who were flying aces during World War II and who now provide the driving force behind the Russian space program, Nevsky battles a family curse and the senseless evil of State Security. Batchelor's massive revision of criminal Soviet history is fabulous but convincing, and it provides a fitting context for high adventure and moral reflection. With exciting scenes of combat from Leningrad to Kazakhstan, this novel offers entertainment on a grand scale. It is also a thoughtful account of a young man's confrontation with the evil inside his country, his family, and himself.

"Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing" is a triumphant return to the epic grandeur of his earlier novels "The Birth of the People's Republic of Antarctica and American Falls." Eight years in the making and based on long-rumored accounts of a Soviet manned mission to the moon launched prior to Apollo II, it takes on nothing less than the titanic contest of the Cold War, the never-to-be-repeated heroics of the sixties' space race, and the hopelessly tragic history of the Soviet Union.
Peter is an orphan, the only son of Apollon Nevsky, the greatest air ace of the Second World War.
As he begins his story, it is 1968, the eve of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. It is also the homestretch of the moon race, and Peter is freshly arrived at Starry Town (Russia's Houston Manned Space Center), a cosmonaut candidate who dreams of claiming the glowing white orb of the moon for Mother Russia. Exuberant, patriotic, loyal, he is nonetheless haunted by his patrimony. His father is one of the vanished, a hero of heroes slaughtered for his heroism by Stalin's henchmen. And now he is being watched―by the Chekhist thugs who dominate every aspect of Russian life and by a mysterious and powerful woman whose role in his life is darker and more deadly than he can yet know.
At Starry Town, Peter falls under the influence of his three "uncles," known as the Martian Troika - his father's three bravest wingmen during the war. They are the heart, soul, and passion of the Russian space program. Peter's idols, they are ruthless men, though certainly no less ruthless than the forces pitched on all sides against them. Like Ishmael aboard mad Ahab's Pequod, Peter is both witness to and willing participant in the tragic and momentous events of the next year―culminating in his uncles' indomitable, doomed quest for the moon.
Peter Nevsky and the True Story of the Russian Moon Landing is a story of Russia in our time. Peter tells us of betrayal, fratricide, the paradox of fate. But he also tells us, in eloquent prose on an opulent scale that spans from the white nights of Leningrad to the deep winter of Siberia, from the steppe to the seas of the moon, what happens when men of great vision stare down the tyrants in pursuit of a dream.
Testifying to Batchelor's vast range, the most moving development of all is Nevsky's religious awakening. And although neither the fine points of aeronautics nor the senseless brutality sanctioned by Soviet officials makes for light reading, this novel is very much a page-turner, combining the turbulence of betrayal and evil with the boyish, shoot-for-the-stars wonder that is Batchelor's forte. Here, the fatalism of 19th-century literary masters coexists honestly with futuristic imagination and hope.
Henry Holt & Co; First Edition, 1993.
New book. Tiny taped tear on DJ. Very light creases on a couple of pages inside. Long scratch on back cover. A few tiny, very light spots on fore edge. See pictures. Otherwise, new inside.