“Armored ships”: not everyone will be taken into the future

The revolution abolished both titles and etiquette. “Are you really a king?” – so easily the Bolshevik “pokes” the Grand Duke Mikhail, while escorting him to be shot. Mikhail does not suspect his fate, he tolerates familiarity. “Not true,” he says. And he doesn’t lie, rather he doesn’t tell. The whole night of March 3, 1917, he really was the king, after his brother Nicholas II abdicated for himself and for his son in his favor. Having weighed everything, sensibly judging, on the morning of the 4th, Mikhail also renounced the throne and called on the country to submit to the Provisional Government, which the Bolsheviks overthrew eight months later. They sent Mikhail away from the capitals to Perm, and now they are taking him to the forest. As if on a train, but in fact to death. “Life quietly flowed through the God-cursed eighteenth year.”

The body of the Grand Duke was never found, and the plot triggers the following logical assumption: what if Mikhail survived and there were people who decided to help him? Of course, one cannot simply escape from Perm – after all, the Civil War is in full swing. But since the earth is burning under your feet, you have to walk on water. This premise sets off an avalanche of events: 700 pages, dozens of lines, dozens of heroes – real and completely fictional, although they often have their own prototypes. And Mikhail is far from the most important and not the most interesting character – there are many main ones, and among them are not only people. The gears of the novel are scrolled by both the man and the ship. It is even strange that no one took on such a unique setting (place and time) – the private river fleet of the Russian Empire, advanced and numerous, which by 1918 was overgrown with armor and bared its guns.