Abandoned by God is a love story.
It is a tale of passion and desperation during the Russian Revolution - where the Captain of the Guards and the Tsar's eldest daughter fall madly in love, where a small band of young terrorist-assassins is committed to their undying love of country and where a man who was once the Tsar of all the Russias finally comes face to face with the true meaning of love.
All of this takes place during the high drama of Russia from 1917 to 1918: the abdication of the Tsar, the rise of Bolshevism, the arrest of the Royal family, the violence of the October Revolution, the signing of the peace treaty with Germany, the emergence of terrorist-assassin cells and the implementation of the Red Terror.
It is within this furnace that the modern world is forged and truths of the past are incinerated. And yet there are some who tenaciously hold on to the values of courage, honesty, and faith in something greater than the sum of themselves.
Abandoned by God is a novel about what we are prepared to do for love because in the end there is nothing else worth living for.
The zeitgeist of this time is shaped by the 1917 February Revolution which establishes the Socialist Revolutionary Party as the key power holder in the newly formed Provisional Government. This is a time of euphoria where anything seems possible as the great leviathan of Russia is reborn. In the months that follow, the Provisional Government releases political prisoners from the gulags, many of whom have been incarcerated, without trial, for decades. They also exonerate all those exiled by the Tsarist regime for fomenting anarchy and rebellion. At the same time, this fledgling government cannot disengage from the war, retract the ancient landholding conventions or offer relief to the starving. Consequently, by October 1917, the Bolsheviks seize power and topple the Provisional Government. For Lenin and his cronies, the Tsar and his family remain a dangerous symbol of the past and they must be exterminated. For Russia, there can be no going back.
This is a time of great passion. Internationally, the unpopular war between the Allies and the Central Powers, in which 2,000,000 Russians are killed and more than 9, 000,000 are wounded, inflames desertion and radicalization. Nationally, socialist ideology ignites the imagination of thinkers, activists, and agent provocateurs; and a collective consciousness is forged in the fire of violence, debate, and oration.
