In 1995 I was drawn to an article on the website of the Jamestown Foundation about the Feliks Group. Named after the founder of the Soviet secret police, Felix Dzerzhinsky, it was established just prior to the end of the Soviet Union and the disbanding of the KGB. There’s no doubt it was responsible for a number of assassinations of corrupt Russian government officials and businessmen during the 1990’s. Even the serving Prime Minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin was said to have been targeted.
You can read that article here https://jamestown.org/program/the-mysterious-felix-group-raises-its-profile/
The Yeltsin era was the time of the Wild East—a free for all that saw the emergence of the Russian Mafia and the oligarchs. It was fertile writing territory.
I set my novel predominantly during those times, and tried to paint a picture of those dark days through the eyes of an Englishwoman who has dreams and flashbacks of a Soviet life she had never lived. These mismatched memories propel her on a journey to seek the source of those memories in the ‘New Russia’ of the 1990’s where everything had changed.
My novel is called ‘The Lenin Project’ and you can buy it on Amazon here.
