Russian Dance: A True Story of Intrigue and Passion in Stalinist Moscow

From Manhattan to Moscow, this personal story of love and espionage takes you on a mesmerizing journey through the turbulent years of the early twentieth century. Advanced Praise for Russian Dance "It is a rare occasion to have an opportunity-as painful as it is-to look into the USSR's tragic past via a personal story of two people . . . who were blessed with a real passion and punished for that with a far-too-real betrayal. Have those involved in the deeds of the inhuman state been publicly exposed and condemned? Very few were. A book like this is not just about history-it is a warning for the present and future. Russian Dance is yet to be over." -Yevgenia M. Albats Fellow, Davis Center for Russian Studies, Harvard University, and author of The State Within a State: The KGB and its Hold on Russia-Past, Present, and Future "Russian Dance is at once riveting history and finely crafted literature-the tale of a brutally oppressive Russia, a communist-obsessed America, and Jewish survival. Her deft depiction of my outspoken grandfather suggests a larger evenhandedness in her handling of the grand scale of her narrative. Andree Brooks has given us a brave, important, and irresistible book." -Hamilton Fish President, Nation Institute, and grandson of Congressman Hamilton Fish Jr., chairman of the special congressional committee set up at the close of the 1920s to investigate communist activity inside the United States "A riveting, disquieting journey to Moscow during the tumultuous political and economic scene of the 1920s and 1930s. The story moves from New York, to Italy, to Moscow as we witness the interplay of intrigue, politics, power, money, and religion. Brooks captures national moods as only a cosmopolitan can." -Gene Dattel financial historian and former investment banker "In Russian Dance, Andree Aelion Brooks immerses the reader in the glittering art and theater life of New York in the 1920s. Brooks renders this world so strikingly, in all its wealth and splendor, that Bluet Rabinoff's decision to abandon husband and daughter and run off to Stalinist Russia with her lover, Marc, appears all the more shocking by contrast. The music and theater world of the 1920s will never come again, but it is vividly preserved in the pages of Russian Dance." -Austin Flint playwright and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Writing, Columbia University