Train to Samarkand

Kazan 1923: a devastating famine broke out in the Volga region. A young Red Army soldier, Deyev, a Civil War veteran with a compassionate nature, is tasked with transporting five hundred children by train from an orphanage to "prosperous" Samarkand, four thousand versts away, to save them from certain death by starvation. However, everything necessary is missing: supplies, clothing, fuel for the steam locomotive and medicine.

 On his month-and-a-half-long journey through the devastated country, where civil war still rages, Deev is accompanied and supervised by the People's Commissar White, a tough Bolshevik. Despite their completely opposite natures, for a time they become indispensable to each other. Implacable enemies lurk everywhere: refugees, bandits, Chekists, Cossacks. The hero, who hides his own dark secrets, is not afraid of risk or danger and is determined to save children's lives at any cost.

 Russia's best-selling author revisits another horrific chapter of Soviet history.

Guzel Yachina was born in 1977 in Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, into a family of a doctor and an engineer. She studied foreign languages at the State University, then graduated from the Moscow Film School with a degree in screenwriting, which she completed in 2015. She made her debut as a writer in the literary magazines Neva and Oktyabr with two short stories Motyljok (Butterfly, 2014) and Vintovka (Rifle, 2015). In 2015, her novel Zulejka otevírá oči (PROSTOR 2017) was published, which became a worldwide bestseller and the basis for a TV series. Another novel Children of the Volga (PROSTOR 2020), translated into seventeen languages so far, became a literary sensation. Jachina has collected several major prizes for it, including the Russian State Great Book Award. Also The Train to Samarkand, which raised great expectations of readers and critics even before its publication in Russia, has met with well-deserved international acclaim, is being translated into twenty languages and has been nominated for the Great Book Award.