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Yankees in Petrograd

Part of MIT Press / Radium Age

Author Marietta S. Shaginyan
Introduction by Jill Roese
Translated by Jill Roese
Ebook
The MIT Press
On sale Aug 19, 2025 | 454 Pages | 9780262384001
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When a capitalist cabal plots to assassinate Lenin, can quick-witted American workers ride to the rescue before it's too late?—a new translation.

In Yankees in Petrograd, the Russian author Marietta S. Shaginyan (writing under the American nom de plume Jim Dollar) gives us a riveting crime and espionage adventure with science fiction elements. Despite having awesome technologies such as public transportation that bends space and time and electrical forcefields protecting Soviet Russia against its foes, the world’s first proletarian state is threatened by a fascist organization that will stop at nothing—including kidnapping, mesmerism, and infiltration—to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Communist leaders! Enter Mike Thingsmaster, American tradesman and leader of a secret global organization defending the interests of the proletariat, who tasks his network with foiling this nefarious plot.

Shaginyan’s novel, serialized in 1924 with covers decorated by Alexander Rodchenko’s photomontages, proved wildly popular with the Soviet reading public, which followed its dizzying plot breathlessly. Settings constantly shift and characters assume multiple identities, and scenes of danger, intrigue, and melodrama are interspersed with moments of comic relief. Can Thingsmaster and his allies—including a robber baron’s scion who converts to the cause of Revolution, an alluring masked woman, a doctor investigating a disease that causes fierce anti-communists to revert to proto-human form, a chimney sweep, an intelligent dog, and the General Prosecutor of Illinois—succeed in thwarting the fascists? You’ll have to read until the final chapter to find out.

A satire of the sort of thrillers then appearing in Black Mask and similar American pulps, Yankees in Petrograd is an over-the-top, pro-communist thrill ride.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Mess to Be Mended (Jill Roese)
Dollar—His Life and Creative Work: An Introductory Essay
Prologue
1 Arthur Rockefeller Meets His Father
2 Doctor Lepsius Alone
3 Which Begins with Interjections
4 The Hotel Patriciana
5 A Meeting Chaired in Absentia
6 The Eccentricities of Westinghouse’s Mistress
7 The Music Teacher and the Notary
8 A World Behind Walls
9 Mirror Allies
10 The Wood Barge
11 Larry’s Adventures in the Buff
12 Miss Orton’s Confession
13 Druck’s Adventures in a Suit
14 Meeting at the Villa “Ephemeris”
15 Vasilov and His Wife
16 A Pleasant Acquaintance
17 Lepsius Sees a Hand
18 The Amelia Sets Sail
19 Beauty’s Dangerous Journey
20 The Harway Dry Docks
21 The Torpedo Departs
22 Bisks’s Diary
23 Bisk’s Diary, Continued
24 The Senator’s Daughter
25 Which Takes Place Partly on Land and Partly at Sea
26 Which Takes Place Wholly on Land
27 The Amelia Goes Full Steam Ahead
28 Arthur Rockefeller Faces the Reader
29 Yankees in Petrograd
30 Husband, Wife, and Dog
31 Aid to the Hungry and Attendant Circumstances
32 Vasilov in Wonderland
33 The Vasilovs’ First Night Together
34 A Black Hand
35 Mrs. Druck’s Cat
36 Lepsius Meets Greengrocer Behr
37 The Trade Agreement
38 Back in Petrograd
39 A Sailor’s Escapade
40 The Situation Becomes Complicated
41 Read the Paper!
42 Rockefeller in Action
43 Torture by Mirrors
44 Toksovsky Forest
45 The AerElectro Station Engineer
46 A Neighbor’s Grateful Donkey
47 On the Reasons for the Donkey’s Gratitude
48 The Walrus from San Francisco
49 The Benefits of Rabbit Husbandry
50 A Migration of Crows, or What One Can Accomplish Sitting in One Place
51 The Attorney General of the State of Illinois Searches for Druck
52 Doctor Lepsius Searches for Professor Hizzerton
53 Mike Searches for Gregorio Cice
54 Prior to the Arrival of the Clock
55 The Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet
56 The Psychiatrists’ Conference
57 Dr. Lepsius’s Enigma
58 A Misogynist Converted
59 Setto Earns Interest
Epilogue
Marietta S. Shaginyan was a Soviet writer, historian, and activist of Armenian descent. She was one of the “fellow travelers” of the 1920s led by the Serapion Brotherhood and became one of the most prolific communist writers experimenting in satirico-fantastic fiction.
Marietta S. Shaginyan View titles by Marietta S. Shaginyan

About

When a capitalist cabal plots to assassinate Lenin, can quick-witted American workers ride to the rescue before it's too late?—a new translation.

In Yankees in Petrograd, the Russian author Marietta S. Shaginyan (writing under the American nom de plume Jim Dollar) gives us a riveting crime and espionage adventure with science fiction elements. Despite having awesome technologies such as public transportation that bends space and time and electrical forcefields protecting Soviet Russia against its foes, the world’s first proletarian state is threatened by a fascist organization that will stop at nothing—including kidnapping, mesmerism, and infiltration—to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Communist leaders! Enter Mike Thingsmaster, American tradesman and leader of a secret global organization defending the interests of the proletariat, who tasks his network with foiling this nefarious plot.

Shaginyan’s novel, serialized in 1924 with covers decorated by Alexander Rodchenko’s photomontages, proved wildly popular with the Soviet reading public, which followed its dizzying plot breathlessly. Settings constantly shift and characters assume multiple identities, and scenes of danger, intrigue, and melodrama are interspersed with moments of comic relief. Can Thingsmaster and his allies—including a robber baron’s scion who converts to the cause of Revolution, an alluring masked woman, a doctor investigating a disease that causes fierce anti-communists to revert to proto-human form, a chimney sweep, an intelligent dog, and the General Prosecutor of Illinois—succeed in thwarting the fascists? You’ll have to read until the final chapter to find out.

A satire of the sort of thrillers then appearing in Black Mask and similar American pulps, Yankees in Petrograd is an over-the-top, pro-communist thrill ride.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents
Introduction: A Mess to Be Mended (Jill Roese)
Dollar—His Life and Creative Work: An Introductory Essay
Prologue
1 Arthur Rockefeller Meets His Father
2 Doctor Lepsius Alone
3 Which Begins with Interjections
4 The Hotel Patriciana
5 A Meeting Chaired in Absentia
6 The Eccentricities of Westinghouse’s Mistress
7 The Music Teacher and the Notary
8 A World Behind Walls
9 Mirror Allies
10 The Wood Barge
11 Larry’s Adventures in the Buff
12 Miss Orton’s Confession
13 Druck’s Adventures in a Suit
14 Meeting at the Villa “Ephemeris”
15 Vasilov and His Wife
16 A Pleasant Acquaintance
17 Lepsius Sees a Hand
18 The Amelia Sets Sail
19 Beauty’s Dangerous Journey
20 The Harway Dry Docks
21 The Torpedo Departs
22 Bisks’s Diary
23 Bisk’s Diary, Continued
24 The Senator’s Daughter
25 Which Takes Place Partly on Land and Partly at Sea
26 Which Takes Place Wholly on Land
27 The Amelia Goes Full Steam Ahead
28 Arthur Rockefeller Faces the Reader
29 Yankees in Petrograd
30 Husband, Wife, and Dog
31 Aid to the Hungry and Attendant Circumstances
32 Vasilov in Wonderland
33 The Vasilovs’ First Night Together
34 A Black Hand
35 Mrs. Druck’s Cat
36 Lepsius Meets Greengrocer Behr
37 The Trade Agreement
38 Back in Petrograd
39 A Sailor’s Escapade
40 The Situation Becomes Complicated
41 Read the Paper!
42 Rockefeller in Action
43 Torture by Mirrors
44 Toksovsky Forest
45 The AerElectro Station Engineer
46 A Neighbor’s Grateful Donkey
47 On the Reasons for the Donkey’s Gratitude
48 The Walrus from San Francisco
49 The Benefits of Rabbit Husbandry
50 A Migration of Crows, or What One Can Accomplish Sitting in One Place
51 The Attorney General of the State of Illinois Searches for Druck
52 Doctor Lepsius Searches for Professor Hizzerton
53 Mike Searches for Gregorio Cice
54 Prior to the Arrival of the Clock
55 The Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet
56 The Psychiatrists’ Conference
57 Dr. Lepsius’s Enigma
58 A Misogynist Converted
59 Setto Earns Interest
Epilogue

Author

Marietta S. Shaginyan was a Soviet writer, historian, and activist of Armenian descent. She was one of the “fellow travelers” of the 1920s led by the Serapion Brotherhood and became one of the most prolific communist writers experimenting in satirico-fantastic fiction.
Marietta S. Shaginyan View titles by Marietta S. Shaginyan

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