The Russia of The Last Red August is a mad and murderous machine where events catch people up and grind them to dust, for no purpose that anyone can understand. Alexei Malashenko has created an ingenious mystery set amid the highest circles of society in the new Russia, a young country peopled by entrepreneurs and democrats. He offers a broad, brilliantly characterized canvas of Russian life in the grip of catastrophic change. Using the attempted coup of August 1991 as the disastrous climax toward which it moves, The Last Red August, by a Soviet journalist and policy analyst who knows the political turmoil of his country from the inside, is a thinly veiled roman a clef that suggests what brought about the coup and, even more revealingly, what caused it to fail. An industrialist, caught up in the conspiracy to topple the government, represents the establishment. His son, an academic, joins the reformers. A chance remark at dinner indicates to the son that there will be a coup and that his father knows when. The ensuing battle between the camps is as ugly as it is deadly, and it is played out against the backdrop of an enormous, decaying Moscow, wilting beneath the August heat.