Polostan

The novel follows a young woman with two names, two nationalities, and a life shaped by revolution, violence, and espionage across the United States and the Soviet Union during the early 1930s.

In October 1933, a young woman meets Bob Overstreet, a closeted gay engineer working on the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. She announces that Dawn is dead, referring to a shooting in North Dakota that was briefly mistaken for an incident involving the outlaw Bonnie Parker. She introduces herself as Aurora, her Russian name, and reveals her plan to leave the country by sailing to Japan and riding the Trans-Siberian Railway into the Soviet Union. Learning that Bob's steel company has a contract to help build a massive new mill there, she proposes to serve as his translator.

Eleven weeks later, Aurora is in Magnitogorsk, a city-sized steel complex in the Ural Mountains. She volunteers for a dangerous Workers' Shock Brigade on Blast Furnace #4, climbing icy scaffolding in brutal cold alongside underfed laborers. Among them are Tishenko, the brigade's ideological enforcer; Fizmatov, a Ukrainian physicist with a PhD from Paris serving a commuted death sentence; and Shaimat, a Tatar who learned to read through a Soviet literacy campaign. When a welder from the previous shift is found frozen to death atop the furnace, Aurora begins telling her life story to curious workers at meals, drawing the attention of Soviet authorities.

The novel alternates between Aurora's present-day interrogation in Magnitogorsk and extended flashbacks revealing her past. Born Dawn Rae Bjornberg in Montana in 1916, she was brought to Petrograd at age four by her parents. Her father, Maxim Artemyev, a Russian-born Communist, renamed her Aurora after the battleship whose cannon shot helped launch the Bolshevik Revolution. Her American mother, isolated by language barriers in their communal apartment, was cast off when Maxim divorced her in Soviet fashion, simply removing his wedding ring. Her mother returned to Montana.

Among Aurora's surrogate family in Petrograd are Veronika, a decorated machine gunner from the Red Women's Death Battalion who warns her never to let a strange man take her, and Grisha, a kindly streetcar conductor who escorts her to school. Both are swept up in the secret police purges. Aurora watches from a window as Grisha, bloody and beaten, is carted away on a truck, while a young Chekist—an agent of the Bolshevik secret police—she recognizes from childhood games waves cheerfully at her.

At age eight, Aurora is dramatically reunited with her mother when armed riders stop her train and her orange-haired mother storms aboard. She spends her adolescence on polo-pony ranches in Montana and Wyoming, where her mother's anarchist relatives rob banks, run bootleg whiskey, and train horses for wealthy British remittance men, younger sons of aristocratic families living abroad on allowances from their estates. Aurora becomes an expert rider and learns polo.

In 1932, Aurora's father takes her to Washington, D.C., to join the Bonus Army, a mass protest by World War I veterans demanding early payment of their service bonuses. His true aim is Communist revolution, and he tasks sixteen-year-old Aurora with procuring two dozen Thompson submachine guns from Chicago gangsters. Through a society contact, Aurora plays in a polo exhibition at Fort Myer, where she unhorses an arrogant lieutenant. Major George Patton approaches her afterward, calling her a warrior born out of time, and warns that his Landesjäger, an urban-warfare force of armored cars and tanks modeled on German doctrine, stands ready to crush the veterans.

Patton's warning proves prophetic. After Aurora's father and other Communists are publicly flogged, General MacArthur leads the assault on the camps. Aurora finds her father dead from tear gas; he had climbed the stairs of a building at Camp Glassford to unfurl a red banner she sewed. She shrouds his body in the banner, steals a rowboat, and rows across the Potomac while tanks burn the camps behind her, escaping to Chicago with a disassembled tommy gun hidden in a violin case.

During the summer of 1933, Aurora lives in a Communist commune and takes a job at the Century of Progress World's Fair in Chicago. She meets Dick, a precocious physics student from New York who explains cosmic rays, X-rays, and quantum mechanics through improvised demonstrations. Their relationship is brief but consequential: they have two sexual encounters, and Aurora becomes pregnant. At a waterfront event, she spots Silent Al, the federal agent who infiltrated her father's cell and betrayed him, and narrowly avoids recognition.

Aurora boards a westbound train, but severe cramping forces her off at Fort Sickles, North Dakota. She falls into the hands of the Reverend and Mrs. Kidd, grifters running a clinic on a Lakota reservation. Mrs. Kidd drugs her with morphine, performs a crude procedure, and interprets the nonviable embryo as demonic. The Kidds scheme to adopt Aurora and intercept her father's veterans' benefits, then have her jailed on fabricated charges. Her half-cousin Reggie Walker arrives and warns that the Kidds plan to murder her. Aurora orchestrates a bank robbery to recover her papers, specifying that the Kidds' house must burn and Dawn must die. In the ensuing chaos, she escapes with her tommy gun, the house is set ablaze, and press reports describe a gun moll perishing in the fire. Dawn Rae Bjornberg is officially dead.

Back in Magnitogorsk, Aurora's story draws scrutiny from the OGPU, the Soviet secret police. After a psychiatric evaluation in which she must reframe her improbable experiences in acceptable Stalinist language, she is transferred to a jail where an interrogator named Shpak subjects her to repeated near-drownings in the frozen Ural River. A senior official interrupts: Lavrentiy Beria, a powerful Soviet security chief, who pronounces Aurora neither insane nor a spy. Her story, he concludes, is too strange to have been fabricated. Meanwhile, Fizmatov visits Aurora and explains that her nonviable pregnancy was not demonic but a birth defect caused by prolonged exposure to the X-ray fluoroscope in the shoe-fitting machine at the fair. This scientific explanation brings Aurora enormous relief, replacing the superstitions and forced drug treatments the Kidds inflicted on her.

At a dinner with Beria and other Soviet leaders, Aurora describes the Chicago balloon launch. Fizmatov's son Elektron, a physics student, explains the revolutionary potential of the newly discovered neutron: When directed at ordinary atomic nuclei, neutrons cause transmutation, releasing immense energy. Beria decides to claim this domain for himself and turns his gaze to Aurora.

At a dacha outside Moscow, Beria administers final tests. Veronika, Aurora's childhood protector, confirms her identity. Aurora assembles a tommy gun from parts on a table. Then Beria quietly orders her to kill Shpak. She empties the magazine into him and asks Beria if he now believes her.

Beria assigns Aurora to work as "Svetlana," a fake translator spying on foreign journalists in Moscow. When a correspondent takes her to Ukraine, she witnesses the concealed famine: a woman holding up a dead or dying baby to a sealed train window, a farmhouse full of corpses, boxcars packed with deported peasants. Beria frames the experience as useful education and gives her a new assignment: cultivating Owen Crisp-Upjohn, a celebrated British journalist immune to previous seduction attempts.

Aurora dyes her hair red, assembles a makeshift Red Army women's polo team on a sandy floodplain south of Moscow that Owen dubs "Polostan," and lures him into a match. During the final chukker, or period of play, alone with him on the vast field, she drops her cover. Speaking in American English, she tells him the OGPU arranged everything and that she needs his help escaping the country. Owen agrees. Aurora instructs him to fall in love with her, write letters the OGPU will read, and travel the world until they send her out after him. He agrees, and they ride back into the game.