The Tsar's Dragons — Catrin Collier

In 1869, â�,��"modernisingâ�,� Russian tsar, Alexander II, decided to drag Russia into the industrial age. He began by inviting Welsh entrepreneur John Hughes to build an ironworks in the Russian Steppes.

A wealthy, successful, Victorian businessman, John left his wife, family, mansion, and homeland to travel a thousand miles to a primitive backwater, medieval in state and outlook. A charismatic visionary with enormous personal magnetism, John persuaded Britainâ�,��"�s old aristocracy and nouveau riche to invest in his venture, while concealing his greatest secret â�,�“ he couldnâ�,��"�t even write his own name.

He recruited adventurers like himself, prepared to sacrifice everything, including their lives to ensure the success of his new town - Hughesovka.

Men like Glyn Edwards, whoâ�,��"�d spent his married life working out of hotel rooms to avoid his wife in Merthyr. The young and ambitious, typified by newly qualified Dr Peter Edwards and his workhouse raised wife, Sarah, looking for an escape from class ridden Britain. Alexei Beletsky, a Russian aristocrat who sees Russianâ�,��"�s future in Johnâ�,��"�s plans. Cowed Jews like Nathan Kharber who accept anti-Semitism as the fate of their race. And those fleeing violence like brother and sister, Richard and Anna Parry.



Hughesovka is a town of opportunity and new beginnings that rapidly becomes a hotbed of villainy, where murderers, thieves, whores and illicit love affairs flourish. The immigrants live alongside aristocrats in manors, and peasants whose homes are holes scooped in the steppe and discover plague, famine and massacres can strike in palaces as well as pits.

Within a generation, the town of Hughesovka (or Yuzovka), becomes a city. Some of Hughesâ�,��"�s working class Welsh Victorian engineers acquire the trappings of aristocrats, great houses, carriages, servants and second homes in St Petersburg but the First World War and revolution loom just over the horizon . . .