Speshnev is the beginnings of a true story of an American Family whose patriarch was a conspirator in the Petrashevski Circle, a group of revolutionists in Tsarist Russia in the early 1800's. Their story continues through World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, their flight into China in 1922 only to get caught up in the Chinese Civil War. They fled in 1933 to come to America. In this, the first of three books, there are three love stories, suicides, murder, marriage to a dead woman and then we have the history of Russia and the Romanov family themselves.