Background:
Winter, 1898:  Katya Petrovna is born to poor Russian Jews in a Shtetl in
the northern Caucasus mountains

Spring, 1904:  Katya's entire village, including her parents, are killed in
a pogrom.  Katya survives by hiding in a well.  Her memory of the incident
is fuzzy, and she cannot remember her last name.

Summer, 1904 - Fall, 1904: Katya wanders north across Russia, half-wild,
half-mad and subsisting on roots and berries.  Fortuitously, she arrives at
St. Petersburg before the harsh Russian winter sets in.

Winter, 1904: Katya begins a career of petty thievery on the streets of St.
Petersburg in order to keep herself alive.  She survives in large part
because she is adopted as a sort of mascot by some contingents of workers at
the St. Petersburg shipyards.

Spring, 1905 - Fall, 1905: The first, abortive revolution against the Czar's
oppresive regime occurs.  Katya, too young to participate, nevertheless is
witness to the heroism of the socialist dockworkers and the oppressive
brutality of the Czarist troops.  The experience colors her view of politics
to the present day.

Winter, 1905 - Summer, 1913: Katya continues her career of petty crime until
her friends at the shipyards, fearful that she will either be arrested or
forced to add prostitution to her job description, begin giving her work.
As she gets older, the work becomes more complex, and she learns the
rudiments of mechanical and electrical engineering.

Fall, 1913 - Spring, 1914: Along with many shipyard workers who remember
1905, Katya begins attending subversive meetings.  She meets the charismatic
Trotsky and becomes friends with him, which is probably why she chooses to
throw in her lot with the Bolsheviks, despite their relative unpopularity
even among the other revolutionaries.  Although uneducated, Katya finds
herself swept up in the great liberal intellectual movements of the period
and place - Marxism, women's equality, scientific humanism, and free love.

Summer, 1914 - Spring, 1917: The Great War breaks out, throwing Russia into
chaos.  At the beginning, Katya is tied to her now highly in-demand shipyard
work.  As the years wear on, however, millions of Russians die in the
pointless slaughter of the war, or due to the increasingly violent purges of
the increasingly insane, Rasputin-dominated Czar Nicholas.  Katya throws in
her lot with the revolutionaries full-time and fights to bring down the
Czarist regime.

Summer, 1917 - Fall, 1917: The Czarist government falls.  Nicholas and his
family, staying at the Summer Palace in St. Petersburg, are captured and
summarily executed.  Katya is rumored to have been directly involved with
this incident, but refuses to speak of it.  A series of governments are
installed and fall in rapid succession as civil war wracks the land.  Lenin
returns from abroad and bluffs his way into the Summer Palace with a brigade
of barely-armed revolutionaries, including Trostky, Katya, and Stalin.  The
Soviet government is established and proves to be the one that will last -
but not without a struggle.

Winter, 1917: The Soviet government is forced to fight an astounding
eleven-front war, both internal and external, in order to maintain its
tenuous hold on power.  Trotsky directs the war effort from wherever the
fighting is thickest, and Katya finds herself fighting alongside him in the
famed Women's Brigade, formed in the spirit of revolutionary egalitarianism
which is beginning to sweep across the land.  Katya witnesses first-hand the
results of modern warfare techniques such as machine-guns and mustard gas.

Spring, 1918: Russians continue to die like flies in the War.  A desperate
shortage of trained pilots is proving critically dangerous for Russia as air
power becomes more important.  At Trotsky's suggestion, Katya is rushed
through pilot training and soon finds herself battling in the skies over the
critical East German/West Russian front.

Summer, 1918: Katya is shot down over Germany (she claims by Von Richtofen,
but the truth of this has never been verified), and is captured by the
Kaiser's army.  She is sent to a POW camp in Alsace-Lorraine.  (The incident
leaves her with a dislike of Germans that has lasted to the present.)  As
the German war effort crumbles, however, the camp becomes more and more
lightly guarded, and Katya escapes.  She makes her way eastward across the
decimated trenches of war-devastated Europe, on foot and on stolen vehicle,
in constant danger the entire way.

Fall, 1918: Katya arrives back in Russia as the Great War finally comes to
an end.  Peace agreements theoretically guarantee recognition of the Soviet
government.  But in reality, hostile Western governments begin a program of
assassinations and espionage in an attempt to surreptitiously destabilize
the hated communist regime.

Winter, 1918 - Winter, 1920: Katya, now a minor war hero and friend to
several high government officials, decides to continue to help protect the
regime she helped bring into being.  She joins the counterrevolutionary
program, designed to ferret out foreign spies and domestic traitors - the
fledgling organization which soon became the KGB.  She is trained in
counterintelligence techniques, and soon finds herself deeply enmeshed in
the web of intrigue which replaced the overt war.  She plays deadly games
with such famous agents as Britain's master spy Reilly - although whether or
not she was also one of his lovers is a matter of deep conjecture in the
intelligence community which has never been resolved.

The 1920's begin: And Katya finds her position increasingly difficult.
Lenin becomes ill and Stalin and Trotsky vie for power.  Katya, firmly in
Trotsky's camp, finds herself battling enemies inside her own organization
as well as outside.

The early 1920's: The power struggle continues, and Stalin begins to gain
the upper hand.  The purges begin, and several times Katya is forced to turn
in former friends - now deadly enemies - in order to save her own skin.
Life becomes increasingly dangerous for her.  A bizarre rumor surfaces that
she is a German spy, turned to their side while a POW during the war.

The early 1920's continue: The shoe drops.  Stalin seizes power, and Trotsky
flees to Mexico, barely escaping with his life.  Katya is unable to escape
in time and, on the pretext that she is a German spy, she is arrested.

Some more of the early 1920's: Katya manages to preserve her life, but she
is sent to the dreaded Gulag Archipelago.  She is sentenced to life in a
Siberian labor camp.  The labor camp she is sent to has no walls and few
guards - there is no need for them, for it is one of those surrounded by
thousands of miles of frozen Siberian wasteland, and it is assumed that
anyone so foolish as to try to escape would die of exposure on the first
night.

Still in the early 1920's: Katya walks out of the camp one night with a
small group of fellow escapees.  She never speaks of what happened on this
trip, but when she finally arrives at the first outpost of civilization - a
Mongolian village - she is alone.

The early 1920's yet: Katya makes her way across Central Asia, tossed hither
and thither by circumstances.  She fights with Mongolian tribesmen and aids
the infant revolutionary movement in China.  She nearly loses her life when
she encounters a hideous corpse-eating cult on an inaccessible plateau in
Tibet, but manages to escape after stealing their horrible sacred book . . .
which, being unable to read, she tosses into a river.  In British India, her
incitements against the colonial government not appreciated, and she is
forced to steal a plane and flee.

Sometime in the early 1920's: The plane, however, runs out of fuel and she
is forced to land in the middle of the deserts of the Middle East, with no
civilization around for hundreds of miles.  Cursing her luck and believing
herself sure to die this time, she sets out across the desert.  It is not
long, however, before she comes upon a mixed group of Americans and Brits,
themselves stranded in the middle of the desert by a broken truck.  She
fixes the truck for them, and they drive her back to their archeological dig
site - for indeed, the group she came upon was the rest of our stalwart band
of adventurers.  After some negotiation, she ended up employed by the group
as a mechanic and electrician.  Probably she would not have stayed with the
group, except that [section deleted for security reasons.]  Therefore, she
followed the group to America . . . where bizarre incidents soon began to
occur . . .