The other place I filled in a historical gap is around Lyudmila’s sniper partner, and around her final husband Kostia Shevelyov. Lyudmila’s partner is named in her memoir as Fyodor Sedykh: such a relationship would have been as intimate as a working relationship could possibly be, yet she makes no mention of him after Sevastopol. Likewise, the man who became her husband after the war is a complete blank: we know nothing about Kostantin Shevelyov except his birth and death dates. Why does her memoir contain so little about two men who would have been so important to her?
I gave her a reason: Konstantin Shevelyov had good cause to fly under the radar, and his famous wife was doing her level best to keep him out of her own limelight. In the carnivorous Stalinist regime, there could be any number of reasons a man might want to lie low. Thus I turned Kostia into Lyudmila’s sniper partner so I could introduce Lady Death’s final husband into the story and pay homage to the records that indicate a romantic link between her and her partner, but also gave him a background that explains why she might list another name as her partner.
Lastly, the marksman: there was no known plot against President Roosevelt in 1942, though he narrowly escaped assassination in 1933 when Giuseppe Zangara fired on him from a crowd in Miami, and he also managed to escape being deposed the following year by a shadowy cabal （allegedly including some of America’s most prominent heads of industry） who hoped to replace him with a military dictator. By 1942, Roosevelt still had plenty of enemies who would have celebrated his death: isolationists, American fascists, political rivals who believed him a traitor to his race and class, and anti-communists who saw even a wartime alliance with the USSR as treason. Creating the marksman also allowed me to make sense of one of the most bizarre episodes of Lyudmila’s goodwill tour: the American millionaire William Jonson who fell in love with her on her tour, followed her from city to city, proposed marriage, and sent her a spectacular set of diamond jewelry with a note stating: “We will meet again.” According to Lyudmila’s memoir, they did not. But this was too good a story to ignore, so in my version they do meet again: first at the White House （which had much less stringent security in the forties than it does today） and then in Rock Creek Park, a stretch of wilderness slicing through the nation’s capital that has swallowed its share of bodies over the years. Murdered Washington intern Chandra Levy disappeared there for a year, despite modern search capabilities. Another park mystery is the lost ring of Teddy Roosevelt, which fell off during a presidential hike in 1902. It remains missing to this day, and I enjoyed crafting a possible fate for it, too!
I owe heartfelt thanks to many people who helped in the writing, researching, and production of this novel. My mother and husband, this book’s first cheerleaders. My wonderful critique partners Stephanie Dray and Stephanie Thornton. My beta readers and marvelously knowledgeable subject matter experts: Erin Davies and Outlaw, Charles F. A. Dvorak, Annalori Ferrell, Elena Gorokhova, and Shelby Miksch. My agent Kevan Lyon and editor Tessa Woodward, and the marvelous team at William Morrow. I would be lost without you all!
I would also have been lost without Lyudmila herself. I recommend her engrossing autobiography Lady Death: The Memoirs of Stalin’s Sniper for those wishing to know more about this fascinating woman. The English translation by David Foreman （Greenhill Books） proved invaluable in the research and writing of this novel. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was far more than a killer of men, and she paid a price for her tremendous courage. Although she survived her war, finished her dissertation, and achieved her dream of becoming a historian, she saw many of her friends die, she struggled with PTSD, and she outlived Kostia . . . but she devoted her later years to war veterans, recorded her story for posterity, and died in the arms of her beloved son, surrounded by family and swearing at death until the very end.
It’s sometimes said that World War II was won with British intelligence, American steel, and Soviet blood. This sweeping generalization bears a kernel of truth. Since the USSR became America’s enemy in the Cold War so soon after WWII’s end, it’s easy to forget that without them, the war against the Axis powers might have been lost. Of all Hitler’s mistakes, his colossal Napoleonic error in taking on the USSR was perhaps the most pivotal: without the eastern front soaking up so much of Germany’s manpower, the Allies might never have prevailed. The cost of that victory was millions of Red Army dead as Soviet blood gave American steel and British intelligence time to turn the tide. In The Rose Code I wrote about the war through the lens of British intelligence. The Diamond Eye is seen through the lens of Soviet blood—one woman’s fight to stanch its flow, first with her rifle and then with her voice as she crossed an ocean to bring American steel home to help her countrymen.