Vladimir Alexandrov discusses with Ivan two things which should be better known: both men who lived in Russia in the early part of the twentieth century.

Vladimir Alexandrov taught courses in Yale's Slavic Department on nineteenth and twentieth-century Russian literature and culture from 1986 to 2018.

While preparing to teach a graduate seminar on Russian émigré culture, he discovered Frederick Bruce Thomas, which resulted in the 2013 biography The Black Russian, which is now being developed into a dramatic TV series. In 2021, he published To Break Russia's Chains: Boris Savinkov and His Wars against the Tsar and the Bolsheviks, which is the biography of a remarkable revolutionary terrorist, political activist, government minister, and writer who has been described as "James Bond as written by Kafka." Vladimir's current project is a book about Russia's little-known support for the Union during the American Civil War. Find out more at www.valexandrov.com.

1. Frederick Bruce Thomas https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/10/10/vladimir-alexandrov-black-russian/ Further reading https://www.blackpast.org/global-african-history/perspectives-global-african-history/russia-s-black-entertainment-empresario-remarkable-saga-fyodor-fyodorovich-tomas-freder/

2. Boris Savinkov https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/to-break-russias-chains-vladimir-alexandrov-book-review-daniel-beer/ Further reading • https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4571&context=etd • https://origins.osu.edu/read/terrorism-path-better-russia?language_content_entity=en

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