The Moscow Trilogy

Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Moscow Trilogy is a loosely connected sequence of historical novels set across revolutionary and Stalinist Russia. Sashenka begins in St Petersburg in 1916 and follows its heroine through revolution and the terror of the 1930s; Red Sky at Noon moves to the Eastern Front in 1942; and One Night in Winter takes place among Moscow’s political elite immediately after victory in 1945. Characters and family connections recur across the books, but each novel has its own principal story.

The trilogy combines invented protagonists with real historical figures and events. Montefiore uses his research as a historian to reconstruct the political atmosphere of late imperial Russia, Stalin’s dictatorship and the German-Soviet war, while private dialogue and the central plots remain fiction. The correct series order is Sashenka, Red Sky at Noon, then One Night in Winter.