vs. destruction, as well as cruelty and terror, are treated in this polyphonic manner. Krasnov had begun writing From Double Eagle to the Red Flag when he was in prison in 1917, but the novel was first published in Russian in Berlin in 1921. The American historian Brent Muggenberg wrote that Krasnov had "an impressive grasp of the motivations and mentalities" on both sides in the Russian Civil War. The German historian Daniel Siemens described From Double Eagle to the Red Flag as a deeply anti-Semitic book that accepted The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion as genuine and accused "international Jewry" of inventing Communism. Siemens noted that the German translation of Ot Dvuglavogo Orla k krasnomu znameni was the favorite book of the Nazi martyr Horst Wessel. Other books written by Krasnov included a historical novel about a group of Don Cossacks resisting the French invasion of Russia in 1812 and another historical novel about Yermak Timofeyevich, the legendary 16th century Cossack conqueror of Siberia. Krasnov's novels were translated into English, German, French, Serbian and other European languages. Despite his chequered military record, Krasnov was seen within émigré circles as a "legendary hero of the Civil War". Another of Krasnov's novels was his 1927 work Za chertopolokhom (Behind the Thistle), a future history set in the 1990s that imagined a post-Communist Russia ruled over by a restored monarchy that had built an enormous wall around the entire empire to prevent any and all contact with the West. Through set in the future, the emperor who has chosen to isolate Russia from the West bears a strong resemblance in both appearance and personality to Ivan the Terrible. The novel begins with the Soviet Union launching an invasion of Eastern Europe sometime in the 1930s, which was to be started by an unleashing of an immense quantity of poisonous gases. However, the Soviet Air Force accidentally unleashed the deadly chemical gases on the Red Army, killing millions while setting off forest fires. The masses of corpses lead to an outbreak of plague, which rendered the borderlands of the Soviet Union uninhabitable for decades and led to a monstrous thistle standing several feet high growing up to in the borderlands. After the disaster, the rest of the world assumes that there is no life left behind the thistle. In Krasnov's future history, in Europe, socialist parties have come to power in