In June 1941, a seventy-one-year-old Russian general sitting in a Berlin apartment issued a proclamation calling on Cossacks everywhere to join the German Wehrmacht - framing the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union as a crusade against communism and Jewry. The man who issued that proclamation, Pyotr Nikolayevich Krasnov, had spent twenty years in exile engineering exactly this moment. That he was wrong about everything - about Germany's intentions, about the war's outcome, about what the British would do with him when it ended - did not make him less formidable, or less responsible for what followed.

Leopold Phelan's biography of Krasnov is the first full English-language account of one of the Russian twentieth century's most extraordinary and most morally catastrophic careers. Born into the Don Cossack aristocracy in 1869, Krasnov served in three wars, commanded an army in the Civil War, created the short-lived Don Republic from nothing in 1918, spent two decades in Paris and Berlin writing bestselling novels and plotting the Soviet Union's overthrow, and ended by directing the Nazi state's Cossack administrative apparatus - before being handed to the NKVD by the British in 1945 and hanged in Moscow in January 1947.

This is the story of a man who was simultaneously a genuine military genius, a gifted novelist, and a willing propagandist for genocide - and of the specific historical forces that made all three possible in the same person.