Live Not by Lies is memoir-like historical fiction "as told by" Soviet intelligence officer Leonid Eitingon and his stepdaughter Zoya Zarubina. Both were actual Soviet intelligence agents. Eitingon operated near the apex of power and managed Trotsky's murder. Zarubina translated the atomic bomb secrets stolen by Klaus Fuchs, Ted Hall, and others from the Manhattan Project.
The book's title is borrowed from an essay by Solzhenitsyn, released the day he was expelled to the West. The Soviet Union, he said, was founded on lies and was wrecked by lies. The novel traces the fortunes of two families, one among the wreckers - the Eitingons - and one among the wrecked — a fictional former White Army colonel, Boris Anokhin and his wife and daughter. Neither family survived those years unscathed. Trotsky, Stalin, Beria, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Daniel Siqueiros, Isaac Babel, Andrei Sakharov, Anna Akhmatova, and the Romanovs are all significant characters in Live Not by Lies, which traces over 70 years of Soviet Communism.
