YANKEES IN PETROGRAD
By:
August 19, 2025
Under the direction of HILOBROW’s Josh Glenn, the MIT Press’s RADIUM AGE series is reissuing notable proto-sf stories from the underappreciated era between 1900–1935.
In these forgotten classics, sf readers will discover the origins of enduring tropes like robots (berserk or benevolent), tyrannical supermen, dystopias and apocalypses, sinister telepaths, and eco-catastrophes.
With new contributions by historians, science journalists, and sf authors, the Radium Age book series will recontextualize the breakthroughs and biases of these proto-sf pioneers, and chart the emergence of a burgeoning literary genre.
Today marks the publication of the following Radium Age series title…
MARIETTA S. SHAGINYAN
Translated & Introduced by JILL ROESE
(August 19, 2025)
When a capitalist cabal plots to assassinate Lenin, can quick-witted American workers ride to the rescue before it’s too late?
In Yankees in Petrograd, the Russian author Marietta S. Shaginyan (writing under the American nom de plume “Jim Dollar”) gives us a crime/espionage adventure with science fiction elements… including Petrograd’s spacetime-bending public transportation and electrical forcefields protecting Soviet Russia against its foes. Despite these awesome technologies, the world’s first proletarian state is threatened by a fascist organization that will stop at nothing — including kidnapping, mesmerism, and infiltration — to assassinate Vladimir Lenin and his fellow Communist leaders! Enter Mike Thingsmaster, American tradesman and leader of a secret global organization defending the interests of the proletariat, who tasks his network with foiling this nefarious plot.
Shaginyan’s novel, serialized in 1924 with covers decorated by Alexander Rodchenko’s photomontages, proved wildly popular with the Soviet reading public, which followed its dizzying plot breathlessly. Settings constantly shift and characters assume multiple identities; scenes of danger, intrigue, and melodrama are interspersed with moments of comic relief. Can Thingsmaster and his allies — including a robber baron’s scion who converts to the cause of Revolution, an alluring masked woman, a doctor investigating a disease that causes fierce anti-communists to revert to proto-human form, a chimney sweep, an intelligent dog, and the General Prosecutor of Illinois — succeed in thwarting the fascists? You’ll have to wait until the final chapter to find out.
A satire of the sort of thrillers then appearing in Black Mask and similar American pulps, Yankees in Petrograd is an over-the-top, pro-communist thrill ride.
“A novel of our time, in which major events succeed each other with purely cinematographic speed… In Jim Dollar’s novel we see nothing but action.” — Nikolai Meshcheryakov, “Foreword to the First Edition” (1924)
JILL ROESE is author of the Marietta S. Shaginyan entry in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Her translation of Shaginyan’s 1931 Soviet production novel Gidrotsentral’ (Hydrocentral) into English is in progresss. Her academic interests also include Soviet prose of the 1920s-30s. An independent scholar, she received her doctorate in Slavic Languages from Columbia in 2017.
MARIETTA S. SHAGINYAN (1888–1982) was a pre-revolutionary and Soviet-era writer whose career spanned eight decades and nearly 80 books. She enjoyed close friendships with Russian luminaries of her day, including Viktor Shklovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff. She is best known for Orientalia (1913), a collection of poetry; the proto-sf Soviet detective series collectively titled Mess—Mend, including Yankees in Petrograd (1924), published under the American-style pseudonym “Jim Dollar”; and a four-volume work (1959–1974) on the life and family of Lenin.
Originally published 1924. Cover illustrated and designed by Seth. See this book at The MIT Press.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF FROM THE MIT PRESS: VOICES FROM THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | J.D. Beresford’s A WORLD OF WOMEN | E.V. Odle’s THE CLOCKWORK MAN | H.G Wells’s THE WORLD SET FREE | Pauline Hopkins’s OF ONE BLOOD | J.J. Connington’s NORDENHOLT’S MILLION | Rose Macaulay’s WHAT NOT | Cicely Hamilton’s THEODORE SAVAGE | Arthur Conan Doyle’s THE LOST WORLD & THE POISON BELT | G.K. Chesterton’s THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL | MORE VOICES FROM THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | William Hope Hodgson’s THE NIGHT LAND | Hemendrakumar Roy’s THE INHUMANS | Charlotte Haldane’s MAN’S WORLD | Francis Stevens’s THE HEADS OF CERBERUS & OTHER STORIES | Edward Shanks’s THE PEOPLE OF THE RUINS | J.D. Beresford’s THE HAMPDENSHIRE WONDER | John Taine’s THE GREATEST ADVENTURE | Marietta Shaginyan’s YANKEES IN PETROGRAD | BEFORE SUPERMAN: SUPERHUMANS OF THE RADIUM AGE, ed. Joshua Glenn | E. and H. Heron’s FLAXMAN LOW: OCCULT DETECTIVE | Irene Clyde’s BEATRICE THE SIXTEENTH | & more to come.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF: “Radium Age” is Josh Glenn’s name for the nascent sf genre’s c. 1900–1935 era, a period which saw the discovery of radioactivity, i.e., the revelation that matter itself is constantly in movement — a fitting metaphor for the first decades of the 20th century, during which old scientific, religious, political, and social certainties were shattered. More info here.