IVAN DANILOV…Serves in the Tsar’s Imperial Army on the Eastern Front during World War One and later deserts his unit to join the Bolshevik cause prior to the 1917 October Revolution. During the bloody Civil War, which follows, Ivan commands a Red Guard Detachment fighting the White Loyalist forces in Eastern Siberia. Later in the Great Patriotic War, Ivan Danilov is one of the Soviet hero’s during the Battle of Stalingrad. After his friend Nikita Khrushchev assumes the leadership of the USSR, Marshal Danilov is named Soviet Defense Minister.
YURI DANILOV…Born in 1931 in Kiev, the Ukraine, the son of Anna Danilov and Dennis Little Wolf, a full blood Oglala Sioux Indian. Little Wolf, an American Engineer and ardent Communist, helps design a new Soviet tractor factory and later the famous Soviet T-34 battle tank. In 1941, while visiting the Little Wolf relatives in America. Yuri and his mother are stranded in Minnesota after Hitler’s forces invaded the USSR. Yuri spends his teen years on the White Earth Indian Reservation, now known under the name of Joseph Little Wolf.
After high school graduation he enlists in the US Air Force and is trained as an aircraft mechanic. In 1950 he qualifies for flight school. In 1952 he flies combat missions in Korea. Shot down over North Korean waters, he is rescued by a Soviet patrol boat and the next day has a bittersweet reunion with Ivan Danilov. Yielding to political pressure from the Soviet Intelligence Service, he agrees to return to his American airbase and spy for his boyhood motherland. During the next decade he is the MVD’s, later the KGB’s, top spy in the US military. In 1960 he aids the Soviets in shooting down a CIA U-2 Spy plane as it flies over Soviet military sites. In May 1962 when the CIA starts to scrutinize his past history the KGB spirits him back to the USSR. With the approval of Khrushchev, Yuri is allowed to serve in the Soviet Air Army.
Shortly after arriving in Moscow he is assigned to serve as an interpreter at a secret Mexico meeting between Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan and US Attorney General Robert Kennedy. The meeting results in an agreement settling the Cuban Missile Crises. After political and military training, he is sent to command an Interceptor Air Regiment in Eastern Siberia. In 1965 he flies combat missions against the American’s in the skies of North Vietnam. In 1979, General Yuri Danilov commands the Soviet air units during their Afghanistan intervention, a war which after nearly ten years of fighting the USSR decides to abandon. Badly wounded in Afghanistan in 1983 he is sent back to Moscow to recover. Several months later he is dispatched to Khabarovsk, Siberia to investigate an International incident brought about by the Soviet downing of Korean Airlines Flight 007.
Yuri Danilov has a lifelong friendship with Sergei Khrushchev, son of the Soviet Chairman. During his military career he meets Chuck Yeager, Francis Gary Powers, Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Through the eyes of Ivan and Yuri Danilov we are witness to Kremlin political upheavals and the many International crises of the times. The story relates Yuri’s progressive loss of faith and trust in the communist system and its doctrines. THE STONE HORSE AND DROSHKI spans his forty-five years of military aviation while piloting some of the worlds latest and hottest aircraft.
THE STONE HORSE AND DROSHKI is also about the tender love and devotion between Yuri and the beautiful Japanese-Russian Eiko Hiraoka.
My personal background includes seven years of US Air Force service and a lifelong interest in American and Soviet/Russian military aviation.
For my father, Ken De Villers
Sincerely,
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