Hard Kisses, Bitter Tears
Hard Kisses, Bitter Tears follows a ten-year span in the life of an eighteen-year-old Belarussian youth from 1935 through 1945. Though it is essentially a saga of Larion Daneelivich Sulupin's personal life, it is set against the tumultuous internal events of Stalin's pre-World War II Soviet Russia and Larion's journey through the subsequent world war. Larion's discovery of love at first sight is interrupted and then threatened by the outbreak of war. Will Larion ever reunite with his young wife, Tamara, and family? Will they be able to survive the war? With the end of war looming, it is not certain whether the Red Army or Patton's Third Army will be the family’s liberators, but the end of the war brings new threats and challenges to the lives of Larion, his wife and their young son.
Paul A. Kazakov
Paul A. Kazakov was born at 19:40 hours on March 6, 1946, at the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration Stateless Working Camp at Furstenwald, Germany (American Zone), which previously housed his parents as slave labor workers before the end of the Second World War. The family emigrated to Canada on April 21, 1950, aboard the U.S.N.S. General J.H. McRae and eventually settled in Southern Alberta.
The author obtained a B.Ed., B.A. & S. and LL.B. He was initially employed as a sessional lecturer in law for the Faculty of Commerce at the University of Calgary. He was admitted to the bar in 1981 and practiced in the civil litigation field until he retired on June 15, 2020.
Upon his retirement, he took up creative writing and Hard Kisses, Bitter Tears is his first completed work, inspired by some of the events which transpired in his parents’ lives.
The author visited the Soviet Union/Russian Federation in 1983, 1985 and 2003, both before and after the dissolution of the USSR. He has recently completed a legal trilogy and is currently working on another story set in the Soviet Union/Russian Federation during the period from 1985 to 2000 – from Gorbachev’s ‘perestroika’ to Yeltsin’s ‘Vouchers’ and ‘Shares for Loans’ to Putin’s ascendency. Its working title is ‘The Oligarch’.
