“While researching for the book The Soul of Kazakhstan in the New York Public Library, I came across a letter Natllya Sedova, Leon Trotsky’s wife, wrote home while exiled in Almaty. She exclaimed about the beauty of a late spring snow blanketing the tulips. As good fortune would have it, my apartment was across from where the Trotskys lived. On a spring day in April, I was treated to the same beautiful sight” – W.E.