He unlocked his front door. The place was silent and still. He looked into the bedroom, the living room, the kitchen, and the bathroom.

The place was empty.

He bolted the door.

• • •

For two weeks Dimka walked around fearing he could be attacked at any minute. Eventually he decided it was not going to happen. Perhaps Nik did not care that his wife was having an affair; or perhaps he was too wise to make an enemy of someone who worked in the Kremlin. Either way, Dimka began to feel safer.

He still wondered at the spite of Yevgeny Filipov. How could the man even have been surprised that Natalya rejected him? He was dull and conservative and homely-looking and badly dressed: what did he imagine he had to tempt an attractive woman who already had a lover as well as a husband? But clearly Filipov’s feelings had been deeply wounded. However, his revenge seemed not to have worked.

But the main thing on Dimka’s mind was the Czech reform movement that was being called the Prague Spring. It had caused the most bitter Kremlin split since the Cuban missile crisis. Dimka’s boss, Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin, was the leader of the optimists, who hoped the Czechs could find a way out of the bog of inefficiency and waste that was the typical Communist economy. Muting their enthusiasm for tactical reasons, they proposed that Dubcek be watched carefully, but that confrontation should be avoided if possible. However, conservatives such as Filipov’s boss, Defense Minister Andrei Grechko, and KGB chief Andropov were unnerved by Prague. They feared that radical ideas would undermine their authority, infect other countries, and subvert the Warsaw Pact military alliance. They wanted to send in the tanks, depose Dubcek, and install a rigid Communist regime slavishly loyal to Moscow.

The real boss, Leonid Brezhnev, was sitting on the fence, as he so often did, waiting for a consensus to emerge.

Despite being some of the most powerful people in the world, the top men in the Kremlin were scared of stepping out of line. Marxism-Leninism answered all questions, so the eventual decision would be infallibly correct. Anyone who had argued for a different outcome was therefore revealed to be culpably out of touch with orthodox thinking. Dimka sometimes wondered if it was this bad in the Vatican.

Because no one wanted to be the first to express an opinion on the record, as always they had to get their aides to thrash things out informally ahead of any Politburo meeting.

“It’s not just Dubcek’s revisionist ideas about freedom of the press,” said Yevgeny Filipov to Dimka one afternoon in the broad corridor outside the Presidium Room. “He’s a Slovak who wants to give more rights to the oppressed minority he comes from. Imagine if that idea starts to get around places such as Ukraine and Belarus.”

As always, Filipov looked ten years out of date. Nowadays almost everyone was wearing their hair longer, but he still had an army crop. Dimka tried to forget for a moment that he was a malicious troublemaking bastard. “These dangers are remote,” Dimka argued. “There’s no immediate threat to the Soviet Union—certainly nothing to justify ham-fisted military intervention.”