Andrew looked at her, wondering what he might reply. But there was no need for him to speak, Galina Kogan was far away. He wanted to be away too. He raised his hand in farewell and set off down the street, leaving her to her thoughts.

Slowly, Galina set off in the other direction, and a couple of minutes later she arrived home. She dumped the bag of produce on the table, and sank onto the couch. And there she remained, stilled not by nostalgia nor by indulgence, but the sheer force of the past.

6 LIFE AND DEATH IN THE SOVIET UNION

6

LIFE AND DEATH IN THE SOVIET UNION

There had been rumours, but now it was official: after twenty years at the helm and twenty years of ill health, General Secretary Brezhnev was dead.

Galina had never known life without him; a toddler when he became leader, she had just turned twenty-one. His image graced each of her classrooms, it was posted on walls and shop fronts, it headlined the TV and newspapers. But now bull-faced Brezhnev, with his grizzled eyebrows and his slack skimpy lips, was dead.

Her mother had always been scathing about him and damning of life under his leadership. The food he promised never appeared, the goods that would have made life easier never materialised; only the military forces and the nuclear arsenal expanded, and the space program, too. But what was the use of sending men into space if people on the ground didn’t have enough to eat? These things Lidiya said in private to Galina, who had learned from her earliest years that what was said at home stayed at home. Brezhnev filled her mother with rage. The Soviet Union wasn’t poor. There was money enough to squash the Poles when they became too independent, and the Czechs when they became too Western, money enough for all manner of emergency. So there must be plenty of money for ordinary people to have better lives.

‘We’re told all the time that things are getting better. That steel production is up, food production is up, oil production is up, new apartments up, factories up, electricity plants up. Everything is up, yet our pathetic lives sink ever lower.

‘Things are getting better? Not a chance. It’s just pokazukha, window dressing.’ Lidiya shook her head in disgust. ‘There may well be people, poor deluded people, who will genuinely mourn our recently departed general secretary, but I’m not among them.’

The funeral for Brezhnev would be held in Moscow, but the entire Soviet Union would mark his passing. Schools, offices and factories would close, and everyone would have the day off to mourn the great leader. Lidiya proposed they make the best of it with their own funeral feast.

‘Ours will be a farewell-and-good-riddance feast,’ she said. ‘Although I can’t imagine his replacement will be any better.’