So it happened on Monday, 15th November, 1982, that Galina and her mother spent much of the day in front of the TV, with an array of delicious food. The dead man meant nothing to them, and the movement of the funeral was ponderously slow, yet something was compelling them to watch.

‘We Russians have an unhealthy tolerance for punishment,’ her mother said wryly.

But it wasn’t some undesirable national trait that kept Galina watching, it was the event itself. From the very beginning, with the cameras gliding over Brezhnev lying in state in the cavernous hall of the House of the Unions, it was a spectacle. Dead Brezhnev was perched atop a gargantuan pyre decorated with red flowers and a thicket of greenery. A small orchestra was playing to one side, and numerous sombre officials were hanging about, looking like they needed some occupation.

‘All these men guarding the great leader,’ her mother said. ‘As if anyone would want to spirit him away.’

Then came the procession itself: guns, machinery, flowers, banners, bands, medal-bearers, and masses of men in military dress, all of them bulked out in grey coats and wearing their silly peaked caps. Galina had seen men like this before, she’d seen state funerals before, but Brezhnev’s was the biggest show of all.

Once the procession was underway, the cameras panned between the proceedings and the huge crowds lining the route.

‘I wonder what bribes were given to those people to make them forfeit their day off,’ Lidiya muttered.

Galina, too, was focused on the crowd. ‘Seems that few women took up the offer.’

‘Women have more sense than men,’ her mother said quickly. ‘They certainly have less time.’ She helped herself to another spoonful of creamy mushrooms. ‘The women who have to cook and clean and care for children, and hold down jobs as well, they don’t mourn this man.’

It was a perennial complaint of her mother’s that all the revolutionary promises to women had never been fulfilled. When Lidiya was a child back in the 1930s, women were already assuming the double burden of domestic labour and outside employment. ‘It was too much even for a Soviet superwoman,’ she said. ‘If a woman believed in her work, then the domestic sphere suffered; if she didn’t, by this time many women lacked the heart and the resources to make a proper home. Cooking was a drudgery. Life was a drudgery.

‘Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev, these leaders come and go, but the hardship for Soviet women endures.’ Lidiya nodded at the TV screen. ‘No sensible women would mourn this man.’