Six months later, Yuri and Vera are standing in front of another poster, this one displayed outside a bakery. The corners have curled and the colours have been blanched by flour and sunlight, but the picture remains very striking. Most of the poster is taken up with a gargantuan female farm-worker painted in shades of red, and carrying a rake in her right hand. Her other hand is stretched out in warning, a stay-away gesture to a priest and two kulaks — three tiny grey figures who scarcely come up to her knees. The caption reads, ‘There is no room in our collective farm for priests and kulaks.’

‘There seem to be so many of them,’ Vera says to Yuri. ‘Not priests, but kulaks. How can there be so many rich peasants and all of them enemies of the people?’

Yuri hushes her, as he needs to do increasingly in these testing days. But as reports multiply of the huge numbers of kulaks arrested for wrongdoing, it is hard not to question.

As for the good peasants, there are shocking rumours: millions of them have died of starvation, and entire communities have been wiped out. There is a scattering of ghost villages across the land.

‘Not even the old aristocracy with all their greed and violence could claim such high casualties,’ Vera says.

The political leaders talk of the need to bear hardships now for the better future ahead. But as the number of dead mount, the cost exacted by the future seems shockingly high.

And yet it seems the leaders are right again. By the mid-1930s, after the hard years of collectivisation and the worst famine in living memory, the scaffolding of the new Soviet state is in place. The people are told of huge productive farms in the countryside, and of large-scale industrialisation in the cities. They hear of the successes blared through loudspeakers, they read about them in newspapers, they see them emblazoned across posters. The leader’s speeches are full of them. And they also hear that the whole world is watching the Soviet Union, that proletarians across the globe are uniting, that International Socialism will soon be realised. With so much at stake, it comes as no surprise to Yuri and Vera that Stalin orders the All-Union Population Census. Stalin wants hard proof of his successes.

Yuri and Vera should be gratified that their long-held ideals have finally been realised. But — and they could never have predicted this — they are no longer the confident revolutionaries they once were. They haven’t lost their faith in socialist principles, but they can’t, like many of their neighbours and colleagues, ignore the contradictions. There are power failures and gas leaks, they ride to work in rickety trams, people are cold and hungry, shops are empty of goods, tuberculosis is rampant, school-aged children wander the streets, and drunk men lie slumped in doorways.

‘They’re twisting the language to make us believe lies,’ Vera says to Yuri at the end of another weary day.