The essence of terror, the terror of terror, is helplessness. Yuri and Vera know there’s a disaster heading their way and there is nothing they can do to stop it. The NKVD always comes at night. Yuri and Vera hardly sleep anymore, and when they do, they never properly undress. Just that week, Vera packed the winter bedding away in the trunk. The bed is strangely flat, their own bodies making only the slightest mounds.

‘It’s not just me in the firing line.’

Yuri is warning Vera — not that she needs reminding — that when one member of a family is taken, others are likely to follow. It’s the price exacted by the state, and the cost of the better future. Vera is not one of those disenchanted Bolsheviks who cast a sentimental and distorting gaze back to the czars. But this, she says, what they have now, is not how it was supposed to be.

Lidiya feels the tension at home. Her mother is nervy, and her father, whom she hardly saw during the busy months leading up to the census, is now home every evening, often earlier than her mother. She watches him sitting in his armchair, a book face-down on his knee, his forehead crinkled with worries. She wishes she could think of something to make him feel better. Her brother seems unaware that anything is wrong; he is full of the Komsomol. He talks incessantly of new friends and experiences, the drills and exercises; he boasts that Komsomol members are being recruited to hand out flyers and put up posters; they’re even being used for crowd control. He says Komsomol members are told to keep their eyes and ears open; enemies of the people, he says, are everywhere. None of these tasks appeals to Lidiya, and she hopes that by the time she reaches Komsomol age the tasks will have changed. Misha spends less and less time at home; sometimes he stays away all night. ‘On Komsomol business,’ he says.

Like all Soviet children, Lidiya knows about Pavlik, the most famous Pioneer of all. A few years earlier, Pavlik and his younger brother were murdered by kulaks. After the deaths, it emerged that Pavlik had informed on his own father. Pavlik not only became a martyr to the great Bolshevik cause, but he was held up as a model for all children, a boy who was such a good Pioneer that he put his country ahead of his father.

Lidiya would never do as Pavlik did. Always she will be child to her parents first and a Pioneer or Komsomol member second; she cannot imagine a life without her mother and father. She is sure her brother holds a different view. Increasingly these days, Misha makes her uneasy, and she is relieved when he is not at home.