Twenty-two years later, Lidiya herself became mother to a daughter. She looked down at the infant and swore she would protect her from all harm. For the first decade of Galina’s life, Lidiya never spoke of her own parents, and for the next decade only sparingly: she was determined to spare her daughter the penalties of a spoiled biography. By the time of Brezhnev’s funeral and the glimpse of Mikhail, Galina was no longer a child, and what little faith in the Soviet system remained to Lidiya after her parents were taken was killed off during the war. There was such inhuman suffering when Leningrad was under siege, such neglect from the central authorities, that Lidiya emerged from those nine hundred days decanted of any patriotism or desire for it. So when Mikhail appeared on the TV displaying the rewards of a life without a spoiled biography, Lidiya broke her silence.

By the time Galina left the Soviet Union, the story of her mother’s family had been told and retold. She had stored it in the safest chamber of memory, where it lay with a strange and quiet volatility. Through the many retellings, her mother’s history, so powerful and vivid, had become her history: the threat of those times, the fear, the terrible loss of a mother and a father, the shocking betrayal of a son and brother. And she, too, had come to hate Mikhail.

The story had expanded since Galina had come to Australia with all she had read about Soviet Russia. She’d been appalled to learn what the great revolution had cost the Russian people — the deliberate starvation of entire communities, the millions of deaths, the lies of the leaders. It was like suddenly discovering that a parent or a sibling, someone very close to you, was a vicious killer. And even if only a fraction of the claims were true, Soviet society had been, and probably remained, monstrously cruel, and Soviet leaders possessed of as little regard for its citizens as the wind had for the clouds it pushed around. She used to believe that in order to remain sane in a repressive regime, memory was forced to discard what it simply could not bear to hold. But the fact was, her own mother and people like her did not forget. Perhaps forgetting was the exclusive prerogative of the perpetrators, providing them with a well-oiled gateway to a guiltless future.