“We both trained at Moscow’s Foreign Languages Institute. I ended up teaching English at a local state school, while Anatoly moved into the Kremlin soon after he won the Lenin Medal for coming top of his year. When we were first married, I thought we had everything, that we must have been blessed, we were so lucky, and by most people’s standards in Russia, we were. But that changed overnight when Anatoly was chosen to translate the chairman’s speeches so they could be used for propaganda purposes in the West.

“Then the chairman’s official interpreter fell ill, and Anatoly filled in. A temporary appointment, they told him, and how he wished it had been. But he wanted to impress the country’s leader, and he must have done so, because he was quickly promoted to become Stalin’s principal interpreter. You’d understand why, if you’d ever met him.”

“Wrong tense,” said Harry. “You mean I’ll understand why when I meet him.”

She smiled. “When you meet him. That was when his problems began,” she continued. “He became too close to Stalin, and although he was only an apparatchik, he began to witness things that made him realize what a monster Stalin was. The image presented to the people, of a kind, benevolent favorite uncle, could not have been further from the truth. Anatoly would tell me the most horrendous stories when he came back from work, but never in front of anyone else, even our closest friends. If he had spoken out, his punishment would not have been demotion, he would simply have disappeared like so many thousands of others. Yes, thousands, if they so much as raised an eyebrow in protest.

“His only solace was in his writing, which he knew could never be published until after Stalin’s death, and probably not until after his own death. But Anatoly wanted the world to know that Stalin was every bit as evil as Hitler. The only difference being that he’d got away with it. And then Stalin died.

“Anatoly became impatient to let the world know what he knew. He should have waited longer, but when he found a publisher who shared his ideals, he couldn’t stop himself. On the day of publication, even before Uncle Joe reached the shops, every copy was destroyed. So great were the KGB’s fears of anyone discovering the truth that even the presses on which Anatoly’s words had been printed were smashed to pieces. The next day he was arrested, and within a week he’d been tried and sentenced to twenty years’ hard labor in the gulag for writing a book that no one had ever read. If he’d been an American who’d written a biography of Roosevelt or Churchill, he would have been on every talk show, and his book would have been a best seller.”

“But you managed to escape.”