When the siege of Leningrad ended, what remained of the city’s population hoped their liberation would be cause for a national celebration. It wasn’t. Stalin had never liked Leningrad or its people, and as the city began to rebuild, he worried about the influence its new generation of leaders was starting to wield. The Soviet Union could only have one seat of power—Moscow—and one unassailable leader—Josef Stalin.

Five years after the city was decimated by the siege, it was purged. The mayor was executed, two hundred city officials were sentenced to hard labour in the Siberian gulags, and two thousand public figures, including industry leaders, scientists, and university professors, were deemed to be anti-Soviet agitators and exiled from the city. By then Valera had become a junior member of the physics faculty at Andrei Zhdanov University. As a survivor of the siege and the daughter of an acknowledged anti-Soviet intellectual, she naturally fell under suspicion. But one thing saved her life. To make the purge as efficient as possible, an arbitrary combination of age and rank was used to decide who posed a threat. Valera was too young and too junior.

She suddenly had the run of Andrei Zhdanov’s labs, with no old intellectuals blocking or belittling her. Then, with Stalin’s death and Khrushchev’s political thaw, her superiors began to return from the Siberian wilderness, and she was back to begging for respect. So, when the GRU agent approached her with the offer of moving to Povenets B, it wasn’t just fleeing the penury of life in Leningrad that enticed her, but escaping the prejudice of academia as well. But Povenets B had just been another kind of cage. And not even a gilded one.

Valera dreamed of a different life, when she was awake and when she was asleep. Almost every night since Ledjo had been born she’d dreamed about the two of them in a small rowing boat, floating in the middle of a calm lake. The details of the dream changed over time—sometimes it was winter and they were bundled up, surrounded by distant, snowy peaks, other times it was summer and she could hear the far rustling of reeds and grassy fields—but the feeling was always the same: freedom.

With the promise of a new life in Povenets B, it felt like her dream might come true at last. She imagined lazy summer days on Lake Onega, fishing for their supper, or long nights curled up in front of a fire, reading stories together like she’d done with her father. None of that had happened. Life in the naukograd was the same, day after grinding day. But last night her dream was the most intense it had ever been. The scenery constantly changed, mountains rising and falling as the sky moved through hues of blue, yellow, and pink, and the sound of Ledjo’s laughter echoed across the water.