On his eighth birthday, Stepan had joined the Young Octobrists and had been given their five-pointed-star badge with a picture of Lenin on it. He always came home from meetings greatly excited by all he was learning.

“Mama, did you know that the last Tsar was an evil man, like an ogre?”

“Really?” Maria asked, with a straight face. “Why do you say that?”

“Because he and his family bought jewels and expensive cars while the poor people starved,” Stepan recited. “They lit cigars with thousand-ruble notes, and if the poor people protested, they shot them.”

Maria caught Peter’s eye across the table. She wanted to defend her family, to explain that they had been good people simply fulfilling the roles into which they had been born, but a slight shake of Peter’s head stopped her.

“I agree that things are much better for working people now,” she said. “Society is fairer.”

“We must all be prepared if the International Revolution is to succeed,” Stepan said, his brow furrowed in concern. “We are proler . . . prolerat . . .” He stumbled over the word. “Aren’t we, Papa?”

“Proletariat? Yes, we are, son.” Peter nodded.

Maria watched as Stepan played games of “Reds and Whites” with the other boys in the courtyard, reenacting scenes from the civil war, and worried about him growing up with Communism as his ideal. She would have loved to teach her children about religion, but Peter dissuaded her. Although there had been some relaxation of the ban on the Orthodox Church, religion was still seen as backward thinking, and it was better that their kids did not stand out from their contemporaries.

Since working out who must have fathered Stepan, Maria kept a close eye on her eldest, fearful that he might start to show negative character traits, but instead his personality grew increasingly like Peter’s: easygoing, calm, and rational. The two often went fishing together on Sunday afternoons, coming home with perch or roach for dinner, and laughing over shared fishing anecdotes: the big one that had nearly pulled Stepan into the river, and the immense trouble Peter took reeling in what turned out to be the wheel of a discarded bicycle.

Stepan’s schoolteacher stopped her one day, full of praise. “He is the peacemaker in the class,” she said. “If two boys are fighting, he will stand in the middle and urge them to shake hands. And when a girl in his class was bullied by some other children, he somehow made them stop. I asked him what he had said, and he told me, all seriousness: ‘There are right things to do in the world and wrong things to do in the world, and we must always choose the right ones.’”