“He got a reprimand.” Peter rubbed his cheek with his knuckle. “Do you think I should have spoken on his behalf? I would have if I thought he faced jail.”

“It’s so petty,” Maria sighed. “I don’t like the Russian people anymore. This regime brings out the worst in everyone. But I agree, it’s better not to speak up or you could find yourself targeted next.”

All over town, portraits of a moustachioed Stalin gazed down at them. His image hung on the outside of shops and factories, on the walls of every office, and in each school classroom. Children sang songs thanking him for the good life he had brought them, and ubiquitous loudspeakers around town blared out his praises, but Maria and Peter were alarmed by the mass arrests under his premiership.

At first it had been the neighbor in their block who tried to cross into Finland, then several factory colleagues disappeared after a purge of the Party in 1933. More recently there had been a purge of any remaining kulaks. There was never any warning. Maria arrived in the morning to find coworkers missing and no explanation offered. The woman who’d lost her hand in the conveyor belt disappeared; so did the man who had been angry with Maria for telling his wife where to find him.

The secret police, known as the NKVD, always came in the middle of the night, the brakes of their black vans screeching on the road outside, followed by a loud banging on the door. Maria lay awake listening as a couple on the first floor were arrested one night.

“We’ve done nothing wrong!” the woman was screaming as they were led away. “We love the Party. We love Stalin.”

They must have done something, Maria persuaded herself. We just don’t know what it was.

She still kept her card files of people who were looking for missing family members, but was wary when new folk approached her. Every apartment block and workplace had informers who would run to the NKVD at the slightest provocation. They might be jealous because you had a better apartment or a more pleasant job than them; perhaps they thought you had not been effusive enough when greeting them in the street. Maria did her best to be friendly with everyone, as had always been her way, but you never knew who were your true friends and who were secret enemies. As the Komsomol meetings proved, one could turn into the other in the blink of an eye.

* * *

Stepan turned eighteen in 1937 and left school to study at the Leningrad Institute of Foreign Languages. He chose English as one of his subjects and Maria was able to help him practice. It was the language she and her family had always spoken at home, and she was as fluent in it as she was in Russian. Peter did not speak a word of English, so sometimes they teased him.