The Lost Daughter follows Maria through the Russian civil war and the Bolshevik economic experiments that led to the famine of 1921–22, in which a staggering five million Russians died. There was a mass movement of peasants to the cities thereafter and the population of St. Petersburg grew rapidly. Citizens lived in communal apartments, often sharing a single room with other families and sleeping in curtained-off areas. Several families used the same bathroom and cooking facilities, leading inevitably to conflicts between neighbors, but I decided to make Peter a shock worker and give his family an apartment of their own.

The Cheka was formed by Lenin in December 1917 as a secret police force to root out enemies of Bolshevism. It had the power to conduct its own nonjudicial trials and executions, and to torture suspects. In 1922 the Cheka was reorganized and eventually the NKVD, the dreaded police force of Stalin’s regime, took over. Hundreds of thousands of Russians were convicted by NKVD troikas and either executed or sent to gulags. There were waves of purges through various professions—the army, doctors, kulaks—and against any perceived enemies of the state. Between 1936 and 1938, in what became known as the Great Terror, over a million people may have died in front of firing squads or in the notorious gas vans. Those whose family members had been jailed or executed came under suspicion themselves, and becoming an informer was one way to avoid arrest.

The siege of Leningrad was one of the most avoidable tragedies in twentieth-century history. Stalin completely misread Hitler’s intentions when he signed a nonaggression pact with him in 1939, and the Soviet army was totally unprepared for invasion, not least because many of its top commanders had been purged in the preceding years. Once the siege began, Stalin seemed to write off the beleaguered city as indefensible and failed to prioritize getting supplies through. Between September 1941 and January 1944, around a quarter to a third of the prewar population of Leningrad died—700,000 to 800,000 people. In the brutally cold January and February of 1942, around 100,000 were dying per month. For years afterward, the siege was rarely spoken about, either inside or outside the Soviet Union. There were references to “hardships” suffered in wartime, but it was only after the collapse of Communism that the true scale of the horror came to light in the form of survivors’ memories and diaries. I’ve used many details from these in my descriptions of conditions.

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