Yuri did not think often about her. It was much too painful. Nadya Davydov had loved Yuri and his younger brother Yegor and, to the best of her abilities, had protected her sons from the brutal beatings their father, Anatoly, gave them at the slightest provocation. Yuri still had scars on the back of his legs from a beating he got when he was eleven. He was in the fourth grade at the time and had been recently inducted into the Young Pioneers. Part of the uniform was a red scoutlike tie worn with a red flag pin containing a tiny portrait of Lenin. Somehow Yuri had lost the pin on the way home from school, and when Anatoly found out about it that night, he went berserk. In a drunken stupor induced by his consumption of nearly a liter of vodka, he’d beaten Yuri until Yuri’s pants were clotted with blood.

For the most part Nadya had been able to divert Anatoly’s nightly drunken bursts of violence onto herself. The usual scenario was for Nadya stoically to withstand a few blows along with Anatoly’s barbed ranting. Then she would stand defiantly between her husband and her children, sometimes with blood streaming down her face. Anatoly would continue to swear at her and threaten more blows. When she wouldn’t move or even speak, he’d shake his fists at his kids and shout that if they ever committed the same transgression that had stimulated his outburst, he’d kill them. He’d then stagger off to pass out on the only couch in the apartment. It was a scene that repeated itself almost nightly until Yuri had reached the eighth grade.

In 1970, on the eve of May 1st, the major Soviet holiday, Anatoly drank more than double his usual quota of vodka. In a particularly foul mood, he chased the rest of his family from the apartment, locked the door, and then passed out. During the night, while Nadya, Yuri, and Yegor slept as best as they could on the benches in the communal kitchen, Anatoly aspirated his own vomit. In the morning he was found cold and stiff with rigor mortis.

It was difficult for the family after Anatoly’s death. They were forced to move from their two-room second-floor apartment to a single room on the top floor of their tenement that was freezing cold in the winter and boiling hot in the summer.

More problematic was the loss of Anatoly’s income, although that difficulty was partially offset by significantly less expense for vodka.

Luckily, the following year Nadya received a promotion at the ceramics factory where she’d been employed since her graduation from vocational school. That meant that Yuri could stay in school through the tenth grade.

Unfortunately, Yuri developed into a withdrawn and belligerent teenager who got into frequent fights in response to teasing by fellow classmates. As a consequence, his studies suffered. His final grades and test scores were not sufficient for the university where his mother had hoped he’d go. Instead, he enrolled in the local vocational college and studied to become a microbiological technician. He’d been advised there was a burgeoning demand for the field, especially in Sverdlovsk. Conveniently for Yuri, the government had built a large pharmaceutical factory to produce vaccines for human and animal use.