Could Stalin be deposed?

He wondered how many Kremlin insiders were asking themselves the same question.

He entered his parents’ apartment building, the ten-storey Government House, across the Moskva River from the Kremlin. They were out, but his sister was there with the twins, Dimka and Tania. The boy, Dimka, had dark eyes and hair. He held a red pencil and was scribbling messily on an old newspaper. The girl had the same intense blue-eyed stare that Grigori had – and so did Volodya, people said. She immediately showed Volodya her doll.

Also there was Zoya Vorotsyntsev, the astonishingly beautiful physicist Volodya had last seen four years earlier when he was about to leave for Spain. She and Anya had discovered a shared interest in Russian folk music: they went to recitals together, and Zoya played the gudok, a three-stringed fiddle. Neither could afford a phonograph, but Grigori had one, and they were listening to a record of a balalaika orchestra. Grigori was not a great music lover but he thought the record sounded jolly.

Zoya was wearing a short-sleeved summer dress the pale colour of her blue eyes. When Volodya asked her the conventional question about how she was, she replied sharply: ‘I’m very angry.’

There were lots of reasons for Russians to be angry just now. Volodya asked: ‘Why’s that?’

‘My research into nuclear physics has been cancelled. All the scientists I work with have been reassigned. I myself am working on improvements to the design of bomb sights.’

That seemed very reasonable to Volodya. ‘We are at war, after all.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said. ‘Listen. When uranium metal undergoes a process called fission, enormous quantities of energy are released. I mean enormous. We know this, and Western scientists do too – we have read their papers in scientific journals.’

‘Still, the question of bomb sights seems more immediate.’

Zoya said angrily: ‘This process, fission, could be used to create bombs that would be a hundred times more powerful than anything anyone has now. One nuclear explosion could flatten Moscow. What if the Germans make such a bomb and we don’t have it? It will be as if they had rifles and we only had swords!’

Volodya said sceptically: ‘But is there any reason to believe that scientists in other countries are working on a fission bomb?’

‘We’re sure they are. The concept of fission leads automatically to the idea of a bomb. We thought of it – why shouldn’t they? But there’s another reason. They published all their early results in the journals – and then they stopped, suddenly, one year ago. There have been no new scientific papers on fission since this time last year.’

‘And you believe the politicians and generals in the West realized the military potential of the research and made it secret?’

‘I can’t think of another reason. And yet here in the Soviet Union we have not even begun to prospect for uranium.’

‘Hmm.’ Volodya was pretending to be doubtful, but in truth he found it all too credible. Even Stalin’s greatest admirers – a group that included Volodya’s father, Grigori – did not claim he understood science. And it was all too easy for an autocrat to ignore anything that made him uncomfortable.