His parents were not great drinkers. They rarely took more than one small glass. Now and again his father went to one of Stalin’s long, boozy dinners with old comrades, and staggered in through the door in the early hours of the morning as drunk as a skunk. But in this house a bottle of vodka lasted a month or more.

Volodya went into the kitchen. His parents were having breakfast, canned sardines with black bread and tea. ‘Father,’ he said, ‘why do we have six years’ supply of vodka in the store cupboard?’

His father looked surprised.

Both men looked at Katerina, who blushed. Then she switched on the radio and turned the volume down to a low mutter. Did she suspect their apartment had concealed listening devices, Volodya wondered?

She spoke quietly but angrily. ‘What are you going to use for money when the Germans get here?’ she said. ‘We won’t belong to the privileged elite any longer. We’ll starve unless we can buy food on the black market. I’m too damn old to sell my body. Vodka will be better than gold.’

Volodya was shocked to hear his mother talking this way.

‘The Germans aren’t going to get here,’ his father said.

Volodya was not so sure. They were advancing again, closing the jaws of a pincer around Moscow. They had reached Kalinin in the north and Kaluga to the south, both cities only about a hundred miles away. Soviet casualties were unimaginably high. A month ago 800,000 Red Army troops had held the line, but only 90,000 were left, according to the estimates reaching Volodya’s desk. He said to his father: ‘Who the hell is going to stop them?’

‘Their supply lines are stretched. They’re unprepared for our winter weather. We will counter-attack when they’re weakened.’

‘So why are you moving the government out of Moscow?’

The bureaucracy was in the process of being transported two thousand miles east, to the city of Kuibyshev. The citizens of the capital had been unnerved by the sight of government clerks carrying boxes of files out of their office buildings and packing them into trucks.

‘That’s just a precaution,’ Grigori said. ‘Stalin is still here.’

‘There is a solution,’ Volodya argued. ‘We have hundreds of thousands of men in Siberia. We need them here as reinforcements.’

Grigori shook his head. ‘We can’t leave the east undefended. Japan is still a threat.’

‘Japan is not going to attack us – we know that!’ Volodya glanced at his mother. He knew he should not talk about secret intelligence in front of her, but he did anyway. ‘The Tokyo source that warned us – correctly – that the Germans were about to invade has now told us that the Japanese will not. Surely we’re not going to disbelieve him again!’

‘Evaluating intelligence is never easy.’

‘We don’t have a choice!’ Volodya said angrily. ‘We have twelve armies in reserve – a million men. If we deploy them, Moscow might survive. If we don’t, we’re finished.’