One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore – review

In the historical note that concludes this gripping page-turner, Simon Sebag Montefiore insists that it is "not a novel about power, but about private life – above all, love". But he has set it in the last decade of Stalin's rule, its characters are members of the Soviet elite, and more than half of the action takes place in the shadow of the Lubyanka. We are in a world that Sebag Montefiore, the author of an award-winning history of Stalin's court, knows intimately, a world where private life is treated as a privilege. Romantic love is feasible (and there is lots of sex), but none of the main characters manages to evade the monstrous clutches of the state. Redemption was not really what Stalin's Moscow was all about.

The story hinges on the fortunes of a group of 18-year-olds at School 801, the exclusive academy that had educated Stalin's children in the previous decade. There is Marina Dorova, known as Minka, whose father Genrikh is the minister of state control and whose mother, Dashka, is minister of health. Nikolai Blagov's father is a diplomat, Vladimir Titorenko's is in charge of Soviet aircraft production and Rosa Shako is the daughter of a Soviet airforce commander. Most striking of all is George, the second son of general Hercules Satinov, Stalin's longstanding comrade-in-arms and a full member of the politburo. Children with pedigrees like this do not walk the few blocks to school; when they turn up for the summer term, they arrive in chauffeur-driven cars. A Rolls-Royce glides up to the metal gates (the spikes of which are tipped with gold) and disgorges Serafima Romashkina, the daughter of one of Stalin's favourite scriptwriters. Accompanying her is her mother, Sophia Zeitlin, a woman instantly recognisable as the voluptuous star of a smash wartime film.

It is all a bit overwhelming for the new boy, Andrei Kurbsky. He has walked to school with his mother; he is the son of an enemy of the people and has only just been granted permission to return to Moscow. There is no money anywhere to pay his fees. But he turns out to have a passion for poetry, and he wins the respect of his classmates by quoting Pushkin in their literature class. Pushkin will stand throughout the book for romance and the Russia all have lost, and the final token of Kurbsky's acceptance by his classmates comes when they invite him to join their gang, the so-called Fatal Romantics Club. His new friends initiate him into the Game, a re-enactment of the fictitious duel between Eugene Onegin and the poet Lensky. They meet, in costume, in an old graveyard. If music and not poetry were now their theme, it would have shifted to a disturbed minor key. But we have already witnessed the final tragic scene. Soon after Kurbsky's initiation, two players of the Game are killed by real guns that have been substituted for their replicas. These are Kremlin children, so the secret police are called at once. With that the case transfers to the Lubyanka, a building whose very name is shorthand for a state that reduces human lives to dust.

The passages that deal with the investigation are the strongest in the book. There is the bleak formica desk, the single naked bulb. The walls are spattered with dried blood; the mattresses have urine stains. Thousands of lives have been extinguished in this place, and most victims were innocent of any crime, but because these suspects are children, innocence has a special poignancy. Kurbsky and George are beaten, threatened, kept awake. Behind the scenes, their fates depend on the political competition between Lavrenty Beria, the head of the NKVD, and the chief of the wartime counter-intelligence agency, Smersh, but in the Lubyanka itself things are getting desperate enough. Their interrogators decide that the Fatal Romantics club is a cover for a wider plot to overthrow Stalin. To collect extra evidence, they kidnap George's younger sister, six-year-old Mariko, and 10-year-old Senka Dorov. In a depressingly credible scene, young Senka has to decide which of his parents to implicate in a plot to sabotage the Soviet state.

As they wait for news of their children, the adults, all of them survivors, if not direct beneficiaries, of earlier terror, know that they must say nothing of their private pain. At a dinner with Stalin and Beria, Satinov does not breathe a word about the case. But it turns out that he has other secrets to protect. The love stories Sebag Montefiore writes about are partly family ones, for power corrupted the closest of parental ties. There are also two secret romances, but it is the state, and the occult workings of politics, that corrupt and shatter every dream.

This is Sebag Montefiore's second novel, and the author has been careful to watch its shape. Pain is kept within reasonable bounds; the cellars where the shooting happens remain off stage. But most readers prefer love to blood and urine stains, and no one wants to close a book without some grain of hope. For millions, the real world of Stalin was not quite like that. But parts of this story are based on interviews with the children of Stalin's court, and what has come to be known as "the Children's Case" did happen. So the book gives us more than mere romance, and whether its subject is love or power, it is certainly a darkly enjoyable read.