Another tragic Russian heroine

Karl Marx wrote that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. It’s tempting to adapt that and say that historians also often repeat themselves, first as biographers, second as novelists. Having written a book about Stalin’s court, and then a biography of Stalin himself, Simon Montefiore now publishes Sashenka, a novel about the horrors visited by Stalin on one family. Stalin appears here as an unsettling combination of rustic, avuncular warmth (‘his feline, almost oriental face smiling and flushed and still singing a Georgian song’) and ice-cold lunacy.

The novel is divided into three parts. In the first, which takes place between 1916 and 1917 in St Petersburg, Sashenka Zeitlin, the teenaged daughter of a wealthy Jewish financier, is recruited into the Bolshevik party. She is arrested for her activism and pursued by a Tsarist officer, who tries vainly to turn her into an informer, but then sees her party’s dream realised when the old ruling classes are swept aside. In the second and longest part, set in Moscow in 1939, Sashenka is married to a senior Communist officer and edits Soviet Wife and Proletarian Housekeeping magazine. They enjoy a pleasant standard of living — city apartment and grand country house — which, ironically, is similar to that which Sashenka enjoyed as a child and against which she fought. The only difference now is that a stray word, or even a false rumour, can cost you your life, and soon enough the world which Sashenka and her husband helped to create turns on them. Serious, moral Sashenka has an affair, and the repercussions lead to her arrest and torture and the loss of her beloved children, Snowy and Carlo. In the third part, set in 1994, a young historian is hired to investigate Soviet archives, and we discover what eventually happened to Sashenka and her family.