Murder and love in Kremlin among Moscow’s elite in 1945

One Night in Winter

He has defeated Hitler and has surrounded himself with poisonous and sweaty militia, many of whom have children at School 801, the educational establishment for the elite ‘responsible workers’ of Moscow.

Two of the school’s pupils, a boy and a girl, are shot dead one night on a bridge near the Kremlin, and this becomes known as the Children’s Case. Stalin himself becomes distracted and then fascinated by the developing investigation.

His own daughter Svetlana and son, Vasily, who turned out to be the world’s most over-promoted and debauched baronial schemer until Uday Hussain more than 60 years later, also attended the school (except the real school was more colourfully named 175.)

Nearly all of this is true, by the way, and this novel is structured around real events in Moscow 70 years ago. Many of the characters featured, such as Stalin, Lavrentiy Beria (executed in 1953) and Molotov (lived until 1986 still praising Stalin) and other Politburo members have walk-on parts, either in meetings with Stalin himself, or as cruel interrogators. The main characters are imagined, but the clever juxtaposition of real people and the fictional players makes for a well told story of alarming vividness.

Post-war Russia encouraged a terrified society in which to have a family was a gift of the state. Pretty young wives of politburo members who may have been recorded expressing an opinion, by means of a bugged line or a ‘confession’, disappear without so much as a by-your-leave.

Grieving husbands in uniform come into work the next day, and continue spying on each other (Stalin loved to pit his bulls against each other): “Don’t worry, the state will find you another wife”.

The investigation reveals that the two dead children were members of an adolescent secret society called the Fatal Romantics who met and enacted the works of the great romantic poets. Pushkin was a favourite and Onegin, his novel in verse, the absolute pinnacle of their obsession. The society’s authenticity was perfected in that Pushkin himself died in his 29th duel, fought over the attempted seduction of his wife by a French officer. But the Fatal Romantics decided, in a moment of foolishness, to expand their remit and fantasised about a new politburo with themselves in all the key roles. It was obviously a joke, in that they were all teenagers, but the romantics wrote everything down in a velvet covered book.

This discovery is when it all starts to become quite nasty.

There are sub-plots that include an intriguing life-long love affair that is not unlike that of Dr Zhivago and Lara.

Maybe Omar Sharif and Julie Christie can play the older versions of the characters when the film is made, which it will be.

Simon Sebag Montefiore ingeniously blends the invented with the real but, like the author’s name, the story is a tad too long.

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