A Shadow in Moscow by Katherine Reay

Author:Katherine Reay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Muse
Published: 2023-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Ingrid

Moscow

November 22, 1958

“A new tomorrow. A new dawn.”

Leo’s words played within Ingrid’s imagination all month—through every nappy change, late-night feeding, and quiet moment. She wondered what they could mean, for her and for their daughter.

For Leo, what they meant became immediately apparent.

He worked longer hours and started bringing work home. Oftentimes, during Anya’s midnight feeding, she’d find Leo shuffling through files, his reading glasses perched on the end of his nose. He was more dedicated and more secretive. And one evening, weeks after his liybimaya, his little darling, was born, he brought an odd device home with him. It was the size of a deck of playing cards, and it made a buzzing sound as he carried it all through the apartment.

“A friend gave me my own.” He waggled the device at Ingrid. “We will always be clean now.”

Ingrid squeezed Anya tight. “Why wouldn’t we be?”

“They listen everywhere.” Leo waved his hand. “And more so lately.” He kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “But not here, not to you, my little darling.”

He locked the new device in his desk’s top drawer and never mentioned it again. But he used it almost nightly.

Which was a good thing, Ingrid surmised, as Leo was a doting father who shared his secrets and his world with his liybimaya deep in the night as he rocked her to sleep. And things were not going well.

The wellspring of optimism following last year’s Sputnik launch had dried up. By insisting that all domestic hardware be kept under government control, the Central Committee now believed they’d lost the space race to the West. The United States was surging ahead and had just passed the 1958 Space Act to create NASA and do exactly what the Soviets forbade—drop all barriers to scientific collaboration between the government and civilian enterprise.

Additionally, defections from East Germany, the German Democratic Republic, continued to increase at an alarming rate, and the discontent in Grozny had not, in fact, faded away. It, too, was growing increasingly precarious.

“It’s a complex problem, you see,” he softly crooned. “But you are right, my baby girl. We must focus on here and now. The stars can wait. I will see what we can do about the GDR . . .”

Yes, Leo’s answer as to how to make the world better for his daughter was immediate. He worked relentlessly to solidify the Soviet Union’s supremacy and control at home and abroad.

Ingrid took longer to find her answer, but a month later, she believed she had.

She stood staring at the British embassy. She had never seen it before as she had never sought it out. Her ancestry always felt like a secret too hazardous to approach. But no more. She had watched her parents for years. She had listened and learned from Adam and Martin. And over the past several months, she had mastered fading into the background, a shadow within her own home. During that time, she had learned much of the inner workings of the CPSU, the Central Committee, the Politburo, and even the KGB.

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