Moskva

Acknowledgements

Moskva is fiction and it goes without saying that no one in this book existed, except for the ones who did.

Thanks go to Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown for fixing the deal. To my editor at Penguin, Rowland White, for his sharp editorial eye and remorseless insistence that if we just did… (and endless cups of coffee). To Emad Akhtar, also at Penguin, for making a few but highly pertinent suggestions. My copy-editor, Emma Horton, who tweaked and trimmed and added thats, and stamped ruthlessly on repetition.

I owe a research debt to Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad and Berlin, and Keith Lowe’s Savage Continent, and an even bigger debt to Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which Le Monde called ‘the greatest Russian novel of the twentieth century’. (They probably forgot Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita.)

I’d like to tip my hat to Grigori Chukhrai’s 1959 Ballad of a Soldier, made during the Khrushchev thaw. It won the Special Jury prize at Cannes in 1960, the same year that La Dolce Vita took the Palme d’Or: a perfect counterpoint of East and West. A tip of the hat also to those who shared their memories of living or working in 1980s Moscow. Tom Fox is an amalgam of two or three people.

You know who you are.

Finally, love and thanks to Sam Baker, my partner, who was writing her own novel and wrestling with setting up a company while I was off, holed up in garrets and hammering away at a laptop. Here’s to still hanging round ley lines littered with sites of slaughter and canonization. I’m glad. Kisses for Mayakovsky is included for you.