Stalin’s Ghost

PROLOGUE

Winter was what Muscovites lived for. Winter knee-deep in snow that softened the city, flowed from golden dome to golden dome, resculpted statues and transformed park paths into skating trails. Snow that sometimes fell as a lacy haze, sometimes thick as down. Snow that made sedans of the rich and powerful crawl behind snowplows. Snow that folded and unfolded, teasing the eye with glimpses of an illuminated globe above the Central Telegraph Office, Apollo’s chariot leaving the Bolshoi, a sturgeon sketched in neon at a food emporium. Women shopped amid the gusts, gliding in long fur coats. Children dragged sleds and snowboards, while Lenin lay in his mausoleum, deaf to correction, wrapped in snow.

And, in Arkady’s experience, when the snow melted, bodies would be discovered. In Moscow that was spring.