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saw revealed in each other. I looked in the mirror of Finn and he looked in mine, and we began to see who we could be, who we really were.
    Finn used to list the things he loved about me, in a sort of league table of characteristics that changed positions according to his whims. But I remember one true and beautiful thing he said, from early in our relationship, which stuck in my mind more than others.
    We were in a corner suite at the Marco Polo Hotel, north of Pushkinskaya and our room looked down on to the ice park.
    ‘I forget how to pretend when I’m with you,’ Finn said to me.
    And I felt the same way about being with him. I’d fallen like a stone, but what I said was: ‘You think you’re good at pretending?’
    ‘Are you?’ he said, smiling.
    ‘Yes. Better than you by a million miles.’
    ‘Pretend this, then,’ he said, and he kissed me.
    But Finn’s reckless frivolity got him into trouble with others, particularly his masters at the British embassy, on more than one occasion.
    ‘It is symptomatic of your behaviour,’ was the way Finn’s head of station put it. ‘You don’t seem to take anything seriously any more.’
    But he was wrong on both counts. First, Finn hardly ever took anything seriously.
    ‘There’s hardly anything worth taking seriously,’ he would say.
    And, second, when he did take something seriously, he took it more seriously than anyone, his head of station included, could possibly have imagined.

4
    I T WAS NOT ONLY my father who was delighted when Andropov came to power, but also the whole of the KGB. And as soon as he had power, the old spy pursued a two-pronged policy. He ruthlessly put down dissent, including punishing people who committed economic crimes, and simultaneously he set about loosening the same reins a little by allowing a small, KGB-controlled experiment in free trade.
    This was hugely significant in terms of how Russia has developed. A few carefully chosen so-called buzinessmen - traders with their own semi-legal tzekhs, or workshops- were allowed to conduct business while at the same time being closely monitored by the security services.
    What Andropov and his cronies failed to see–or, more probably, exploited-was that the only people who could take advantage of these little windows of opportunity were the criminal elements, the mafia, the men who had conducted business throughout thehistory of the Soviet Union. They were the only people who knew what to do.
    And so the mafia were the first to benefit from perestroika when it finally arrived under Gorbachev in 1985. They were already in pole position, the only ones with money. By the nineties they had completely entrenched their power. And with them were their allies in the KGB who watched over them and shared in the spoils. Thus the secret state and the mafia state were married in a devil’s pact.
    ‘It was the KGB itself who managed perestroika right from the beginning,’ Finn said. ‘Perestroika was an invention of the KGB’s.’
    But from inside the KGB I couldn’t see it.
     
    For my final exams, I wrote a short story, which won me a prize at school. It was a fictional tale about the last man to be executed in the Soviet Union for possession of more than ten thousand dollars; holding more than ten thousand dollars was still a capital offence under Gorbachev.
    The story was called, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’, a tongue-in-cheek title that echoed the thoughts of the condemned man as he looked out of his cell window on to the execution yard on his final morning on earth, and saw that it was snowing. My father was furious that I appeared to see injustice in the man’s execution.
    After my parents returned to Moscow, all the years I’d spent with Nana in the capital and at the dacha in Barvikha, with only brief visits from them, hadn’t prepared me for the fact that my father evidently felt he still had complete power over my future.
    Like our leaders, my father always looked angry. Sometimes