A solitary figure crossing the courtyard at night inching towards a manhole… this is how Moscow looked like in the 50s of the past century.  I thought this photograph to be appropriate for the cover of my new collection of short stories, quite a few of which are  “inhabited” by protagonists born around that time, with a long shadow of Stalin still hovering over their lives.

When I began writing this book the grey monolith of the Soviet civilization, with its language, its signs and symbols seemed to be gone forever: the hammer and sickle eagerly replaced by a two-headed eagle; streets and cities jumping back to their original, pre-revolutionary names. When I finished the book, the history went in reverse, with the KGB operative firmly leading the country to a new abyss. What is it in human psyche that makes such disastrous detours possible? Looking for an answer I wanted to examine the lives of people who were neither heroes nor villains. Among them I found cads and cowards, bureaucrats and secret sadists against whose grim moral backgrounds the small acts of kindness and grace and mercy shine with a brighter, more treasured light.

For the sake of this light I wrote my stories.