‘Maupassant always took lunch in the Eiffel Tower,’ Finn once told me, ‘because he hated it so much, and it was the only place in Paris he couldn’t see it.’

So it was with us at Barvikha, though of course we loved the place. But we could somehow look beyond the ugly presence of guards and fences and the instruments of repression because we were on the inside.

‘That’s what it’s like to be on the inside of the KGB,’ Nana said. ‘If we look out we can’t see where we are.’

She was right. From inside the KGB, from inside the KGB’s forest, we had the view of the world outside, but we couldn’t see the ugliness of our position in the Soviet apparat. And as I sank deeper and deeper into the Russian secret state, I observed less and less of what I was actually doing on its behalf.

Nana preferred to be at the dacha rather than in Moscow and would grumble bitterly when she had to take me back to school after the weekends. She would hurry me out of class on a Friday afternoon and, unless we went to the circus or the fairground, both of which she loved, we would go straight out to Barvikha in one of my father’s official cars, just the two of us.

Nana distrusted our KGB privileges more than she disliked them. She was of a generation where nobody was safe, regardless of how exalted they were in the system. But the one privilege she wholeheartedly enjoyed were the two chauffeurs and the official black Volga cars with their special plates and flashing blue lights which could whisk us out to the forest on a Friday night, or back from Barvikha into the centre of Moscow on a Sunday night at high speed, without militia interference.

But in Barvikha she was at home, and so was I. Other than the official cars, she rejected all the elite services we had in Moscow and could have had at Barvikha.