In 1976, when I was seven, I asked Nana why our leaders always looked so cross. The reason, she said, was that no matter how hard they tried they could never completely take away everyone’s power. The impossible task naturally made them very angry. The biggest, most ruthless secret service in the world couldn’t control the inner lives of its own people.

‘Tyrants become tyrants by force of will,’ she said. ‘By imposing their power on others. But that’s the easy bit. They can never be truly powerful, however, unless they also take away every last morsel of power from other people. And that, as far as I know, is not possible until death.’ And she laughed with triumph. ‘But then they lose that power anyway to God!’

Nana, like many others, didn’t accept the illusions handed down by the state, by my grandfather Viktor, the economic adviser, or my father. Nana chose her own illusions. And she made her chosen illusion her own reality, her power, and in this she was free. It was a lesson I haven’t properly understood until now.

In 1976, I went to a school in Moscow reserved for the elite, but, thankfully, not one of the schools attended only by children of KGB officers and which my father considered to be academically slothful and run solely on the basis of privilege. I was lucky in this.

With true Soviet panache, the school was called Number 47. I met a more interesting mixture of people there, many from our apartment block, though I was aware even at that age that I was different, one of only two pupils in the school who was the child of a senior SVR officer. The headmaster was always deferential and I knew of his instruction to other teachers to ‘go easy’ on me, ‘to be careful’, to treat me with kid gloves.

I was supposed to make friends with Vladimir, a boy two years older than me, whose father was also in the SVR, but I disobeyed my father’s instructions and formed a crush on Misha who was in the same class as me, and the same age. I wrote Misha a letter.