A week later, our chambermaid saw him as he emerged from the laundry room of our house in Damascus. He was reeking of vodka, she said, despite not being airborne. I had fallen asleep in the unwashed clothes, also reeking of vodka.

Though both of us denied everything, he was sent home, lost his job and disappeared. If I am honest, it was I who had seduced him and I tried to blot his fate from my mind.

That summer, in an effort to improve my holiday moods, I was given a Persian kitten by one of my father’s diplomatic friends in Damascus and he became my main companion. I called him Genghiz and played with him all the time, eventually taking him back to Moscow. He was a cat with magical powers. He would patrol the neighbourhood around Leninsky Avenue frightening the stray dogs and making the militia’s guard dogs whimper. At Barvikha he took over the forest and cowed the KGB guard dogs there too, but he was the best of friends with Nana’s Siberian cat whom he protected.

I was eleven when I first learned my father was a spy. He told me why our lives were different from those of the others on embassy territory. Even the ambassador, I’d noticed, treated my father with unnatural respect. And my father was always working.

‘The SVR are the workhorses of the Soviet state,’ he told me, as though reading from some thirties manual of appropriate slogans. ‘Diplomats are there thanks only to their Party connections.’

With little attempt to disguise it, he despised my mother’s father Viktor for his diplomatic status.

But to me his remark was a terrible insight into who ruled in Russia and who still, effectively, rules today. Nobody ever mentioned the people at all then, except as an ideological abstract. Nor do they now. But wasn’t it our people who worked in the factories and fields who were the workhorses of the state? No, they were just glue. Try asking a Russian MP today what the people would like and you’ll be met by the blankest stare of incomprehension. It is not even cynicism, in my opinion. The people are actually invisible.