‘The people are the grease in the machine,’ my father said once.

Russian elitism remains unchanged from the Middle Ages and is far worse than anything in the West.

When my father wasn’t toiling as a workhorse of the state in a ‘normal’ way–in other words, engaged in the SVR’s fight against the waves of truth that threatened to wash over the Soviet Union-I remember him sitting in an upholstered red leather swivel armchair in his private study. I was forbidden to enter, but on the occasions when I broke into his sanctum, I always saw him drinking. Even as a child, I thought ‘Why does he always drink? What is he hiding? He’s trying to avoid the truth.’

These drinking sessions often went on long into the night. Scotch whisky was what drew his drinking partners, who came and went unannounced, and he always had a ready supply from Grandfather Viktor, though he still despised Viktor for these ‘unearned’ privileges.

My mother, intelligent, educated, witty, would do stray and unchallenging embassy jobs as a typist or telephone operator. The position of the housewife was revered in the Soviet Union, rather as the cow is revered by Hindus. It was a state policy that clumsily blundered over, and then blunted, a natural instinct, I thought. They nationalised some normal human instincts, while others they simply crushed.

So as a housewife my mother’s unused degree in philology became merely a status symbol for my father and lay mouldering in the attic of her past.

Sometimes, very rarely, there’d be something to cause a ripple of excitement in Damascus–for me, at any rate.

One July day when, as usual, I was playing table tennis in the hot dusty compound, my father’s secretary ran outside to tell me to come immediately. Inside the house, my father and mother and a man I didn’t recognise were standing around a beautiful cello, which my father had bought for my mother a few months before. They were standing at a safe distance, as if the cello was an unexploded bomb. Everyone was silent, my father was frowning, my mother looked scared.