And so the mafia were the first to benefit from perestroika when it finally arrived under Gorbachev in 1985. They were already in pole position, the only ones with money. By the nineties they had completely entrenched their power. And with them were their allies in the KGB who watched over them and shared in the spoils. Thus the secret state and the mafia state were married in a devil’s pact.

‘It was the KGB itself who managed perestroika right from the beginning,’ Finn said. ‘Perestroika was an invention of the KGB’s.’

But from inside the KGB I couldn’t see it.

For my final exams, I wrote a short story, which won me a prize at school. It was a fictional tale about the last man to be executed in the Soviet Union for possession of more than ten thousand dollars; holding more than ten thousand dollars was still a capital offence under Gorbachev.

The story was called, ‘Not a Great Start to the Day’, a tongue-in-cheek title that echoed the thoughts of the condemned man as he looked out of his cell window on to the execution yard on his final morning on earth, and saw that it was snowing. My father was furious that I appeared to see injustice in the man’s execution.

After my parents returned to Moscow, all the years I’d spent with Nana in the capital and at the dacha in Barvikha, with only brief visits from them, hadn’t prepared me for the fact that my father evidently felt he still had complete power over my future.

Like our leaders, my father always looked angry. Sometimes his crossness spilled into rage and that always terrified me, until I learned to suppress my fear. My mother, however, never seemed to lose her nerve.

‘He has a very stressful job,’ she’d say. ‘He has to think about everything.’