A Train to Moscow - Elena Gorokhova (33 of 2023 Feb 8)

 In post–World War II Russia, a girl must reconcile a tragic past with her hope for the future in this powerful and poignant novel about family secrets, passion and loss, perseverance and ambition.

In a small, provincial town behind the Iron Curtain, Sasha lives in a house full of secrets, one of which is her own dream of becoming an actress. When she leaves for Moscow to audition for drama school, she defies her mother and grandparents and abandons her first love, Andrei.

Before she leaves, Sasha discovers the hidden war journal of her uncle Kolya, an artist still missing in action years after the war has ended. His pages expose the official lies and the forbidden truth of Stalin’s brutality. Kolya’s revelations and his tragic love story guide Sasha through drama school and cement her determination to live a thousand lives onstage. After graduation, she begins acting in Leningrad, where Andrei, now a Communist Party apparatchik, becomes a censor of her work. As a past secret comes to light, Sasha’s ambitions converge with Andrei’s duties, and Sasha must decide if her dreams are truly worth the necessary sacrifice and if, as her grandmother likes to say, all will indeed be well.

Another taste of the Russian psyche with its suspicion of the enemy without and the enemy within or at least the planting of that suspicion by the state, a people manipulated, misled, forced to spy on each other, told a version of history that we would say is fake news. Particularly apposite as we sit here enduring Putin’s destruction of Ukraine, showing that nothing much has changed in 80 years or more. How we would love to communicate with ordinary Russians, learn more about their country and culture, visit etc. That seems a pipe dream now even though they are, in reality, just like us, but let down more than we are by their leaders. Government should be for the people but in Russia it is for the state, the ruling elite. The curtain on stage - the division between reality and make-believe - which is which? The iron curtain - another division - why is it there, why is it necessary? So many questions.