Sashenka

Winter 1916. Sixteen-year-old Sashenka Zeitlin is growing up amid wealth, political intrigue and revolutionary conspiracy in the final months of imperial Russia. While her mother moves through the fashionable world around Rasputin, Sashenka is drawn towards the Bolshevik underground and risks arrest by the Tsarist authorities. Her choices carry her through revolution and into a Soviet adulthood in which political loyalty has become inseparable from family survival.

Two decades later, during the Stalinist terror, Sashenka is married to a powerful Soviet official and raising two children when a forbidden affair exposes the family to catastrophic danger. A later strand follows the effort to reconstruct what happened from fragmentary archives and suppressed memory. Montefiore mixes invented protagonists with real figures including Rasputin, Lenin and Stalin, using documented political events while fictionalising private encounters and family history.