11 Sep 2013 03:38:37
Attending Moscow's most exclusive school, they form a Pushkin-inspired club, the Fatal Romantics, and swear to "live for love and romance". But when a play-acting duel goes wrong and two of them die, their club is discovered and condemned as "bourgeois sentimentalism", the children – some as young as six – are arrested and imprisoned, and Stalin's inquisitors embark on a witch-hunt.
Sebag Montefiore's knowledge of the period helps him bring 1945 Moscow to bleak, fascinating life, its "crumbling buildings… drab, beige, peeling, khaki, grey". He reanimates historical figures to unsettling effect, from Stalin himself to his dissolute son Vasily, and, most disturbingly, Beria, "his green-grey man-breasts hanging pendulously like a camel's buttocks". But One Night in Winter is more than a recreation of history: by turns engrossing and upsetting, Sebag Montefiore makes his cast of children both hopelessly romantic – "If we cannot live with love, we choose death" – and
