Elvira Bary

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Marika Snegova, president of a premier Moscow logistics firm, is the “Snow Queen” of the Kremlin’s shadow economy. An architect of high-stakes evasion, she manages the clandestine supply lines that keep Russia’s sanctioned aviation industry airborne. To the Russian elite, she is a pillar of the new imperial order; in private, she is a woman waiting for the ice beneath her to crack.

The moment Russia invaded Ukraine, Marika’s estranged daughter, Alisa, abandoned her graduate studies at Harvard to join the defense effort in Kyiv. In a Moscow where disloyal elites have an unsettling habit of falling from windows, Marika’s dark secret could cost her more than her millions; it could cost her life.

When Alisa suddenly stops answering her messages, Marika’s calculated composure collapses into desperation. Blacklisted by her former Ukrainian associates and monitored by the FSB, she is forced to reach across the frontlines to the only man she can trust: Leo Bruneval.

An American engineer now designing drones for the Ukrainian Armed Forces, Leo was Marika’s first love. Their passionate affair in 1980s Moscow was crushed by the Soviet state; forty years later, they find themselves on opposite sides of a conflict far more brutal than the Cold War of their youth.

Dzerzhinsk, Gorky Region, USSR
1980

Marika vividly remembered the magnificent summer of 1980. The entire Soviet Union was breathless with pride, eyes fixed on our athletes. Ten gold medals, then fifty, then eighty. The stands roared and wept with ecstasy, while the rest of the world watched us in awe.

But all of that was happening in Moscow, four hundred kilometers away from the rusted swings where Marika sat. It was far from Dzerzhinsk, a city where nothing ever happened, save for the occasional drunken brawl outside a beer stall or a rare shipment of hard-to-find tights at the department store.

Marika was fourteen, dressed in a foolish red sundress, a hand-me-down from an older cousin. On her feet were dusty sandals with glued-on soles; in her dark hair, a homemade hair clip set with faux pearls.

Around her loomed the gray concrete boxes of high-rise apartments, and the same song wafted from every open window:

Goodbye, Moscow, goodbye!
The Olympic fairytale, farewell!

The entire neighborhood was watching the closing ceremony, but Marika had been punished by her father and sent out to the courtyard to “think about her behavior.”

She—a straight-A student and class monitor—had won nothing in the pavement-drawing contest at the local House of Culture. Her father had wasted money on flowers from the market, planning to congratulate her when the winners were announced. Instead, he forced her to give the bouquet to some bespectacled girl who had taken first prize, so that Marika would feel the full weight of her shame.

That girl had drawn the globe as a giant sunflower. Scaling its side was a jagged-toothed nuclear bomb, an American flag painted on its sleek black flank.

Marika had drawn the Snow Maiden—in the middle of summer, of all things.

Her father had been livid. “Are you a total fool?” he had barked at her. “Where is the ideological meaning in that?”

There truly was no meaning. Marika simply loved the illustrations in her storybooks—the beautiful maidens in white fur coats and pointed kokoshnik headdresses.

She had drawn it exceptionally well; even the head of the jury had praised her. But once the officials from the District Committee arrived, they chose a winner based on topical relevance.

Marika’s four-year-old brother, Gosha, had proven to their father that he knew all his letters, so he was allowed to watch the Olympics. She was sent outside deliberately so she would feel unwanted.

The setting sun glinted off the windows of the high-rises. Marika pumped the creaking swings with all her might, soaring higher and higher toward the sky, toward the gold and lilac clouds. The skirt of her sundress billowed like a sail.

Perhaps she should have cried from humiliation, but her mind was elsewhere: When I grow up, I’m moving to Moscow.

Marika already knew her life would be like a movie. She would achieve everything. She would have a fur coat just like the Snow Maiden’s, and she would watch the next Olympics from the stands, not from a television screen. And no one would ever punish her or cast her out again.

Never.