While writing historical novels, I read a staggering number of memoirs, including handwritten ones and books passed around in samizdat. Most of them, alas, were little more than inventories of Important Events. This happened, then that happened, then history marched on in heavy boots. The truly interesting details had to be extracted like gold dust.

And how happy I was when I found them: the small, vivid things no textbook would ever bother to mention. A smell in a communal kitchen. A quarrel over tangerines before New Year’s Eve. A dress altered three times because there was no fabric to buy. These details did what dates and decrees never can: they brought a vanished world back to life and gave it breath, color, emotion, and meaning.

Memoirists often dismiss such things as too ordinary to record. Surely everyone knows this. Why write it down? But that is the great illusion. Everything changes, and then everything is forgotten: what people ate, how they celebrated, what they dreamed of, what they feared, what they considered normal, and what they never even thought to question.

The Soviet Union has sunk into the abyss, and with it disappeared an entire world unlike any other. When I tell my son that we had no private property, and that doing business was considered a crime, he can hardly believe me. What do you mean, you couldn’t sell your own apartment? Why couldn’t people simply travel abroad? Why did the state get to decide such things?

I realized that I needed to write down my memories. Not as a solemn parade of milestones, but as a living world. I want readers, even a hundred years from now, to step inside that world and feel what kind of time it was, what kind of country it was, and what kind of people we were.