The Soviet Sisters
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Synopsis
From bestselling author of The German Heiress, a gripping new historical novel filled with secrets, lies, and betrayals, following two spy sisters during the Cold War.
"Anika Scott pens a fascinating tale of secrets, surveillance, and sisterhood.... The Soviet Sisters will suck you in to the very last page!" —Kate Quinn, New York Times bestselling author of The Diamond Eye
“Electrifying, meticulously researched, and expertly plotted, The Soviet Sisters is at once a Cold War thriller, a gripping spy story, a page-turning mystery, and a familial drama.” —Lara Prescott, New York Times bestselling author
Sisters Vera and Marya were brought up as good Soviets: obedient despite hardships of poverty and tragedy, committed to communist ideals, and loyal to Stalin. Several years after fighting on the Eastern front, both women find themselves deep in the mire of conflicts shaping a new world order in 1947 Berlin. When Marya, an interpreter, gets entangled in Vera’s cryptic web of deceit and betrayal, she must make desperate choices to survive—and protect those she loves.
Nine years later, Marya is a prisoner in a Siberian work camp when Vera, a doyenne of the KGB, has cause to reopen her case file and investigate the facts behind her sister's conviction all those years ago in Berlin. As Vera retraces the steps that brought them both to that pivotal moment in 1947, she unravels unexpected truths and discoveries that call into question the very history the Soviets were working hard to cover up.
Epic and intimate, layered and complex, The Soviet Sisters is a gripping story of spies, blackmail, and double, triple bluff. With her dexterous plotting and talent for teasing out moral ambiguity, Anika Scott expertly portrays a story about love, conflicting world views, and loyalty and betrayal between sisters.
Release date: July 12, 2022
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
Print pages: 368
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The Soviet Sisters
Anika Scott
Siberia, 1956
Shoulder to shoulder, we’re marching down the packed snow road. There are five of us in the row, me on one end, the coldest place in the line, my arm dragging against the snowbank. We’re like marionettes joined by the sleeves, women made of wood. We lurch forward at the same pace, careful where we put our shabby boots. If one of us falls, the guard might get angry. When I move, the ice cracks in the fibers of my coat. I want to march faster to stay warm, but I can’t.
“Halt!” the guard calls behind us.
We don’t turn our heads to see how far away we are from the rest of the work brigade. Out the corner of my eye is the snowbank and behind that, the white trees all around. In front of us, the road goes on and on, long and empty, vanishing in the fog at the foot of the mountains. That’s the edge of the world. There’s nothing on the other side of the mountains, nothing at the end of the road. Not for me. Not yet. I have six more years here. I’ve lost track of how long a year is, so I concentrate on today. Now. If I get through enough days, enough nows, I’ll be free.
Behind us, the guard is pacing. I hear his gusting breaths and the crunch of his boots. We’re far enough away from the work brigade that I can’t hear their shovels as they clear the road of hard snow. The guard has us to himself, and I’m glad the five of us prisoners are here together. We all are. Instinctively, we press closer, arm to arm, mitten to mitten, like a wall.
“Anyone have to go behind a tree?” the guard asks.
We don’t move.
“You haven’t had a break all morning. Go on. If you need to relieve yourselves, go ahead.” Something in his tone reminds me of my sister. Even when Vera was nice, she was always something else underneath, something I couldn’t trust.
Down the line, I feel a shift. One of the women really does have to go, but she can’t; she can’t break the line. I’ve been in the Gulag more than a quarter of my life; I know all the games the guards play. He might let her relieve herself in peace and rejoin the line, or he might shoot her for trying to escape. He gets 50 rubles for that, I think. That’s what our lives are worth. Fifty little rubles.
None of us break the line. The guard paces behind us, his tone suddenly different. “What are you anyway? Traitors. Spies and traitors. You think you can afford to be ungrateful?”
We’re standing with our backs to him, but I know, we all know, that he’s raised his rifle. It’s pointing at her, and then her, her, her. Me. We might be spies and traitors, but we aren’t stupid. We don’t move. Don’t say a word.
“Let’s warm you up, then. Sit,” he cries.
We drop to the snow. My bones feel like they’ll snap in the cold like twigs.
“Stand.”
We’re slower on the way up. I press my mittens on the knees of my trousers, straightening my back.
“Sit.”
Down we go. The minute I’m down, I hardly know how I’ll get up.
“Stand.”
I don’t know how much longer I can do this. As I struggle to stand, I dream of being rescued, Henry appearing in the road, pointing his Browning at the guard, a car idling behind him, ready to take me away.
“Sit.”
Nine years. For almost nine years, I’ve been a prisoner in this or that camp. Nobody is going to save me. Nobody is going to take away the pain and the cold place on my spine where I feel the guard’s rifle pointing at me.
“Stand.”
Get through today. That’s all I have to do. Get through my now. One day nobody will shout at me anymore. I won’t hear the guards in my head. That’s when I’ll know I’m free.
We’re standing shoulder to shoulder, five women, the wall unbroken, but the guard is determined. “You!” The woman beside me stiffens. The guard is right behind us, his rifle at her back, touching her coat. I can feel it too. I might be next. “Walk.”
I’m dreaming again, but instead of Henry in the road, it’s Felix beside me where the snowbank is. He’s enduring this too. His arm presses into mine, holding me up. He understands the lesson this place teaches me every day: I’m never going home, not as the woman I used to be. I’m worth nothing now. I’m not even human.
But I am.
I turn to the snowbank and the white trees. Deep in the thickening forest, I see Vera as a wraith peering at me from the shadows.
I am.
MILITARY COLLEGIUM OF THE SUPREME COURT OF THE USSR
25 JUNE 1956
MOSCOW
To Comrade Rudenko
Enclosed are a series of recordings made by your former colleague, Vera Ilyanovna Koshkina, regarding the case of her sister, who was convicted of treason in 1947. These recordings are remarkable for their vivid detail and confessional tone.
However, there appear to be some inconsistencies with the known facts of the case. The contradictions in her account may only be a fault of her memory, since the events took place nine years ago. Regardless, I believe an external review of these recordings is in order before we make a decision about her sister’s case.
Chairman, Military Collegium
Cheptsov
Testimony for Chairman A. Cheptsov
Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR
Moscow, 28 February–3 June 1956
[BEGIN RECORDING]
Comrade, we live in a new age. Stalin is dead, three years dead, and with him the fear of speaking the truth. At last we can speak free from the threat of a bullet or of men knocking on the door at night. This is what I believe, and why I’m trusting you with this account of my investigation into the case of my sister, Marya.
The preliminaries for the record: My name is Vera Ilyanovna Koshkina. I’m a lawyer by training and serve as an aide to our highest government officials in the Presidium, my specialty in legal and security matters and topics related to Germany. Years ago, I served as an officer of state security, assisting the prosecution in the war crimes trials at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
My work at the Kremlin focuses on government policy, but at heart, I’m a lawyer concerned with justice above all else. The guilty should be punished, the innocent freed. It goes without saying that this work should never be done at the expense of the truth. But there are the more difficult cases, where innocence and guilt, truth and lies, are harder to untangle.
On 13 August 1947, the court found my younger sister, Marya Ilyanovna Nikonova, guilty of espionage, counterrevolutionary activities, and treason to the Fatherland under Paragraph 58. There were many unanswered questions about her true activities in Berlin, where she was arrested, but after a quick investigation, she was sentenced to fifteen years in the Gulag. At the time I wasn’t permitted access to her case, for reasons I’ll be laying out for you here in these recordings.
The taint of having a traitor in the family has weighed on me, our mother, and my youngest sister for nearly nine years. While Stalin lived, the smallest suspicion of disloyalty could lead to imprisonment, exile, or death. To protect ourselves, we did what it seemed right to do at the time: cut off contact with Marya, removed her photograph from our homes, and relied on the support of the friends and colleagues who knew us to be good and loyal comrades. My husband, Nikolai Koshkin, the deputy foreign minister, has been crucial to my family’s survival. Without him, I believe we would have shared Marya’s fate, and I would not be here in a position to seek the truth of her case.
Making the decision to do this has not been easy. By the time Stalin died, the silence about my sister had become a habit. I admit to being too frightened to break it. Too many years had passed. I needed courage, a sign that it was time to overcome the fear that had kept me from looking truthfully at what my sister had done.
Several days ago, I finally heard the call for change that I needed to bring me to this moment.
It happened at the Great Kremlin Palace. Without warning, all of us Soviet delegates and functionaries were called to attend a secret, unscheduled session of the Twentieth Party Congress. I sat with my husband in the second row, my notebook open on my lap, ready to take notes as I’d been doing throughout the congress, even though I, like everyone else, thought the congress had already ended.
When First Party Secretary Khrushchev took the podium, he began to speak about what I assumed was an afterthought the party leadership wanted the rest of us to learn, something about the “cult of the individual” and its harmful consequences. But Khrushchev’s tone hardened the moment he mentioned Stalin. He quoted Lenin, saying that Stalin “is capricious and abuses his power.” From there, we knew, all of us in the room knew, what was happening. We should’ve guessed it the moment we arrived at the hall to see a statue of Lenin and nothing, not even a portrait, of Stalin. Behind his row of microphones, Khrushchev delivered blow after blow against Stalin. He spoke of repression, torture, terror, purges, the long list of injustices committed in our country since as long as many of us could remember. For hours, we listened in shock as he raged and shook, dismantling the shining image of Stalin that had dominated our lives. “Comrades,” Khrushchev said, “don’t repeat the errors of the past.” This phrase resonated so deeply inside me, I hardly heard what came after until he declared, “Long live the victorious banner of our party—Leninism!” I was swept up in the applause that exploded throughout the hall and rose to my feet in a standing ovation.
After the speech, my husband and I filed out of the hall in silence, the delegates around us looking numb with shock. Side by side, Nikolai and I walked home across Red Square and past the mausoleum where Stalin and Lenin are laid to rest, and then through the city to the river, following the water to the skyscraper that is our home on the Kotelnicheskaya Embankment. In the living room, Nikolai drifted to the drinks cabinet, I to the cigarettes on the table. We still hadn’t said a word to each other since the speech. The shock sat too deep. Khrushchev had called the last thirty years, Stalin’s entire rule, into question.
The KGB inhabits a part of our building, and it is no secret our apartment is bugged. If I want to discuss anything of real importance with Nikolai, we must turn on the radio, and so I did, a broadcast about industrial quotas, at full volume.
“It’s time, Kolya,” I said to my husband. “I’m reopening Marya’s case.”
Nikolai was at the window. The rooftops of Moscow spread out below us, a soothing view that always gave us a moment of rest, the belief that we were high above the squabbles and intrigues at the Kremlin and the Foreign Ministry. He was as shaken by the speech as I was but didn’t show it. Always the diplomat, his tie was precisely pinned and knotted, his face thoughtful. When he answered me, he used the tone he reserved for when he had to state uncomfortable facts.
“Nothing has changed, Vera. I’m afraid your sister is still a traitor and a spy.”
It stung me to hear it said, especially from him, no matter how he tried to soften it.
“You heard Khrushchev today,” I said. “We don’t have to be afraid to talk about the past anymore. He already has. In front of everybody. He talked about things we all knew and were too scared to admit. People executed on the word of an informant, or sent to the Gulag without evidence of a crime. We know—I knew all along—innocent people were sent to Siberia. What if Marya—?”
“Marya wasn’t innocent. You know what she did. You were there.”
He meant in Berlin, the place where everything had happened, my sister’s downfall. “I have to find out the truth of her case,” I said. “I owe it to her.”
“You don’t owe her anything. You barely survived after what she did in Berlin.”
“We don’t know precisely what she did. They rushed the investigation. She was convicted within weeks of her arrest.”
“Because everybody could see how guilty she was.”
“Because no one wanted to look any closer. I was in the security services back then, Kolya. I know how much they cared about the truth.”
Nikolai took me by the shoulders in the way of an equal, a comrade in arms.
“Leave it alone, Vera. We’ll have enough to do shielding Khrushchev from the fallout from his speech. Stalin may be dead, but his friends aren’t. They’re going to fight back. This is no time for us to get distracted. I’m sorry about Marya, I truly am, but your duty is to the nation and people. Is your sister more important than your country?”
It’s a legitimate question, and one I still contemplate as I begin this investigation into my sister’s case. I’m recording my progress for the court to capture the evolution of my thinking about Marya in a form that is much harder to edit or redact than written testimony. To preserve the authenticity of events, and to aid my memory for detail, I will narrate my actions as if they are unfolding in the moment. To be safe, these recordings must remain classified. Marya’s case may force me to divulge sensitive information related to my work as an officer of state security in Berlin from May to July 1947.
As this case develops, I pledge to keep an open mind about my sister. She may very well be guilty of spying for a Western intelligence agency. Then again, maybe she isn’t the traitor we took her for all these years; and if she isn’t, what does that mean? What would it say about all of us, the country that condemned her, the family that kept silent for so long? If she’s innocent, what does that say about me?
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