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carpet. At the far end of the hall, under a vaulted ceiling, tables were arranged in banquet style, with a head table and several oval-shaped ones placed around a dance floor. A chamber orchestra played Tchaikovksy’s ‘Nocturne in D Minor’. I was surprised when the head waiter led my father and me to one of the front tables.
    When we were all seated, one of the guards marched to the double doors and announced that Comrade Stalin had arrived. We rose to our feet. I noticed the worker opposite my father and me wiping his trembling hands on his thighs.
    ‘Don’t get excited,’ my mother had cautioned me about meeting Stalin. ‘Let him do the talking, and don’t express your opinions … on anything.’
    Stalin entered the hall accompanied by three uniformed guards. He wore a grey marshal’s uniform and his hair was brushed back from his forehead. He moved slowly and deliberately, meeting the eye of anyone who was bold enough to look into his face. I lowered my gaze when he looked in our direction. Stalin emanated authority, although he was shorter and older looking than he appeared in his portraits. He was followed in by the heroes Valery Chkalov, his co-pilot Georgy Baidukov and navigator Alexander Belyakov, and several commissars. They took their places and Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, welcomed us and proposed a toast to ‘our great leader and teacher of all peoples’. Then he toasted Chkalov and his crew as ‘knights of culture and progress’.
    The meal began. The feast set out before us included Olivier and beetroot salads, caviar and pickled vegetables for starters, followed by mushroom soup and fish. What impressed me most wasn’t the variety and abundance of the food, or the champagne and fine wines served in crystal glasses, but the quality of the bread. The rolls were so soft and sweet that they dissolved in my mouth; they didn’t need butter or oil to make them palatable. I had never tasted bread like it. Our family was spared the queues for bread rations because my father’s position meant that we received special parcels of items that weren’t always available in the stores. Even then the bread was often hard and bitter. The shortage of bread, I had discerned from whispered conversations around me, had something to do with the peasants in the countryside — with their farms being turned into collectives. When I’d asked my mother about it, I’d received the mysterious reply: ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.’
    After the main course of chicken cutlets and vegetable pie, our leader rose to give a speech about aviation and its importance to the Soviet Union.
    ‘Vast expanses of our great country are still not linked by roads and railways,’ he thundered. ‘Air travel is the most promising solution to this problem. The Motherland needs courageous and determined pilots with this vision.’
    He spoke like he moved: unhurriedly and with intention. Each word penetrated my consciousness. But he didn’t need to convince me. I already had ambitions of learning to fly like my brother, Alexander, who was a cadet in the air force. I’d learned from my instruction that women in the Soviet Union were the equals of men, unlike women in the West. Even those from poor families could go to university to study science or engineering, or rise to become factory managers.
    Valery Chkalov stood up to speak next. Although I had read every thrilling detail about his transpolar flight in Pravda , it was exciting to hear the story from the man who had lived it. I hung on each word while Chkalov described how the plane’s compass had become inoperable as the crew neared the polar region, and how from then on Belyakov had to rely on dead reckoning and a solar heading indicator as his guides. I gasped along with everyone else when Chkalov explained how headwinds and storms caused the fuel to be consumed faster than anticipated and depleted the crew’s