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They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get through a journey without trying to lodge some kind of a complaint. In Leningrad without an internal passport, they said. Praskovya explained that she was about to leave the city anyway, she was on her way back home to Moscow. No passport, they said, shaking their heads. Come with us. They packed Praskovya in a cattle car headed east. Full of unwholesome types. Street peddlers and drunks, vagrants, the puffy, pockmarked faces you’d see emerging from patched-up overcoats, red against the cold, wheedling on street corners, begging you to let them darn your socks or replace your buttons for a few good turnips or a crust of bread. She tried to e

They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get through a journey without trying to lodge some kind of a complaint. In Leningrad without an internal passport, they said. Praskovya explained that she was about to leave the city anyway, she was on her way back home to Moscow. No passport, they…

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