In Russian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who experienced the worst of the Soviet Union’s terrors, this is not just a throwaway adage but a strategy for self-preservation. As Alex Halberstadt’s father — the son of one of Stalin’s former bodyguards — attests: ‘There is no more to be gained from sifting through the past than through cigarette ashes.’
Halberstadt, a Soviet-born American writer, doesn’t agree. Aged nine, soon after leaving Moscow with his family and defecting to the West, he began having a recurring nightmare in which he was chased by a ferocious bulldog, a dream that lingered into adulthood. Contrary to the proverb, ignorance, it seems, is a shoddy defence against night terrors. Throughout his life an inner dread has followed him like a ‘medieval possession’, something he believes is an inherited affliction, with roots in his family’s unacknowledged past.

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