Lara Novikova belongs to a class the Soviet system wasn’t supposed to have, and never officially admitted to: the nomenklatura, the children and spouses of Party and ministerial officials who lived a visibly different life from everyone around them — better apartments, foreign goods, travel clearances, doors that opened because of whose daughter you were rather than anything you’d done yourself. Her father, a Deputy Minister of Culture at the beginning of the novel, has given her exactly that kind of life. She studies at GITIS, the Soviet Union’s premier school for actors and theater professionals, the kind of place a government minister’s daughter got into without much difficulty and that most Soviet teenagers never saw the inside of.
It would be easy to write her off as simply spoiled, and in some ways she is: used to getting what she wants, used to people making room for her. But privilege built her into someone who makes room for other people too, instinctively and without calculating what it costs her: the friend who introduces you to everyone she knows, who vouches for you before she has any real reason to, who stays loyal past the point it’s convenient. It’s a kind of generosity only available to someone who’s never had to worry about running out. But it’s generosity all the same, and Jack, arriving in Moscow as a stranger with nothing, becomes one of the people it lands on.
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