The Children of Perestroika
novel
publication scheduled by Albin Michel in May 2026
The Children of Perestroika is set in the early 1990s in a small Soviet republic, on the eve of the collapse of the Soviet Union.
One morning, ten-year-old Verochka, a gifted piano student raised in a family of Communist intellectuals, wakes up in a city gripped by shortages, brutal winters, and mounting political tension. The familiar order quickly dissolves: books are burned for heat, loyalties fracture, and adult certainties quietly unravel. At the piano, however, another order persists — governed not by ideology but by sound — offering a fragile refuge and the first glimpse of freedom.
As Perestroika reshapes daily life, the reforms that promise renewal instead hasten disintegration, leaving millions facing exile, uncertainty, and disillusionment. Within Verochka’s own home, a passionate love affair threatens to break a family already on the brink of collapse.
Moving between tenderness, absurdity, and loss, The Children of Perestroika is a coming-of-age novel about what remains when everything is lost — and how a child, through music, creates a new homeland beyond the ruins of a vanished world.
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“Every single thing in our apartment now serves a single purpose: it must burn.
And yet there are never enough things.
First the old recipes vanish into smoke. Then newspapers, magazines, address books, essays, school notebooks. The forests around the city burn too. The furniture. The doors. Wooden dolls. The floorboards. The clogs and the playgrounds of my childhood.
When nothing remains, the books come next.
I often reread them — one last time. I learn them by heart. I copy out whole passages, or hide them beneath my bed, or in my wardrobe under old clothes, like prisoners awaiting execution. But they are almost always discovered, and my father loses his temper.
He carries them back to the dining room and feeds them to the flames just to warm a little soup…
The History of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union burns quickly. But Balzac’s Human Comedy, which my mother refuses to surrender until the very last moment, takes much longer. My father says it depends only on the number of pages and the quality of the paper, while I watch the black letters on the white page writhe before disappearing forever. With them vanish the characters, the scenes, the eras, the feelings, the memories, the ideas — all swallowed by the voracious flames.”
"
Like an acrobat placing a foot upon a rooftop, in a deafening silence I lay my hands on the piano and strike the opening chord of the Pathétique Sonata.
A pause.
Like a heartbeat fading.
Several long seconds.
A second chord.
Another pause — like a bow drawn taut.
They are all watching me, holding their breath — Andrei Belëv in the front row, waiting for my shoes to slip, for me to fall. But I hold steady.
Silence.
One more.
And then the waves of fire come.
Voracious, they set the dull hall ablaze. The crowd draws nearer now. I see its monstrous shadow swell along the walls, hear the storm’s thunder, fierce, and its flashes of anger rekindle the gilded stucco of the ceiling. Once again I hear the relentless cries:
“Down with the government!”
I hold my breath and, as before, plunge in.
Exalted, I swim in this liquid fire. I surrender myself to it completely. The notes become living beings. Restless, they race along the keyboard, collide, stagger, fall, and scream with exhaustion and despair. They are naked. They are bound. They have nothing left to lose before the infinite darkness, winter, death. This is their last chance to remain alive.
And then I forget everything: my mother, Belëv, the competition, the audience, overwhelmed by an all-consuming freedom. I am alone before it, carried by it, possessed by it, and the entire world ceases to exist.
The visual world of the novel...
