The famine that decimated Annushka’s village officially never happened. Since she was a child, she’s kept quiet about what she saw in an implicit bargain with the Soviet regime: behave, and you might live to see your parents again.

She survives by keeping her head down and cultivating the image of a loyal, if not terribly bright, citizen. When the Nazi invasion of Ukraine forces her to flee east, however, she meets people as disillusioned as herself: Diana, a former ballerina pressed into serving as a concubine for a powerful man; and Viktor, a haunted veteran returning from imprisonment in a labor camp. With them, she finally feels free to speak the truth.

But this is Stalin’s Russia, and anyone can betray her.

The Silence that Remains is a sweeping historical epic that takes readers from Paris to the far reaches of Siberia, and from the battlefields of World War I to the end of the gulag system. But it is also a deep exploration of what decent people do when prosperity, and even survival, depend on falling in line behind one of history’s most brutal dictators and his devoted enforcers.