Harold and Jane Barrington surrendered their passports, and when they first arrived in Moscow, they were feted and fed as royalty. Only Alexander seemed to notice the smell in the bathrooms, the lack of soap, and the brazenly destitute with rags on their feet who collected outside their restaurant windows, waiting for the dirty dishes to be brought into the kitchen so they could eat the scraps. The drunken squalor in the beer bars to which Harold Barrington took Alexander was so depressing that Alexander finally stopped going. He didn’t care how much he wanted to be with his father.

At the residential hotel where they were staying, they received special treatment, along with other expatriates from England, Italy, and Belgium.

Harold and Jane got their new Soviet passports, thereby permanently severing their ties with the United States. As a minor, Alexander would not be getting his Soviet passport until he was sixteen and had to register for the compulsory military service.

Alexander went to school, learned Russian, made many friends. He was slowly adjusting to his new life when in 1935 the Barringtons were told that they would have to leave their rent-free accommodation and fend for themselves. The Soviet government could no longer keep them. The trouble was, the Barringtons could not find a room for themselves in Moscow. Not a single room in any communal apartment anywhere. They moved to Leningrad and, after weeks of going from one housing committee to another, finally found two rooms in a squalid building on the south side of the Neva. Harold found work at Izhorsk factory. Jane’s drinking increased. Alexander kept his head down and concentrated on school.

It all ended in May 1936, the month Alexander turned seventeen years old.

Jane and Harold Barrington were arrested in the least expected way—but also the most ordinary. One day she did not come home from the market.

All Harold wanted was somehow to get a message to Alexander, but they had had bitter words and he had not seen the boy in two nights.

Four days after his wife’s disappearance, there was a soft knock on Harold’s door at three in the morning.

What Harold did not know was that representatives of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs had already come for Alexander.

A man named Leonid Slonko was Jane’s interrogator at the Big House. “What funny things you say, Comrade Barrington,” he said to her. “How did I know you were going to say them?”

“You’ve never met me before,” she said.

“I’ve met thousands like you.”

Really, thousands, she wanted to say. Are there really thousands of us coming from the United States?

“Yes, thousands,” confirmed Slonko, as if she’d spoken. “They all come. To make us better, to live the capitalist-free life. Communism requires a sacrifice, you know that. You must put away your bourgeois aesthetic and look at us as a new reformed Soviet woman and not as an American.”

“I have put away my bourgeois aesthetic,” Jane said. “I’ve given away my home, my job, my friends, my entire life. I came here and started a new life because I believed. All you had to do was not betray me.”

“And how did we do that? Did we do that by feeding you? By clothing you? By giving you a job? A place to live?”

“Then why am I here?” she asked.

“Because it is you who have betrayed us,” said Slonko. “We cannot abide your disillusionment when we are trying to rebuild the human race for the benefit of all mankind. When we are trying to eradicate poverty and misery from this earth.”

Slonko added, “And let me ask you, Comrade Barrington, when you expressed contempt for our country by calling on the U.S. embassy in Moscow a few weeks ago, did you perhaps forget that you have given up your allegiance to the United States by advocating the overthrow of democracy? By being connected with the Popular Front? By giving up your American citizenship? You are not an American citizen. They do not care whether you live or die.” Slonko laughed. “How silly all of you are. You come here from your countries, decrying their governments, their customs, their ways of life that are repulsive to you. Yet at the first sign of trouble, who is it that you contact?” Slonko slapped the table. “Be assured, comrade, that the American government couldn’t care less about you right now. They’ve forgotten who you are. The file on you and your husband and your son has been sealed by the U.S. Department of Justice and put into a vault. You are ours now.”

It was true. Jane had gone to the U.S. embassy in Moscow two weeks before her arrest. She had taken the train with Alexander. She must have been followed. The reception she got at the embassy was chilly at best: the Americans had no interest in helping either her or her son.

“Was I followed?” she asked Slonko.

“What do you think?” he said. “You’ve shown that your fealty is a fickle thing. We were right to follow you. We were right not to trust you. Now you will be tried for treason under Article 58 of the Soviet Constitution. You know that, too. You know what’s ahead of you.”

“Yes,” she said. “I just wish it would come quicker.”

“What would be the point of that?” Slonko was a big, imposing man of advancing age, but he still looked strong and skilled. “You understand how you look to the Soviet government. You have broken with the country you were born in, then spat on the country that provided for you and your family. You were doing quite well in America, quite well—you, the Barringtons of Massachusetts—until you decided to change your life. You came here. Fine, we said. We were convinced you were all spies. We watched you because we were cautious, not vindictive. We watched you and then we wanted you to stand on your own two feet. We promised you we would take care of you, but for that we needed your undying loyalty. Comrade Stalin expects—no, requires—nothing less.

“You went to the embassy because you changed your mind about us the way you changed your mind about America. They said, sorry, but we don’t know you. We said, sorry, but we don’t want you. So what’s there for you to do? Where do you go? They won’t have you, we don’t want you. You have shown us you cannot be trusted. Now what?”

“Now death,” said Jane. “But I beg you, spare my only son.” She lowered her head. “He was just a young boy. He never surrendered his U.S. citizenship.”

“He surrendered it when he registered for the Red Army and became a Soviet citizen,” said Slonko.

“But the U.S. State Department doesn’t have a subversive file on him. He never joined the Communists there, he is not part of this. I beg you—”

“Why, comrade,” Slonko said, “he is the most dangerous of you all.”

Jane saw her husband once before appearing in front of a tribunal presided over by Slonko. After a speedy trial, she was put in front of the firing squad, turned blind to the wall.

Until his arrest Harold Barrington’s concern for Alexander did not outweigh his despair at being caught with his dreams around his ankles.

He had been in prison before; incarceration did not bother him. Being in prison for his beliefs was a badge of honor, and he had worn that badge proudly in America. “I have sat in some of the best jails in Massachusetts,” Harold used to say. “In New England no one compares to me in what I endure for my beliefs.”

The Soviet Union had turned out to be a land of soup kitchens. Communism wasn’t working as well in Russia as everyone hoped because it was Russia. It would work great in America, Harold thought. That was the place for Communism. Harold wanted to bring it back home.