Maria Ivanovna Gerasimova was not actually an Estonian, though she’d been born there fifty years before. Her family was composed entirely of ethnic Russians, since the small Baltic state had been part of the Russian Empire under the czars, only to experience a brief “liberation”—as the troublemakers called it—between the world wars, during which the Estonian nationalists had not made life overly easy for ethnic Russians. Her earliest childhood memories of Tallinn were not all that pleasant, but like all children she had made friends who would be friends forever. They’d even survived her
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