The Soviet Union was a prison, especially for the lively minded, whose travel abroad and activities at home were dictated by the Communist Party’s cultural commissars. But in the period between the end of the Stalin terror and the start of the Brezhnev era’s grim stagnation, a lucky few enjoyed some wisps of freedom.

Cultural continuity between that period and a lost past is the central theme of “Zhivago’s Children”. The metaphorical reference is to Tanya, the child of Yuri and Lara Zhivago in Boris Pasternak’s great novel. Brought up by peasants, “she has no opportunity to inherit the tradition of free-thinking, spirituality and creativity that her father embodied.” How will she turn out? The novel leaves that fictional question unanswered. Vladislav Zubok’s book shows, with great sympathy and insight, what happened to Tanya’s real-life counterparts.

The Zhivago legacy is Russia’s “silver age”, when Anna Akhmatova, a poet, and Vasily Kandinsky, a painter, as well as others, flowered towards the end of the tsarist era and in the emancipated years immediately after the Bolshevik revolution. But Stalin, who liked uplifting stories and pictures featuring combine harvesters, banned their work as subversive and decadent. Many perished in the murderous frenzy of the 1930s. Yet enough survived to preserve at least some of the knowledge and traditions of the past.

The huge expansion of Soviet higher education after the war was supposed to create docile “cultural cadres”. What emerged were young people, marked by “boundless, sparkling optimism”, proud of their country’s achievements but open-minded to its failings. After Stalin’s death, their independent thought and behaviour became “oxygenated”. Tight-knit circles of friends, kompany in Russian, discussed love, life, letters and more. In one such group the young Mikhail Gorbachev struck up an instant, passionate and lifelong liaison with a bright culture-vulture called Raisa.

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