It was not a place where the political tourist visited. Water and electricity were rationed but vodka (and its accompanying domestic violence) was plentiful. Abraham obtained a job as a factory welder and laboured under appalling conditions, while Boris refused to go to school and was classified a “hooligan” by Soviet authorities.

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By now, Abraham’s ideals were shattered; his God had failed, his hopes defiled. He wept openly and apologised often to his family for his disastrous mistake. And by now, all they wanted was to return to Australia. But with obstruction both from Soviet and Australian authorities, they had to wait four years.

There is an especially poignant account of the young Boris and his elder sister travelling alone to the British Embassy in Moscow – all the while under constant surveillance – to plead for exit visas. Countless beseeching letters, including from Boris himself (some seized by the Soviets, others now preserved in ASIO’s records), had proved fruitless.

Eventually, the Frankel family was permitted to return. But not Abraham. ASIO believed, falsely, he had been giving lectures across Russia extolling the virtues of the Soviet system, and he remained a threat to Australian national security. It was another three years – a total of seven – before he could set foot again in St Kilda. The personal cost of ideological zeal was high. Embittered, but never an apostate, he withdrew from communist activity.

These years in the “workers’ paradise”, capturing at the ground level what life was like inside Khrushchev’s Russia, are central to this book. But as its subtitle suggests, there is also much about the formation of the parents’ political outlooks in prewar Europe, their anti-Zionist Jewishness, the culture of dissident émigré communities in postwar Melbourne, anti-communism and the Petrov affair. The historical context of each is skilfully sketched (although Petrov’s importance is underestimated).

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The book straddles a sometimes uneasy mix of multiple genres – memoir, autobiography, philosophical musings and historiographical asides – but remains a remarkable, engrossing story about lost ideals and despair, bureaucratic obstruction and, ultimately, resilience and survival.

Phillip Deery is the author of Spies and Sparrows: ASIO and the Cold War (Melbourne University Press).

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