The Betrayal by Helen Dunmore is the sequel to The Siege and follows the lives of Anna, Andrei, and Kolya in 1952 Leningrad. While the traumas of the Leningrad siege still live within each of them, they have carved out normalcy in their lives years after the war. Andrei is a successful doctor, Anna is a pre-school teacher, and Kolya attends school and enjoys upsetting the neighbors with his piano playing. Their peace is threatened, however, when a ten-year-old patient comes under Andrei’s care. The child, Gorya Volkov, is faced with terminal illness and so Andrei and his colleagues must come up with the best course of treatment. Sounds like a fairly normal procedure, right? Well, yes, if the child was not the son of a high ranking Soviet official.
The elder Volkov constantly tries to “catch out” Andrei and his colleagues, questioning them as if they are already arrested and holding them personally responsible for his son’s cancer. Andrei knows anything and everything he says or does will be scrutinized with the brutal closeness of a suspicious Soviet official looking for an easy scapegoat. Andrei and Anna try to prepare for the worse, as they are not completely ignorant of arrests and people being sent away to work camps or executed. Their lives abruptly come crashing down just when they have built a fragile happiness despite the insidious powers that be.
Helen Dunmore takes a routine, if tragic, plot into higher stakes of life and death that ripple from Andrei outward. While The Betrayal is overall heartbreaking, I did not find myself as deeply moved and immersed as with The Siege. The brutality of the arrests, imprisonments, and executions of no doubt millions of Russians will stick with you through Andrei’s experiences.
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