"Older men declare war, but it is the youth that must fight and die." - Herbert Hoover

Natalia Alianovna Romanova was born in the industrial city of Stalingrad on January 3, 1960. She came screaming into the world just before dawn, in a blocky Soviet hospital on the banks of the Volga River. The winter day was frigid, the wind whipping through streets dusted with grainy snow. Less than a generation before, the Battle of Stalingrad had laid waste to most of the city and killed more than million people. It was one of the most devastating engagements in the history of human warfare and marked the beginning of the end for Hitler's Germany on the Eastern Front. The Allies prevailed, though ideological differences and the passage of time would fracture ties between countries that had, at least in theory, shared a common goal for the duration of the war. After the peace, a modern metropolis rose from the rubble and ashes of the Hero City, becoming an important center for the production steel, oil, chemicals, and ships for the Motherland.

Shortly after the little girl's first birthday, when she was a happy, chubby-faced toddler with strawberry-blonde curls and two adoring parents, the Khrushchev government in Moscow changed the city's name to Volgograd. The Soviet Union, born in blood at the dawn of the 20th century and tempered by war, was turning a corner into a modern era of prosperity. To do so, it must shed the poisonous legacy of Stalin and his Gulag. Sputnik was an example to the world that the country was forward-thinking, even as it built a wall of concrete and wire to bisect the already-divided city of Berlin. That same year, it would put a man into space before the United States. It was by a margin of mere weeks, but that was enough to make another victorious claim of "first". The race for supremacy was well under way.

In the fall of 1964, Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown for Leonid Brezhnev. Under this new leader, who was himself the son of a metalworker, the military proliferated, driven by the logic that it would serve as a deterrent to war. At the same time, culture was increasingly repressed beneath conservative and backward policies. Three-year-old Natalia, whose hair was now a bright coppery shade that stood out against the gray landscape of her home, was eager to start school. From the windows of her parents' small apartment, she watched the other children who lived nearby come and go all winter. She knew her numbers and letters, her colors, and the sounds that animals made, though the only animals she'd seen in real life were cats, dogs and pigeons. The child did not know that the young and charismatic president of the United States, who had come to Berlin to decry the building of the wall by her country, had been assassinated on a street in Dallas nearly a year before. Neither did she know that missiles on an island named Cuba had brought the Eagle and the Bear to the brink of mutually assured destruction, or that there was an escalating conflict in a faraway country called Vietnam. The stories her daddy told her when he came home from his factory job were full of fairies and snow maidens, not monsters.

The fire that killed three American astronauts in January of 1967 was widely propagandized in the Soviet Union, presented to its citizens as evidence of the superiority of the Soviet system. Yuri Gagarin in was an international celebrity and a Hero of the Soviet Union, the handsome dream of many young girls, at least until his sudden death in 1968. The next year, Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong's "small step for man" catapulted the United States to the forefront of the space race. Young Natalia walked the streets of Volgograd to school and back, wearing a bulky hand-me-down coat and a green wool cap. Before it had been a sweater of her father's, but her mother had unraveled the old garment and knitted the hat just for Natalia. Each morning, her unruly mass of hair was temporarily tamed into two long braids that hung down her back, so as not to distract her from her schoolwork. She had a white blouse and plain pinafore like all the other girls, with itchy wool stockings. Sitting in her wooden desk, her feet didn't touch the floor. Across the Atlantic ocean, children in American schools practiced ducking under their desks and covering their heads, in case the Russian bogeyman decided to attack. That was an image that never entered the girl's head as she bent it over her schoolwork, doing sums and printing neat answers on the clean, white page.

When she was eight years old, a fire that happened much closer to home completely reshaped Natalia's small, secure world. Once she started going to school, her mother got a job at the same factory where her father worked. Even so, when she returned home in the afternoon, eager to share the news of her day, her mother was always there with a smile and a snack. One day, when winter snows finally seemed to be giving way to spring, there was a man in a dark suit sitting at her kitchen table instead of her mother. He introduced himself as her Uncle Ivan, though she had never seen him before that she could remember. His warm brown eyes had looked very sad when he bent down to tell her that her parents had been killed by a fire at the factory. Because of that, she must come to live with him in a big house with many other girls. She didn't want to leave the small apartment, the only home she had ever known. The bedspread her mother had sewed covered her narrow cot and her drawings were hung on the walls; this was the place where her mother baked such good bread and daddy made her laugh. In the end, she had no choice. They didn't take anything from her meager collection of toys or books, nor any of her clothes - only what she had on her back. When they got where they were going, even those few items were stripped from her, including her green hat...