When she was little, before the Incident, she had a doll named Alina. The doll was a cheap thing, made of carved wood and salvaged rags, with bits of black wool for hair, but she was Natalia's doll, made for her by her Babushka. Alina was many things, a Tsarina, a spy, an engineer, an explorer, a revolutionary, a writer, a student, a mother, a soldier. She was Natalia's escape.
The fireplace is the door to Hell which Alina the Spy had to skirt as the evil Mister Smith tried to push her into its firey depths. The kitchen counter is the fifth floor apartment Alina the Engineer had to live in as she worked to better the lives of the proletariat. The windowsill was the freezing Arctic ledge that Alina the Explorer had to cross the reach safety. The patch of floor next to Natalia's bed is a grand court where Tsarina Alina holds court and helps her people fight cruelty. The dusty spot next to the coal scuttle is where Alina the Revolutionary rallies her troops to crush the greedy bourgeoisie.
Natalia created a world, filled with sidekicks named Roman, Fyodor, and Irina, lovers called Mikhail, Leonid, and Josef, and villians like Mister Smith and Baroness Von Fuester. She built worlds, characters, countries, adventures, lives, everything right down to their favourite colour. She plans who they fall in and out of love with, what they wear, what they like and dislike, who they'e friends with, who they hate. She, in her narrow purview of the world, lives through them, they do the things she only dreams of, they allow her to see the world without leaving her parents' apartment.
Her mother used to jokingly complain that Natalia used to spend more time in her imaginary world then in reality. Madame Romanova would smile sadly and indulge her daughter these little things; a fantasy world was so little to give when so many of the little delights she'd had when she herself was a child were not allowed or far to expensive for the already stretched salary of a factory worker.
When her family's apartment goes up in flames Alina burns with it, her little wood body shrinking into nothing. With the doll goes Natalia's world. She's a big girl, she has to live in the real world now.