The Last Russian Doll

A prologue cast as a fairy tale introduces the novel's central motifs: a young girl who looks identical to her porcelain doll survives a massacre when armed men mistake her for the doll, but she carries it for so long she can no longer tell which of them is real.

In London in June 1991, Rosie White, born Raisa, a postgraduate student at Oxford, attends a reading by Alexey Ivanov, a nearly century-old Russian dissident. Alexey reads from The Last Bolshevik, his memoir of imprisonment on Stalin's White Sea Canal, a massive forced-labor project. When asked about the dedication to "Kukolka," Russian for "little doll," he refuses to name her. Rosie seeks a research-assistant position in Moscow, but her true motive is to investigate the unsolved murders of her father, Papa, and older sister, Zoya, shot in 1977 by a slate-eyed stranger in the family's Moscow apartment. Rosie's mother, Mum, born Yekaterina but known as Katya, who has an alcohol addiction, dies that month of liver failure. On her deathbed she tells Rosie that a brass key inside a porcelain doll opens a locked drawer in their former apartment. Rosie finds the key, viewing the trip as a final reckoning before her autumn wedding to Richard, her English fiancé. Alexey explains that his project involves finding Kukolka, a woman who went missing years ago, and warns there is no enlightenment in the past.

The narrative shifts to Petrograd in January 1916, where Valentin Andreyev, an orphaned Bolshevik orator raised by the radical writer Pavel Katenin, spots Antonina Nikolayevna, called Tonya, in a revolutionary crowd. Tonya is the unhappy wife of Dmitry Lulikov, a wealthy factory owner who treats her as a possession. Valentin plans to seduce her to humiliate Dmitry but falls genuinely in love. He breaks things off in fear but returns, and their relationship deepens. Dmitry gives Tonya a custom-made porcelain doll fashioned to resemble her, signaling his possessive nature.

Rosie arrives in Moscow in July 1991 and is taken to a remote dacha, or country house, rather than the promised apartment. Alexey assigns Lev, a stoic OMON (riot police) officer, as her bodyguard. Rosie begins experiencing phantom smells, snatches of music, and visions of a girl who resembles her. Using Mum's key, she opens the family's old stenka, a wall cabinet, and finds a porcelain doll containing a map of Tula province marking a house called Otrada. She and Lev drive to the village of Popovka, where an elderly man named Kirill gives directions to Otrada. They find the house in charred ruins, with an unburned doll placed among the creepers.

During the February 1917 Revolution, Valentin asks Tonya to leave Dmitry, tying a red ribbon around her wrist as a promise. She agrees but is newly pregnant. She faints, and Dmitry locks her away, sending a farewell poem on her stationery to make Valentin believe she rejected him. When Tonya escapes, young Bolsheviks kill Dmitry on the embankment. She goes to Valentin's cellar but finds Viktoria, Pavel's daughter, there in a state of undress. Heartbroken, Tonya returns to Otrada and gives birth to a daughter, Lena, helped by Kirill and Nelly, friends in Popovka. Valentin, never receiving Tonya's letters, marries Viktoria. Before leaving Petrograd, Tonya gives Countess Natalya Burtsinova, who loved Dmitry, a map marking Otrada. In 1924, Natalya tells Tonya that Valentin is ill in Moscow. They reconcile for one night, but Natalya sabotages his return as retribution for Dmitry's death.

Rosie reads Natalya's handwritten memoir, sent anonymously to the countess's elderly daughter, Akulina Burtsinova. She also studies handwritten fairy tales found among Mum's belongings and notices stylistic overlaps. Akulina shows her a photograph of Tonya, who looks strikingly like Rosie, deepening the suspicion that Tonya is her grandmother. Rosie researches Valentin, learning he was arrested in 1924 and exiled to the Solovetsky Islands, and theorizes that Alexey is Valentin under a new identity. Through Marina Katenina, Viktoria's daughter-in-law, she learns Valentin survived exile and returned to Moscow in 1933. At the Vernissage market, she recognizes the doll maker Eduard Rayevsky as the man who murdered her father and sister. That night, her recurring ghost reveals itself as Zoya, still bearing the wound that killed her.

By the late 1930s, Tonya and Valentin live in Moscow under assumed names with their twins, Katya and Mikhail. Valentin, returned from the camps deeply traumatized, edits underground anti-Stalin material. Tonya is interrogated weekly at the Lubyanka, the secret-police headquarters, by Sasha Ozhereliev, an officer who once helped deliver Lena. To protect Valentin, she attributes his treasonous writings to Pavel Katenin, sacrificing Valentin's foster father. During the 1941 Leningrad blockade, the family starves and Lena dies of a gangrenous infection she hid to spare others. Tonya has Valentin dictate his memoir onto the bedroom walls while she writes it down, preserving the truth.

In 1948, ten-year-old Katya, jealous of a notebook of fairy tales Tonya dedicated to Lena, shows it to her mother's editor, who passes it to state security agents. The secret police arrest Tonya. Katya, consumed with guilt, runs away to the mysterious "doll maker" who has been leaving porcelain dolls at the family's door.

Rosie and Lev travel to Leningrad, where Alexey owns an apartment in Tonya's former house. On the walls, they find The Last Bolshevik in tiny script dated to 1942; Lev identifies the handwriting as matching the fairy tales and Natalya's memoir. During the August 1991 coup attempt, Valentin's son Mikhail and his wife Marina attend a rally where Alexey speaks from a balcony. Mikhail declares the man is not his father, demolishing Rosie's theory. Amid the tumult, Rosie and Lev kiss for the first time.

Alexey reveals the truth. He is not Valentin but Sasha Ozhereliev, the former secret-police officer who, as a young doll maker's apprentice in Saratov, created the first porcelain doll from Tonya's photograph and became obsessed with her. He tracked her for decades, eventually becoming her NKVD interrogator. When Katya ran away, Sasha and his brother Eduard raised her. He arranged Tonya's release, helped Katya and Rosie defect to England, paid for Rosie's education, and bought Mum's London apartment. His lifelong project has been creating dolls depicting each generation of Tonya's female line; the doll of Rosie is the last. Rosie smashes it, rejecting his objectification of her family. Alexey dies that night.

Rosie breaks off her engagement, declaring her soul is Russian, and moves to Moscow with Lev, who has left the OMON. In January 1993, she discovers a published edition of Tonya's fairy tales including a story that implies Tonya survived the gulag by assuming another person's identity. At a café, Rosie meets Tonya, her grandmother, recognizing her instantly by their shared appearance.

In February 1993, Rosie drives Tonya to Popovka. Tonya enters the house where Kirill and Nelly once lived and finds a man there: blind, nameless, his identity erased by decades of dementia. He is Valentin, who traveled to Otrada years earlier in a dissociative episode, accidentally set the house on fire, and was pulled from the ruins by Kirill. He does not recognize Tonya. She begins to tell him their story, and he stops her. "I've heard you," he says. Tonya embraces him, reflecting that this is not the ending but the beginning of the final story, and envisions them young again on a frozen river embankment, running together into a new life.