Later that afternoon, at a hotel bar in Moscow, I met Sergei Lebedev, a 36-year-old novelist and journalist who lately had emerged as a civic activist. I was feeling as curious about the man himself as I was about his writing, as intrigued by his family background as by his knowledge of the country’s history. He was born in 1981, I knew, and so was just old enough to have spent the first part of his childhood in the Soviet Union and his youth in the chaotic years after its demise. I also knew that he had originally been a geologist.

“I was born into a classic Soviet family,” he said once we had taken our seats at a table near a window looking out onto the street. “Both my parents were geologists; they were members of the Soviet intelligentsia.”

He was short and stocky, with a stubbly beard, and there was something indomitable about him that made me think about an animal that won’t let go of something when it gets its teeth into it. Lebedev’s books dealt with history — it lay like a shadow over everything he wrote — and the fact that its presence was so powerful suggested that the conflicts and tensions inherent in it were still unresolved, still had a bearing on Russian society in obscure yet palpable ways.

Lebedev told me that everything in his childhood was designed to keep parts of the past hidden from him. His great-grandfather had, for example, been an officer in the czar’s army before he switched sides and joined the Red Army. But in the family’s version of events, he had always worn the Red Army’s cape with its red star, as if he had been born in 1917 and there had been nothing before that.

“For me that was normal,” he said. “To live in an incomplete world. To live in a world full of holes. With all these questions that could never be asked.”

The street outside was lit by the rays of the low October sun and busy with people strolling through the town on this Sunday afternoon. Many of them must have had stories similar to Lebedev’s, I thought. There is a mechanism in people that stops us from talking about bad experiences and makes us reluctant to stir up the past. But secrets foster a specific version of reality in which the individual pieces have to be arranged in a particular way, fitting so neatly together that if just one were to change position, the whole picture would fall apart. Our identity is shaped by stories, about our own history, about our family’s history, about the history of our people or our country. What happens when one of these identity-shaping stories doesn’t fit? Suddenly you are not who you thought you were. And then who are you?

I asked him what the narrative in Russia was like now.

“It’s very strange,” he replied. “First of all, it is important to understand that the authorities have no single, coherent ideology. They use elements from all sorts of different fields: If it works, they’ll take it. They need a smoke screen to hide the fact that they’re nothing but a bunch of kleptocrats. Take, for example, the name of the United Russia party. Those words, a ‘united Russia,’ were a slogan of the counterrevolutionaries, coined in reaction to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who wished to establish new, self-governing republics. The current administration is building a state founded on Soviet nostalgia, but they have no qualms about appropriating an opposition slogan. And it’s not the slightest bit controversial.”