Along the way, she breaks the heart of her first love, and perhaps also her own. Galina's beauty allows her to rise out of the poverty of her beginnings, becoming a beauty queen and marrying the 13th richest man in Russia. Kirovsk, 2013: a chorus of the women of this poisoned industrial town tell the story in first person plural of Galina, granddaughter of a ballerina who had been sent to Siberia after falling foul of Stalin's regime. Then, as a small act of rebellion, he leaves a trace of a ballerina he has been told to erase – an act that will cost him dearly. But he begins to paint his brother's face over those faces he has been tasked with removing, so that over time his brother appears in many pictures, even with Stalin. The artist understands the danger of photographs, so when his brother is killed by the regime, he persuades his sister-in-law to destroy all pictures of him. Leningrad, 1937: in the Department of Party Propaganda and Agitation, a failed artist spends his days airbrushing enemies of the Soviet regime out of history, while retouching pictures of Stalin to ensure that he always looks great – in fact, getting younger by the year.
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