When the KGB were coming to arrest my father, grandmother developed a secret code using sausages to communicate vital information. If she were to bring a certain kind of sausage to his cell and slice it one way, it meant that news of his arrest had been passed to the West, broadcast on Radio Free Europe, and taken up by international human rights groups. If it were sliced another way, it meant that they hadn't managed to get the information through.
It was 1978, in Kyiv, and my father, Igor Pomerantsev, had been detained for “allowing friends and acquaintances to read copies of harmful literature”: books censored for telling the truth about the Soviet prison system (Solzhenitsyn) or for being written in a style too subversive for the regime (Nabokov).
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