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Charismatic and earnest, she was adored for her image as a Decembrist’s wife — women who had given up their lives and followed their husbands to exile in Siberia.

Much of “The Lost Pianos of Siberia” consists of neat summaries of major events in Russian history — the Decembrist uprising, the Gulag — and well-known anecdotes, such as Chekhov’s trip to Sakhalin Island, and the composition and debut of Shostakovich’s “Leningrad” Symphony during World War II. This is not a book for readers already familiar with Russian history.

This apparent bad luck in fact saved the writer from being arrested for taking part in the Decembrist uprising of 1825 in St Petersburg.

A century of rebellions, from the Decembrist uprising in 1825 to the revolution of 1905, ensured that a steady supply of political dissidents were carted across the Urals by a progressively more paranoid state.

Even further back, 1826: Nicholas I, after crushing the Decembrist rebels, invited their exiled supporter, the poet Aleksandr Pushkin, in for a chat.