One Night in Winter

I enjoyed One Night in Winter by Simon Sebag Montefiore which is set in Stalinist Russia.  The reader gets an idea about life and death at the time and the paranoia that fueled it.  The main characters are teenage children, the offspring of the elite class (classes in a communist country? of course.)  who attend an exclusive school.  Their favourite subjects are literature and poetry and they form a club.  When it all goes wrong, there are repercussions for the children which seem really over the top, but the author bases his story on an actual similar case.  The fear that all involved experience is difficult to comprehend where you might be at the top one day and executed as a traitor the next. 31/2/5