Nothing untypical about that, until you learn that the father vanished into the Gulag along with millions of other Russians when the girl was nine. And the only way I have been able to survive is because of my intense love for you, my daughter. I have lived for the moment when I would see you again. Please do not contact me again. The number of the dead depends on who is telling the story.
Estimates vary, but always the total is in the millions, double digit millions.
Under the Bolsheviks, then the Communists, continuing until the time of Mikhail Gorbachev, people all over the Soviet Union disappeared into the prison system popularly called by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago. For millions more there was a simple shot to the back of the head. Then Communism collapsed. It was an exercise I learned as a boy in elementary school the air raid siren would shriek its warning and we would duck under our school desks and cover our heads, practicing for the day when the missiles were really incoming. One of the doctors grimaced and I thought I had committed a terrible social blunder.