'I'm a hero. It's easy to be a hero. If you don't have hands or feet, you're either a hero or dead.' So begins Ruben Gallego's shocking account of his bleak life in the Soviet Union's network of hidden orphanages.

Ruben was born in Moscow in 1968 with severe cerebral palsy. His grandfather, the head of Spain's Communist Party, found his disability unbearable and banished him to a state orphanage, telling Ruben's mother that her son had died.

Communist Russia's much vaunted welfare system claimed to leave no citizen behind. But as Ruben moved from home to home he lived the sinister reality behind the myth. He faced freezing dormitories, rotten food, the cruelty of carers, and the belief that his mother had abandoned him. Above all he suffered severe neglect, as a 'non-ambulant' in homes which often lacked one single wheelchair, and in which people were left lying, and dying, in their own filth.

But Ruben was tenacious. With his disability, survival was already a way of life. And the occasional kindnesses shown him - a fig, chocolate, a conversation - fed his passion for freedom. From within he finds the strength to escape his fate, marry, become a parent and, eventually, track down and reunite with his mother.