A. A. Yepishev, who was at one time deputy Minister of State Security, told me that Stalin kept a black oilskin exercise book in which he would make occasional notes, and that for some time Stalin kept letters from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and even Trotsky. All efforts to discover either the notebook or these letters have failed, and Yepishev did not reveal his source.
Yepishev did not reveal his source but he did, according to Volkogonov, have a theory. He believed that Stalin’s private papers had been removed from his Kremlin safe by Lavrenty Beria, while the General Secretary lay paralysed by his stroke.
Beria made a dash for the Kremlin where it is reasonable to assume he cleaned out the safe, removing the Boss’s personal papers and with them, one assumes, the black notebook … Having destroyed Stalin’s notebook, if indeed it was there, Beria would have cleared the path to his own ascendancy. Perhaps the truth will never be known, but Yepishev was convinced that Beria cleaned out the safe before the others could get to it.
*
NOW calm yourself, and don’t get excited, because this proves nothing, you understand? Nothing whatever.
But it does make it a thousand times more likely.
Back outside the entrance to the reading room, Kelso yanked open the narrow wooden drawer and searched through it quickly until he found the index cards to Yepishev, A. A. (1908–85). The old man had written a score of books, of uniform dullness and hackery: History Teaches: The Lessons of the Twentieth Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War (1965), Ideological Warfare and Military Problems (1974), We Are True to the Ideas of the Party (1981) …
Kelso’s hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria – always, in the past, his most productive time of day – a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile. He ran down the flight of steps and along the wide and gloomy corridor that led to the Lenin’s military section. This was a small and self-contained area, neon-lit, with a subterranean feel to it. A young man in a grey pullover was leaning against the counter, reading a 1970s MAD comic.
‘What do you have on an army man named Yepishev?’ asked Kelso. ‘A. A. Yepishev?’
‘Who wants to know?’
Kelso handed over his reader’s card and the young man examined it with interest.
‘Hey, are you the Kelso who wrote that book a few years back on the end of the Party?’
Kelso hesitated – this could go either way – but finally he admitted he was. The young man put down the comic and shook his hand. ‘Andrei Efanov. Great book. You really stuffed the bastards. I’ll see what we have.’
THERE were two reference books with entries for Yepishev: the Military Encyclopaedia of the USSR and the Directory of Heroes of the Soviet Union, and both told pretty much the same story, if you knew how to read between the lines, which was that Aleksey Alekseevich Yepishev had been an armour-plated, ocean-going Stalinist of the old school: Komsomol and Party instructor in the twenties and thirties; Red Army Military Academy, 1938; Commissar of the Komintern Factory in Kharkov, 1942; Military Council of the Thirty-Eighth Army of the 1st Ukrainian Front, 1943; Deputy People’s Commissar for Medium Machine Building, also 1943 –
‘What’s a “medium machine”,’ asked Efanov, who was peering at the books over Kelso’s shoulder. Efanov turned out to have done his military service in Lithuania – two years of hell – and to have been refused admittance to Moscow University in the communist time on the grounds he was a Jew. Now he was taking a huge delight in poking over the dust and ashes of Yepishev’s career.
‘Cover-name for the Soviet atomic bomb programme,’ said Kelso. ‘Beria’s pet project.’ Beria. He made a note.
– Secretary of the Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party, 1946 –
‘That was when they purged the Ukraine of collaborators, after the war,’ said Efanov. ‘A bloody time.’
– First Secretary of the Odessa Regional Party Committee, 1950; Deputy Minister of State Security, 1951 –
Deputy Minister …
Each entry was illustrated with the same official photograph of Yepishev. Kelso looked again at the the square jaw, the thick brow, the grim face set above the boxer’s neck.
‘Oh, he was a big bastard, boy. A fleshy tank …’
‘Gotcha,’ whispered Kelso to himself.
After Stalin’s death, Yepishev’s career had taken a dive. First he had been sent back to Odessa, then he had been packed off abroad. Ambassador to Romania, 1955–61. Ambassador to Yugoslavia, 1961–62. And then, at last, the long-awaited summons back to Moscow, as Head of the Central Political Department of the Soviet Armed Forces – its ideological commissar – a position he held for the next twenty-three years. And who had served as his deputy? None other than Dmitri Volkogonov, three-star general and future biographer of Josef Stalin.
To extract these small plums of information it was necessary to dig through a great pudding of cliché and jargon, praising Yepishev for his ‘important role in shaping the necessary political attitudes and enforcing Marxist–Leninist orthodoxy in the Armed Forces, in strengthening military discipline and fostering ideological readiness’. He had died aged seventy-seven. Volkogonov, Kelso knew, had died ten years later.
The list of Yepishev’s honours and medals took up the rest of his entry: Hero of the Soviet Union, winner of the Lenin Prize, holder of four Orders of Lenin, the October Revolution Order, four Orders of the Red Banner, two Orders of the Great Patriotic War (1st class), the Order of the Red Banner, three Orders of the Red Star, the Order of Service to the Motherland …
‘It’s a wonder he could stand up.’
‘And I’ll bet you he never shot anyone,’ sneered Efanov, ‘except on his own side. So what’s so interesting about Yepishev, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘What’s this?’ said Kelso suddenly. He pointed to a line at the foot of the column: ‘V. P. Mamantov.’
‘He’s the author of the entry.’
‘Yepishev’s entry was written by Mamantov? Vladimir Mamantov? The KGB man?’
‘That’s him. So what? The entries are usually written by friends. Why? D’you know him?’
‘I don’t know him. I’ve met him.’ He frowned at the name. ‘His people were demonstrating – this morning –’
‘Oh, them? They’re always demonstrating. When did you meet Mamantov?’
Kelso reached for his notebook and began skimming back through the pages. ‘About five years ago, I suppose. When I was researching my book on the Party.’
Vladimir Mamantov. My God, he hadn’t thought about Vladimir Mamantov in half a decade, and suddenly here he was, crossing his path twice in a morning. The years fluttered through his fingers – ninety-five, ninety-four … Some details of the meeting were starting to come back to him now: a morning in late spring, a dead dog revealed in the thawing snow outside an apartment block in the suburbs, a gorgon of a wife. Mamantov had just finished serving fourteen months in Lefortovo for his part in the attempted coup against Gorbachev, and Kelso had been the first to interview him when he came out of jail. It had taken an age to fix the appointment and then it had proved, as so often in these cases, not worth the effort. Mamantov had refused point-blank to talk about himself, or the coup, and had simply spouted Party slogans straight out of the pages of Pravda.
He found Mamantov’s home telephone number from 1991, next to an office address for a lowly Party functionary, Gennady Zyuganov.
‘You’re going to try to see him?’ asked Efanov, anxiously. ‘You know he hates all Westerners? Almost as much as he hates the Jews.’
‘You’re right,’ said Kelso, staring at the seven digits. Mamantov had been a formidable man even in defeat, his Soviet suit hanging loose off his wide shoulders, the grey pallor of prison still dull on his cheeks, murder in his eyes. Kelso’s book had not been flattering about Vladimir Mamantov, to put it mildly. And it had been translated into Russian – Mamantov must have seen it.
‘You?
??re right,’ he repeated. ‘It would be stupid even to try.’
FLUKE Kelso walked out of the Lenin Library a little after two that afternoon, pausing briefly at a stall in the lobby to buy a couple of bread rolls and a bottle of warm and salty mineral water.
He remembered passing a row of public telephones opposite the Kremlin, close to the Intourist office, and he ate his lunch as he walked – first down into the gloom of the metro station to buy some plastic tokens for the phone, and then back along Mokhavaya Street towards the high red wall and the golden domes.
He was not alone, it seemed to him. His younger self was ambling alongside him now – floppy-haired, chain-smoking, forever in a hurry, forever optimistic, a writer on the rise. (‘Dr Kelso brings to the study of contemporary Soviet history the skills of a first-rate scholar and the energy of a good reporter’ – The New York Times.) This younger Kelso wouldn’t have hesitated to call up Vladimir Mamantov, that was for sure – by God, he would have battered his bloody door down by now if necessary.
Think about it: if Yepishev had told Volkogonov about Stalin’s notebook, might he not also have told Mamantov? Might he not have left behind papers? Might he not have a family?
It had to be worth a try.
He wiped his mouth and fingers on the little paper napkin and as he picked up the receiver and inserted the tokens he felt a familiar tightening of his stomach muscles, a butteriness around his heart. Was this sensible? No. But who cared about that? Adelman – he was sensible. And Saunders – he was very sensible.
Go for it.
He dialled the number.
The first call was an anti-climax. The Mamantovs had moved and the man who now lived at their old address was reluctant to give out their new number. Only after he had held a whispered consultation with someone at his end did he pass it on. Kelso hung up and dialled again. This time the phone rang for a long time before it was answered. The tokens dropped and an old woman with a trembling voice said, ‘Who is this?’
He gave his name. ‘Could I speak with Comrade Mamantov?’ He was careful to say ‘comrade’: ‘mister’ would never do.
‘Yes? Who is this?’
Kelso was patient. ‘As I said, my name is Kelso. I’m using a public telephone. It’s urgent.’
‘Yes, but who is this?’
He was about to repeat his name for a third time when he heard what sounded like a scuffle at the other end of the line and a harsh male voice cut in. ‘All right. This is Mamantov. Who are you?’
‘It’s Kelso.’ There was a silence. ‘Doctor Kelso? You may remember me?’
‘I remember you. What do you want?’
‘To see you.’
‘Why should I see you after that shit you wrote?’
‘I wanted to ask you some questions.’
‘About?’
‘A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin.’
‘Shut up,’ said Mamantov.
‘What?’ Kelso frowned at the receiver.
‘I said shut up. I’m thinking it over. Where are you?’
‘Near the Intourist building, on Mokhavaya Street.’
There was another silence.
Mamantov said, ‘You’re close.’
And then he said, ‘You’d better come.’
He gave his address. The line went dead.
THE line went dead and Major Feliks Suvorin of the Russian intelligence service, the SVR, sitting in his office in the south-eastern suburb of Yasenevo, carefully slipped off his headphones and wiped his neat pink ears with a clean white handkerchief. On the notepad in front of him he had written: ‘A black oilskin notebook that used to belong to Josef Stalin …’
Chapter Three
‘Confronting the Past’
An International Symposium on the
Archives of the Russian Federation
Tuesday 27 October,
final afternoon session
DR KELSO: LADIES and gentlemen, whenever I think of Josef Stalin, I find myself thinking of one image in particular. I think of Stalin, as an old man, standing beside his gramophone.
He would finish working late, usually at nine or ten, and then he would go to the Kremlin movie theatre to watch a film. Often, it was one of the Tarzan series – for some reason Stalin loved the idea of a young man growing up and living among wild animals – then he and his cronies in the Politburo would drive out to his dacha at Kuntsevo for dinner, and, after dinner, he would go over to his gramophone and put on a record. His particular favourite, according to Milovan Djilas, was a song in which howling dogs replaced the sound of human voices. And then Stalin would make the Politburo dance.
Some of them were quite good dancers. Mikoyan, for example: he was a lovely dancer. And Bulganin wasn’t bad; he could follow a beat. Khrushchev, though, was a lousy dancer – ‘like a cow on ice’ – and so was Malenkov and so was Kaganovich, for that matter.
Anyway, one evening – drawn, we might speculate, by the peculiar noise of grown men dancing to the baying of hounds – Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, put her head round the door, and Stalin made her start dancing, too. Well, after a time, she grew tired, and her feet were hardly moving, and this made Stalin angry. He shouted at her, ‘Dance!’ And she said, ‘But I’ve already danced, papa, I’m tired.’ At which Stalin – and here I quote Khrushchev’s description – ‘grabbed her like this, by the hair, a whole fistful, I mean by her forelock, as it were, and pulled, you understand, very hard … pulled, jerked and jerked.’
Now keep that image in your mind for a moment, and let us consider the fate of Stalin’s family. His first wife died. His oldest son, Yakov, tried to shoot himself when he was twenty-one, but only succeeded in inflicting severe wounds. (When Stalin saw him, according to Svetlana, he laughed. ‘Ha!’ he said. ‘Missed! Couldn’t even shoot straight!’) Yakov was captured by the Germans during the war and, after Stalin refused a prisoner exchange, he tried suicide again – successfully this time, by hurling himself at the electrified fence of his prison camp.
Stalin had one other child, a son, Vasily, an alcoholic, who died aged forty-one.
Stalin’s second wife, Nadezhda, refused to bear her husband any more children – according to Svetlana, she had a couple of abortions – and late one night, aged thirty-one, she shot herself through the heart. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that someone shot her: no suicide note has ever been found.)
Nadezhda was one of four children. Her older brother, Pavel, was murdered by Stalin during the purges; the death certificate recorded a heart attack. Her younger brother, Fyodor, was driven insane when a friend of Stalin’s, an Armenian bank robber named Kamo, handed him a gouged-out human heart. Her sister, Anna, was arrested on Stalin’s orders and sentenced to ten years in solitary confinement. By the time she came out she was no longer capable of recognising her own children. So that was one set of Stalin’s relatives.
And what of the other set? Well, there was Aleksandr Svanidze, the brother of Stalin’s first wife – he was arrested in thirty-seven and shot in forty-one. And there was Svanidze’s wife, Maria, who was also arrested; she was shot in forty-two. Their surviving child, Ivan – Stalin’s nephew – was sent into exile, to a ghastly state orphanage for the children of ‘enemies of the state’, and when he emerged, nearly twenty years later, he was profoundly psychologically damaged. And finally there was Stalin’s sister-in-law, Maria – she was also arrested in thirty-seven and died mysteriously in prison.
Now let us go back to that image of Svetlana. Her mother is dead. Her half-brother is dead. Her other brother is an alcoholic. Two uncles are dead and one is insane. Two aunts are dead and one is in prison. She is being dragged around by her hair, by her father, in front of a roomful of the most powerful men in Russia, all of whom are being forced to dance, maybe to the sound of howling dogs.
Colleagues, whenever I sit in an archive or, more rarely these days, attend a symposium like this one, I always try to remember that scene, because it reminds
me to be wary of imposing a rational structure on the past. There is nothing in the archives here to show us that the Deputy Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or the Commissar for Foreign Affairs, when they made their decisions, were shattered by exhaustion, and very probably terrified – that they had been up until three a.m. dancing for their lives, and knew they might well be dancing again that evening.
Not that I am saying that Stalin was crazy. On the contrary. One could argue that the man who worked the gramophone was the sanest person in the room. When Svetlana asked him why her Aunt Anna was being held in solitary confinement, he answered, ‘Because she talks too much.’ With Stalin, there was usually a logic to his actions. He didn’t need a sixteenth-century English philosopher to tell him that ‘knowledge is power’. That realisation is the absolute essence of Stalinism. Among other things, it explains why Stalin murdered so many of his own family and close colleagues – he wanted to destroy anyone who had any first-hand knowledge of him.
And this policy, we must concede, was remarkably successful. Here we are, gathered in Moscow, forty-five years after Stalin’s death, to discuss the newly-opened archives of the Soviet era. Above our heads, in fire-proofed strong-rooms, maintained at a constant temperature of eighteen degrees celsius and sixty per cent humidity, are one and a half million files – the entire archive of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
Yet how much does this archive really tell us about Stalin? What can we see today that we couldn’t see when the communists were in power? Stalin’s letters to Molotov – we can see those – and they are not without interest. But clearly they have been heavily censored. And not just that: they end in thirty-six, at precisely the point when the real killing started.