We can also see the death lists that Stalin signed. And we have his appointments book. So we know that on the eighth of December, nineteen thirty-eight, Stalin signed thirty death lists containing five thousand names, many of them of his so-called friends. And we also know, thanks to his appointments book, that on that very same evening he went to the Kremlin movie theatre and watched, not Tarzan this time, but a comedy called Happy Guys.
But between these two events, between the killing and the laughter, there lies – what? who? We do not know. And why? Because Stalin made it his business to murder almost everyone who might have been in a position to tell us what he was like …
Chapter Four
MAMANTOV’S NEW PLACE turned out to be just across the river, in the big apartment complex on Serafimovich Street known as the House on the Embankment. This was the building to which Comrade Stalin, with typical generosity, had insisted that leading Party members go to live with their families. There were ten floors with twenty-five different entrances at ground level, at each of which the GenSec had thoughtfully posted an NKVD guard – purely for your security, comrades.
By the time the purges were finished, six hundred of the building’s tenants had been liquidated. Now the flats were privately owned and the good ones, with a view across the Moskva to the Kremlin, sold for upwards of half a million dollars. Kelso wondered how Mamantov could afford it.
He came down the steps from the bridge and crossed the road. Parked outside the entrance to Mamantov’s staircase was a boxy white Lada, its windows open, two men in the front seat, chewing gum. One had a livid scar running almost from the corner of his eye to the edge of his mouth. They watched Kelso with undisguised interest as he walked past them towards the entrance.
Inside the apartment block, next to the elevator, someone had written, neatly, in English, in capitals and lower case, ‘Fuck Off’. A tribute to the Russian education system, thought Kelso. He whistled nervously, a made-up tune. The lift rose smoothly and he got out at the ninth floor to be met by the distant thump of western rock music.
Mamantov’s apartment had an outer door of steel plate. A red aerosol swastika had been sprayed on to the metal. The paint was old and faded but no attempt had been made to clean it off. Set in the wall above it was a small remote TV camera.
There was already plenty about this set-up that Kelso didn’t like – the heavy security, the guys in the car downstairs – and for a moment he could almost smell the terror from sixty years ago, as if the sweat had seeped into the brickwork: the clattering footsteps, the heavy knocking, the hurried goodbyes, the sobs, silence. His hand paused over the buzzer. What a place to choose to live.
He pressed the button.
After a long wait, the door was opened by an elderly woman. Madame Mamantov was as he remembered her – tall and broad, not fat, but heavily built. She was draped in a shapeless, flowery smock and looked as though she had just finished crying. Her red eyes rested on him briefly, distractedly, but before he could even open his mouth she had wandered off and suddenly there was Vladimir Mamantov, looming down the dark passage, dressed as if he still had an office to go to – white shirt, blue tie, black suit with a small red star pinned in his lapel.
He didn’t say anything, but he offered his hand. He had a crushing handshake, perfected, it was said, by squeezing balls of vulcanized rubber during KGB meetings. (A lot of things were said about Mamantov: for example – and Kelso had put it in his book – that at the famous meeting in the Lubyanka on the night of 20 August 1991, when the plotters of the coup had realised the game was up, Mamantov had offered to fly down to Gorbachev’s dacha at Foros on the Black Sea and shoot the Soviet President personally; Mamantov had dismissed the story as ‘a provocation’.)
A young man in a black shirt with a shoulder holster appeared in the gloom behind Mamantov, and Mamantov said, without looking round, ‘It’s all right, Viktor. I’m dealing with the situation.’ Mamantov had a bureaucrat’s face – steel-coloured hair, steel-framed glasses and pouched cheeks, like a suspicious hound’s. You could pass it in the street a hundred times and never notice it. But his eyes were bright: a fanatic’s eyes, thought Kelso; he could imagine Eichmann or some other Nazi desk-murderer having eyes like these. The old woman had started making a curious howling noise from the other end of the flat, and Mamantov told Viktor to go and sort her out.
‘So you’re part of the gathering of thieves,’ he said to Kelso.
‘What?’
‘The symposium. Pravda published a list of the foreign historians they invited to speak. Your name was on it.’
‘Historians are hardly thieves, Comrade Mamantov. Even foreign historians.’
‘No? Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands. Ours has been stolen from us – gouged and blackened by the libels of our enemies until the people have become lost.’
Kelso smiled. Mamantov hadn’t changed at all. ‘You can’t seriously believe that.’
‘You’re not Russian. Imagine if your country offered to sell its national archive to a foreign power for a miserable few million dollars.’
‘You’re not selling your archive. The plan is to microfilm the records and make them available to scholars.’
‘To scholars in California,’ said Mamantov, as if this settled the argument. ‘But this is tedious. I have an urgent appointment.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I can only give you five minutes, so get to the point. What’s all this about Stalin’s notebook?’
‘It comes into some research I’m doing.’
‘Research? Research into what?’
Kelso hesitated. ‘The events surrounding Stalin’s death.’
‘Go on.’
‘If I could just ask you a couple of questions, then perhaps I could explain the relevance –’
‘No,’ said Mamantov. ‘Let us do this the other way round. You tell me about this notebook and then I might answer your questions.’
‘You might answer my questions?’
Mamantov consulted his watch again. ‘Four minutes.’
‘All right,’ said Kelso, quickly. ‘You remember the official biography of Stalin, by Dmitri Volkogonov?’
‘The traitor Volkogonov? You’re wasting my time. That book is a piece of shit.’
‘You’ve read it?’
‘Of course not. There’s enough filth in this world without my volunteering to go jump in it.’
‘Volkogonov claimed that Stalin kept certain papers – private papers, including a black oilskin exercise book – in his safe at the Kremlin, and that these papers were stolen by Beria. His source for this story was a man you’re familiar with, I think. Aleksey Alekseevich Yepishev.’
There was a slight movement – a flicker, no more – in Mamantov’s hard grey eyes. He’s heard of it, thought Kelso, he knows about the notebook –
‘And?’
‘And I wondered if you’d come across this story while you were writing your entry on Yepishev for the biographical guide. He was a friend of yours, I assume?’
‘What’s it to you?’ Mamantov glanced at Kelso’s bag. ‘Have you found the notebook?’
‘No.’
‘But you know someone who may know where it is?’
‘Someone came to see me,’ began Kelso, then stopped. The apartment was very quiet now. The old woman had finished wailing, but the bodyguard hadn’t reappeared. On the hall table was a copy of Aurora.
Nobody in Moscow knew where he was, he realised. He had dropped off the map.
‘I’m wasting your time,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I might come back when I’ve –’
‘That’s unnecessary,’ said Mamantov, softening his tone. His sharp eyes were checking Kelso up and down – flickering across his face, his hands, gauging the potential strength of his arms and chest, darting up to his face again. His conversational technique was pure Leninism, thought Kelso: ‘Push out a bayonet. If it strikes fat, push deeper. If it strikes iron, pull bac
k for another day.’
‘I’ll tell you what, Doctor Kelso,’ said Mamantov. ‘I’ll show you something. It will interest you. And then I’ll tell you something. And then you’ll tell me something.’ He waved his fingers back and forth between them. ‘We’ll trade. Is it a deal?’
AFTERWARDS, Kelso tried to make a list of it all, but there was too much of it for him to remember: the immense oil painting, by Gerasimov, of Stalin on the ramparts of the Kremlin, and the neon-lit glass cabinet with its miniatures of Stalin – its Stalin dishes and its Stalin boxes, its Stalin stamps and Stalin medals – and the case of books by Stalin, and the books about Stalin, and the photographs of Stalin – signed and unsigned – and the scrap of Stalin’s handwriting – blue pencil, lined paper, quarto-sized and framed – that hung above the bust of Stalin by Vuchetich (‘… don’t spare individuals, no matter what position they occupy, spare only the cause, the interests of the cause …’).
He moved among the collection while Mamantov watched him closely.
The handwriting sample, said Kelso – that … that was a note for a speech, was it not? Correct, said Mamantov: October 1920, address to the Worker–Peasant Inspection. And the Gerasimov? Wasn’t it similar to the artist’s 1938 study of Stalin and Voroshilov on the Kremlin Wall? Mamantov nodded again, apparently pleased to share these moments with a fellow connoisseur: yes, the GenSec had ordered Gerasimov to paint a second version, leaving out Voroshilov – it was Stalin’s way of reminding Voroshilov that life (how to put it?) could always be rearranged to imitate art. A collector in Maryland and another in Dusseldorf had each offered Mamantov $100,000 for the picture but he would never permit it to leave Russian soil. Never. One day, he hoped to exhibit it in Moscow, along with the rest of his collection – ‘when the political situation is more favourable’.
‘And you think one day the situation will be favourable?’
‘Oh yes. Objectively, history will record that Stalin was right. That is how it is with Stalin. From the subjective perspective, he may seem cruel, even wicked. But the glory of the man is to be found in the objective perspective. There he is a towering figure. It is my unshakeable belief that when the proper perspective is restored, statues will be raised again to Stalin.’
‘Goering said the same of Hitler during the Nuremberg trial. I don’t see any statues –’
‘Hitler lost.’
‘But surely Stalin lost? In the end? From the “objective perspective”?’
‘Stalin inherited a nation with wooden ploughs and bequeathed us an empire armed with atomic weapons. How can you say he lost? The men who came after him – they lost. Not Stalin. Stalin foresaw what would happen, of course. Khrushchev, Molotov, Beria, Malenkov – they thought they were hard, but he saw through them. “After I’ve gone, the capitalists will drown you like blind kittens.” His analysis was correct, as always.’
‘So you think that if Stalin had lived –’
‘We would still be a superpower? Absolutely. But men of Stalin’s genius are only given to a country perhaps once in a century. And even Stalin could not devise a strategy to defeat death. Tell me, did you see the survey of opinion to mark the forty-fifth anniversary of his passing?’
‘I did.’
‘And what did you think of the results?’
‘I thought they were –’ Kelso tried to find a neutral word ‘– remarkable.’
(Remarkable? Christ. They were horrifying. One third of Russians said they thought Stalin was a great war leader. One in six thought he was the greatest ruler the country had ever had. Stalin was seven times more popular than Boris Yeltsin, while poor old Gorbachev hadn’t even scored enough votes to register. This was in March. Kelso had been so appalled he had tried to sell an op-ed piece to the New York Times but they weren’t interested.)
‘Remarkable,’ agreed Mamantov. ‘I should even say astounding, considering his vilification by so-called “historians”.’
There was an awkward silence.
‘Such a collection,’ said Kelso, ‘it must have taken years to assemble.’ And cost a fortune, he almost added.
‘I have a few business interests,’ said Mamantov, dismissively. ‘And a considerable amount of spare time, since my retirement.’ He put out his hand to touch the bust, but then hesitated and drew it back. ‘The difficulty, of course, for any collector, is that he left so little behind in the way of personal possessions. He had no interest in private property, not like these corrupt swine we have in the Kremlin nowadays. A few sticks of government-issue furniture was all he had. That and the clothes he stood up in. And his private notebook, of course.’ He gave Kelso a crafty look. ‘Now that would be something. Something – what is the American phrase? – to die for?’
‘So you have heard of it?’
Mamantov smiled – an unheard-of occurrence – a narrow, thin, rapid smile, like a sudden crack in ice. ‘You’re interested in Yepishev?’
‘Anything you can tell me.’
Mamantov crossed the room to the bookshelf and pulled down a large, leather-bound album. On a higher shelf Kelso could see the two volumes of Volkogonov – of course Mamantov had read them.
‘I first met Aleksey Alekseevich,’ he said, ‘in fifty-seven, when he was ambassador in Bucharest. I was on my way back from Hungary, after we’d sorted things out there. Nine months work, without a break. I needed a rest, I can tell you. We went shooting together in the Azuga region.’
He carefully peeled back a layer of tissue paper and offered the heavy album to Kelso. It was open at a small photograph, taken by an amateur camera, and Kelso had to stare at it closely to make out what was happening. In the background, a forest. In the foreground, two men in leather hunting caps with fleece-lined jackets, smiling, holding rifles, dead birds piled at their booted feet. Yepishev was on the left, Mamantov next to him – still hard-faced but leaner then, a cold war caricature of a KGB man.
‘And somewhere there’s another.’ Mamantov leaned over Kelso’s shoulder and turned a couple of pages. Close up, he smelled elderly, of mothballs and carbolic, and he had shaved badly, as old men do, leaving grey stubble in the shadow of his nose and in the cleft of his broad chin. ‘There.’
This was a much bigger, professional picture, showing maybe two hundred men, arranged in four ranks, as if at a graduation. Some were in uniform, some in civilian suits. A caption underneath said ‘Sverdlovsk, 1980’.
‘This was an ideological collegium, organised by the Central Committee Secretariat. On the final day, Comrade Suslov himself addressed us. This is me.’ He pointed to a grim face in the third row, then moved his finger to the front, to a relaxed, uniformed figure sitting cross-legged on the ground. ‘And this – would you believe? – is Volkogonov. And here again is Aleksey Alekseevich.’
It was like looking at a picture of Imperial officers in the tsarist time, thought Kelso – such confidence, such order, such masculine arrogance! Yet within ten years, their world had been atomised: Yepishev was dead, Volkogonov had renounced the Party, Mamantov was in jail.
Yepishev had died in 1985, said Mamantov. He had passed on just as Gorbachev came to power. And that was a good time for a decent communist to die, in Mamantov’s opinion: Aleksey Alekseevich had been spared. Here was a man whose whole life had been devoted to Marxism–Leninism, who had helped plan the fraternal assistance to Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan. What a mercy he hadn’t lived to see the whole lot thrown away. Writing Yepishev’s entry for the Book of Heroes had been a privilege, and if nobody ever read it nowadays – well, that was what he meant. The country had been robbed of its history.
‘And did Yepishev tell you the same story about Stalin’s papers as he told Volkogonov?’
‘He did. He talked more freely towards the end. He was often ill. I visited him in the leadership clinic. Brezhnev and he were treated together by the parapsychic healer, Davitashvili.’
‘I don’t suppose he left any papers.’
‘Papers? Men like Yepishev didn’t keep pa
pers.’
‘Any relatives?’
‘None that I knew of. We never discussed families.’ Mamantov pronounced the word as if it was absurd. ‘Did you know that one of the things Aleksey had to do was interrogate Beria? Night after night. Can you imagine what that must have been like? But Beria never cracked, not once in nearly half a year, until right at the very end, after his trial, when they were strapping him to the board to shoot him. He hadn’t believed they’d dare to kill him.’
‘How do you mean, he cracked?’
‘He was squealing like a pig – that’s what Yepishev said. Shouting something about Stalin and something about an archangel. Can you imagine that? Beria, of all people, getting religious! But then they put a scarf in his mouth and shot him. I don’t know any more.’ Mamantov closed the albums tenderly and placed them back on the shelf. ‘So,’ he said, turning to face Kelso with a look of menacing innocence, ‘someone came to see you. When was this?’
Kelso was on his guard at once. ‘I’d prefer not to say.’
‘And he told you about Stalin’s papers? He was a man, I assume? An eyewitness, from that time?’
Kelso hesitated.
‘Named?’
Kelso smiled and shook his head. Mamantov seemed to think he was back in the Lubyanka.
‘His profession, then?’
‘I can’t tell you that, either.’
‘Does he know where these papers are?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘He offered to show you?’
‘No.’
‘But you asked him to show you?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a very disappointing historian, Dr Kelso. I thought you were famous for your diligence –’
‘If you must know, he disappeared before I had the chance.’
He regretted the words the instant they were out of his mouth.
‘What do you mean, he “disappeared”?’
‘We were drinking,’ muttered Kelso. ‘I left him alone for a minute. When I came back he’d run away.’
It sounded implausible, even to his own ears.
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