Archangel (Mass Market Paperback) Page 6

  The list ofYepishev's honours ancE 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 (ist 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 Mamanrov'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.

  Mamanrov 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 skiiis 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 Mamantoy, 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 Mamantoy?' 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...

  '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 offosef Stalin, Ifind myself thinking of one image in particular. I think of Stalin, as an old man, standing beside his gramophone.

  He wouldfinish working late, usually at nine or ten, and then he would go to the Kremlin movie theatre to watch afllm. Often, it was one of the Tarzan series -for some reason Stalin loved the idea ofa 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 ofgrown 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 fret 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 family His first wife died, His oldest son, Yakov, tried to shoot hi
mself 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 certficate 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 and 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. 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...

  .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 Ke
lso; 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 mzkht answer my questions?'