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 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 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.