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 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 mzkht 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.