'How long do you reckon? Twenty minutes?'
'Fifteen,' said the driver, showing off. He gunned the engine, shot the lights, swung right, and Suvorin was pitched the other way, against the door. He had a brief impression of the Lenin Library flashing past.
'Relax,' he said, 'for pity's sake. We don't want to get a ticket.'
They sped on. Once they were clear of the centre, Netto unlocked the glove compartment and handed Suvorin a welloiled Makarov and a clip of ammunition. Suvorin took it reluctantly, felt the unfamiliar weight in his hand, checked the mechanism and sighted briefly at a passing birch tree. He hadn't joined the service because he enjoyed this kind of thing. He had joined because his father was a diplomat who had taught him early on that the best thing to do if you lived in the Soviet Union was to get a posting abroad. Guns? Suvorin hadn't set foot on the Yasenevo range inside a year. He gave the weapon back to Netto who shrugged and stuffed it in his own pocket.
A blue dot grew noisily in the road behind them, swelled and flashed past like an angry fly - a patrol car of the Moscow militia. It dwindled into the distance.
'Asshole,' said their driver.
A few minutes later they turned off the main road and headed into the wilderness of concrete and wasteland that was the Victory of the Revolution. Fifteen years in Kolyma, thought Suvorin, then welcome home to this. And the joke was, it must have seemed like paradise.
Netto said, According to the map, Block Nine should be just round this corner.
'Slow down,' ordered Suvorin, suddenly, putting his hand on the driver's shoulder. 'Can you hear something?'
He wound down his window. Another siren, off to the left. It faded for a moment, muffled by a building, then became very loud, and colours burst ahead - a blue and yellow light-show, rather pretty, moving fast. For a couple of seconds the patrol car seemed to be coming straight at them but then it swung off the road and bounced over the rough ground, and a moment later they were level with it and could see the entrance to the block themselves, lit up like a fairyland -three cars, an ambulance, people moving, shadowed tracks in the snow
They cruised round the building a couple of times, a trio of ghouls, unnoticed, as the stretcher men brought out the body and then Kelso was driven away.
IMONOV TELLS THE following story.
At meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, it was Comrade Stalin's habit to rise from his place at the head of the long table and to pace behind the backs of the participants. Nobody dared to look round at him: they could establish where he was only by the soft squeak of his leather boots or by the passing fragrance of his Dunhill pipe. On this particular occasion, the conversation concerned the large number of recent plane crashes. The head of the air force, Rychagov, was drunk. 'There will continue to be a high level of accidents, ' he blurted out, 'as long as we're compelled by you to go up in flying coffins.' There was a long silence, at the end of which Stalin murmured. 'You really shouldn't have said that. 'A few days later, Rychagov was shot.
One could quote any number of such stories. His favourite technique, according to Khrushchev, was suddenly to look at a man and say: 'Why is your face so shifty today? Why can't you look Comrade Stalin directly in the eyes?' That was the moment when one's l~fr hung in the balance.
Stalin's use of terror seems to have been partly instinctive (he was naturally physically violent: he sometimes struck his subordinates in the face) and partly calculated 'The people. 'he told Maria Svanidze, 'need a tsar. 'And the tsar upon whom he modelled himself was Ivan the Terrible. We have written confirmation of that here in this archive, in Stalin’s personal library, which contains a copy of A. M Tolstoy's 1942 play. Ivan Grozny (F558 03 D350). Not only has Stalin corrected the speeches of Ivan to make them sound more laconic - to sound more like himself in fact - but he has also scrawled repeatedly over the title page 'Teacher-
Indeed, he had only one criticism of his role modeclass="underline" that he was too weak. As he told the director, Sergei Eisenstein: 'Ivan the Terrible would execute someone and then spend a long time repenting and praying God got in his way in this matter. He ought to have been still more decisive!' (Moskovskie novosti, no. 32, 1988).
Stalin was nothing lf not decisive.
Professor L A. Kuganov estimates that some sixty-six million people were killed in the USSR between 1917 and 1953 - shot, tortured, starved mostly, frozen or worked to death. Others say the true figure is a mere forty-five million. Who knows?
Neither estimate, by the way, includes the thirty million now known to have been killed in the Second World War.
To put this loss in context: the Russian Federation today has a population of roughly 150 million. Assuming the ravages inflicted by communism had never occurred, and assuming normal demographic trends, the actual population should be about 300 million.
And yet - and this is surely one of the most astounding phenomena of the age - Stalin continues to enjoy a wide measure of popular support in this half-empty land His statues have been taken down, true. The street names have been changed But there have been no Nuremberg Trials, as there were in Germany There has been no process here equivalent to de-Nazification. There has been not been a Truth Commission, of the sort established in South Africa.
And the opening of the archives? 'Confronting the past? Co me, ladies and gentlemen, let us say frankly what we all know to be the case. That the Russian government today is scared, and that it is actually harder to gain access to the archives now than it was six or seven years ago. You all know the facts as well as I do. Beria's files: closed The Politburo's files: closed Stalin's files -the real files, I mean, not the window dressing on offer here: closed
I can see my remarks are not being well received by one or two colleagues - All right, I shall draw them to a conclusion, with this
observation: that there can now be no doubt that it is Stalin rather than Hitler who is the most alarming figure of the twentieth century.
I say this -I say this not merely because Stalin killed more people than Hitler - although clearly he did - and not even because Stalin was more of a psychopath than Hitler - although clearly he was. I say it because Stalin, unlike Hitler, has not yet been exorcised, and also because Stalin was not a one-off like Hitler, an eruption from nowhere. Stalin stands in a historical tradition of rule by terror which existed before him, which he refined, and which could exist again. His, not Hitler's, is the spectre that should worry us.
Because, you know, you think about it. You hail a taxi in Munich -you don't find the driver displaying Hitler's portrait in his cab, do you? Hitler's birthplace isn't a shrine. Hitler's grave isn't piled with fresh flowers every day You can't buy tapes of Hitler's speeches on the streets of Berlin. Hitler isn't routinely praised as 'a great patriot' by leading German politicians. Hitler's old party didn't receive more than forty per cent of the votes in the last German election -But all these things are true of Stalin in Russia today, which
is what makes the words of Yevtushenko, in 'The Heirs of Stalin’s more relevant now than ever:
'So I ask our government,
To double,
To treble,
The guard,
Over this tomb.'
FLUKE Kelso was escorted into the headquarters of the central division of the Moscow City Militia shortly before three a.m. And there he was left, washed up with the rest of the night's detritus - half a dozen hookers, a Chechen pimp, two white-faced Belgian bankers, a troupe of transsexual dancers from Turkestan and the usual midnight chorus of outraged lunatics, tramps and bloodied addicts. High-corniced ceilings and half-blown chandeliers gave proceedings a Revolutionary epic look.
He sat alone on a hard wooden bench, his head leaning back on the peeling plaster, staring ahead, unseeing. So that - that was what it looked like? Oh, you could spend half a lifetime writing about it all, about the millions - about Marshal Tukhachevsky, say, beaten to a pulp by the NKVD: