Stalin's Children (8 page)

Bibikov himself would have perfectly understood, with his rational mind, as he stood in a cellar or faced a prison wall in his last moments, the logic of his executioners. And perhaps - why not? - he might, if he had met different people in his early days in the Party, found different patrons, have become an executioner himself. Did he not explain away the famine which his Party had brought to the Ukraine as a necessary purging of enemy elements? Did he not consider himself one of the Revolution's chosen, ruled by a higher morality? Bibikov was no innocent, caught by an evil and alien force beyond his comprehension. On the contrary, he was a propagandist, a fanatic of the new morality - the morality which now demanded his life, however pointlessly, for the greater good.

'No, it was not for show nor out of hypocrisy that they argued in the cells in defence of all the government's actions,' writes Solzhenitsyn. 'They needed ideological arguments in order to hold on to a sense of their own rightness - otherwise insanity was not far off.'

When people become the building blocks of history, intelligent men can abdicate moral responsibility. Indeed the Purge - in Russian
chistka,
or 'cleaning' - was to those who made it something heroic, just as the building of the great factory was heroic to Bibikov. The difference was that Bibikov made his personal revolution in physical bricks and concrete, whereas the NKVD's bricks were class enemies, every one sent to the execution chamber another piece of the great edifice of Socialism. When one condones a death for the sake of a cause, one condones them all.

In some ways, perhaps, Bibikov was more guilty than most. He was a senior Party member. Men like him gave the orders and compiled the lists. The rank-and-file investigators followed them. Were these men evil, then, given that they had no choice but to do what they were told? Was Lieutenant Chavin, a man who tortured confessions from Party men like Bibikov, not less guilty than the Party men themselves, who taught their juniors that ends justify means? The men drawn to serve in the NKVD, in the famous phrase of its founder Felix Dzerzhinsky, could be either saints or scoundrels - and clearly the service attracted more than its fair share of sadists and psychopaths. But they were not aliens, not foreigners, but men, Russian men, made of the same tissue and fed by the same blood as their victims. 'Where did this wolf-tribe appear from among our own people?' asked Solzhenitsyn. 'Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is ours.'

This was the true, dark genius behind the Purge. Not simply to put two strangers into a room, one a victim, one an executioner, and convince one to kill the other, but to convince both that this murder served some higher purpose. It is easier to imagine that such acts are committed by monsters, men whose minds had been brutalized by the horrors of war and collectivization. But the fact is that ordinary, decent men and women, full of humanistic ideals and worthy principles, were ready to justify and even participate in the massacre of their fellows. 'To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he's doing is good,' writes Solzhenitsyn. 'Or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with natural law.' This can happen only when a man becomes a political commodity, a unit in a cold calculation, his life and death to be planned and disposed of just like a ton of steel or a truckload of bricks. This, without doubt, was Bibikov's belief. He lived by it, and died by it.

There was one part of the file that was closed to me. About thirty pages of the 'rehabilitation investigation', instigated by Khrushchev in 1955 as part of a wholesale review of the victims of the Purge, had been carefully taped together. After some persuasion, Panamaryev, as curious as I was, furtively un-taped them and we began quickly to leaf through the closed part of the file.

The forbidden pages concerned the NKVD men who had participated in the interrogation of Bibikov, Even half a century later, the Ukrainian Security Service was trying to protect its own. Their files had been ordered up by the investigators who prepared Bibikov's rehabilitation. But the NKVD officers themselves could not be questioned, because by the end of 1938 they had themselves all been shot.

'Former workers of the Ukrainian NKVD TEITEL, KORNEV and GEPLER . . . were tried for falsification of evidence and anti-Soviet activity,' says one of the documents. 'Investigators SAMOVSKI, TRUSHKIN and GRIGORENKO . . . faced criminal proceedings for counter-revolutionary activity,' notes another.

Almost every person whose name appears in the file, from the accused and their NKVD interrogators to local Party Secretary Markitan, who signed the order to expel Bibikov from the Party two days after his arrest, were themselves killed within a year. The Purge had consumed its makers, and all that we are left of their lives are a few muffled echoes in a vast silence of paper.

The last document in the file, stamped and numbered, was a letter I had written to the Ukrainian Security Service that summer requesting to see my grandfather's file, invoking a Ukrainian law which allows close relatives access to otherwise classified NKVD archives. The file had been carefully unbound by skilful hands and my letter stitched in and numbered with the rest, at the very back of the dossier. So the last signature in the fatal file, scrawled across the bottom of the letter, turned out to be my own.

4
Arrest

Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for our Happy Childhood.
Slogan from a 1936 propaganda poster

Even after years in Moscow, I could never quite shake the feeling of being in a weird cat's cradle of conflicting ages. There were quaintly historic touches: soldiers in jackboots and breeches; babushkas in headscarves; ragged, bearded beggars straight out of Dostoyevsky; obligatory coat checks and rotary phones; fur hats; drivers and maids; bread with lard; abacuses instead of cash registers; inky newspapers; the smell of wood smoke and outdoor toilets in the suburbs; meat sold from trucks piled with beef carcasses manned by a
muzhik
with a bloody axe. Some rhythms of life seemed absolutely unchanged from my father's day, my grandfather's day even.

There were a few moments when I think I caught glimpses of the nightmare world my grandfather entered in July 1937. For a few hours, I saw and smelt and touched it. It was enough, perhaps, to give a sense of what it was like, at least physically. What it was like in his head and heart is a place I never wish to visit.

One night in early January 1996, a month after I had visited Kiev to view my grandfather's file, I was walking through a light snowfall towards the Metropole Hotel. I was trying to catch a taxi, and didn't notice that three men were following me. The first I knew of their approach was the sleeve of a yellow sheepskin coat coming up at my face, followed by a powerful blow to the jaw. I felt no pain, just percussion, like a jolting train. For two or three minutes of strangely balletic time, I stood, I fell again, I scrambled up, as the men continued to beat me. I smelled the wet fur of my hat as I pressed it to my face to protect my nose.

Then I saw, as I lay on the street, the caked front wheels and dirty headlights of a red Lada crunching through the snow towards us. Improbably enough, a man with his left leg in a huge plaster cast levered himself out of the passenger door. He shouted something, and the three men looked suddenly embarrassed and began wandering away with looks of feigned innocence. The men in the car helped me up, then drove off.

At that moment, a police jeep rounded the corner. I flagged it down, opened the door, mumbled what had happened, and got in. At the moment we picked up speed down Neglinnaya Street in pursuit of the assailants, I suddenly felt my brain clear, and time suddenly shifted gears in tandem with the police driver from very slow to very fast. We pulled out on to Okhotny Ryad and I saw my assailants playing in the snow by the Lubyanka Metro. The jeep pulled a stylish power slide across eight lanes of traffic and skidded to a halt.

The three men were reaching for their passports, looking calm and happily drunk, smiling, thinking it was a routine document check. Two had the Asiatic features of Tatars, the third was a Russian. When they saw me clamber out of the jeep they froze and seemed to shrink a size.

'Those are the men,' I said, theatrically, pointing at them. The two Tatars were bundled into a tiny cage in the back of the jeep. No more than a dozen minutes had passed since they had begun beating me.

The police station was impregnated with the eternal Russian prison odour of sweat, piss and despair. The walls were pale institutional beige at the top and dark brown at the bottom. My two assailants sat in a cage in the corner of the reception room, their heads in their hands, muttering to each other and occasionally looking up at me.

The desk sergeant sat behind a Perspex screen, his little office raised a foot above the rest of the room. In front of him were several large, Victorian-looking ledgers, a set of stamps, a pile of forms, and an ashtray made out of a Fanta can. He took my details impassively, then picked up his telephone and dialled his superiors. From that moment, I think, the men's fate was sealed. I was a foreigner, and that meant trouble for the police if the case wasn't handled properly - consular complaints to the Foreign Ministry, paperwork flying.

The investigator appointed to the case was Svetlana Timofeyevna, a Lieutenant-Colonel of the Moscow Criminal Investigation Department. She was a confident and matronly woman who sized me up with a shameless, penetrating stare, well used to separating men into wimps and loudmouths. She was one of those portly, invincible, middle-aged Russian women, whose kind lurked like Dobermanns in the front offices of all Russia's great men; they ruled ticket offices and lorded it over hotel reception desks.

With great reverence, after we had been through the details several times verbally, Svetlana Timofeyevna pulled out a blank statement sheet headed
Protokol,
or official statement, and began to take down the official record of my testimony. I signed the bottom of each page and initialled each correction. Finally she reached for a blank folder headed
Delo,
or criminal case, and carefully filled in the accused's details on its brown cardboard cover. The file had begun. From that moment on, I, my assailants, the investigators, were all its creatures.

For the next three days I staggered over to the police station at Svetlana Timofeyevna's summons, groggy with mild concussion. The station was even more depressing in daylight, a low, two-storey concrete building in a courtyard full of dirty slush, litter bins and stray dogs. I met the policemen who had been with me on the night of the assault, and one of them assured me, in a confiding whisper, that 'we made sure those guys are having an interesting time'. I felt a guilty thrill of revenge.

Between long, fitful sleeps in my sunless third-floor apartment and long afternoons in the station, it seemed that I had somehow slipped into a pungent underworld, where I endlessly watched the investigator's pen crawling across reams of paper, my head throbbing, willing it to finish. I dreamt of it at night, a feverish frustration dream, obsessively focused on the crawling pen, the way it dented the cheap official paper, held by a disembodied hand and lit by harsh, institutional lamplight.

On the third day - but somehow it seemed like so much longer than three days, this waking-sleeping bureaucratic nightmare - I felt like an old-timer, trudging up the police station's worn stairs, past the stinking officers' toilet from which the seat had been stolen. I found Svetlana Timofeyevna in uniform for the first time since I'd met her.

'We're going to have the
ochnaya stavka
now,' she said. The
ochnaya stavka,
or confrontation, was a standard Russian investigative procedure in which the accused meets his accusers and their statements are read to each other. She scooped up the swelling file and led me downstairs to what looked like a large schoolroom, full of rows of benches facing a raised dais, where we took our seats in silence. I stared at the grain of the desk.

The men came in so quietly I didn't hear them until the policeman shut the door. They were both manacled, shuffling stiffly with heads bowed. They sat down heavily in the front benches, looking up at us sheepishly like guilty schoolboys. They were brothers, Svetlana Timofeyevna had told me, Tatars from Kazan. Both were married, with children, and lived in Moscow. They looked younger than I had imagined them, and smaller.

'Matthews, please forgive us if we hurt you, please, if there's anything we can do . . .' the smaller man, the older brother, began. But Svetlana Timofeyevna cut him off. She read my clumsy statement, in the longest of its four versions, then a medical report. They listened in silence; the younger one had his head in his hands. Their own testimony was just five sentences, stating that they had been too drunk to remember what happened and that they freely admitted their guilt and contrition. At the end of each statement there was an awkward moment as she passed the accused papers to sign. Helpfully, I pushed the papers further forward on the desk so that they could sign in their clanking handcuffs. They nodded in polite acknowledgement each time.

'Do you have anything to say?'

The elder brother, still in his yellow coat, began talking. He was calm at first, a forced chumminess in his voice. He held my eye, and as he spoke I stopped hearing what he was saying and just felt its tone, and read the look. He was begging me to spare them. My face was frozen in a kind of horrified smile. He leaned further forward, a note of panic creeping into his voice. Then he fell on his knees and wept. He wept loudly, and his brother wept silently.

Then they were gone. Svetlana Timofeyevna was saying something, but I didn't hear. She had to repeat herself, and touch my shoulder. She was saying we should go. I mumbled something about dropping the charges. She sighed heavily, and told me, wearily, as though she was trying to explain life's hard facts to a child, that it wouldn't be possible. She was not a hard-hearted woman, even after years of busting stupid little people for stupid little crimes. Yet even though she had seen the men's weeping wives and knew the case was trivial, unworthy of the terrible retribution which she was about to unleash, she knew that that afternoon she would type up a full report recommending that the two men be remanded in custody pending trial.