Free Archangel by Robert Harris

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 fis tful , 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 - succes sfully this time, by hurling hi mself 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 nig ht, 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