Free Archangel by Robert Harris Page A

named Kamo, handed him a gouged-out human heart. Her siste r, 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 wi f e ?, 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 ch ildren 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 terr ifi ed - 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 te ll 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.
    And this policy, we must concede, was remarkably successfu l. 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 c ommunists 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 a nd 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 eig hth 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, the re lies - what? W ho? We do not know. And why? Because Stalin made it his business to murder almost everyone who might have been in a