Free Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews

carried out. There is no hint of where or how, though the usual method was 'nine grams', the weight of a pistol round, to the back of the head. The signature of the commanding officer is illegible; the date is 14 October 1937.
     
    For the two days that I sat in Kiev exarrurung the file, Alexander Panamaryev, a young officer of the Ukrainian Security Service, sat with me, reading out passages of barely legible cursive script and explaining legal terms. He was pale and intelligent, about my age, the kind of quiet young man who looked as though he lived with his mother. He seemed, underneath an affected professional brusqueness, almost as moved as I was by what we read.
    'Those were terrible times,' he said quietly as we took a cigarette break in the gathering dusk of Volodimirskaya Street, the granite bulk of the old NKVD building looming above us. 'Your grandfather believed, but do you not think that his accusers believed also? Or the men who shot him? He knew that people had been shot before he was arrested, but did he speak out? How do we know what we would have done in that situation? May God forbid that we ever face the same test.'
     
    Solzhenitsyn once posed the same, terrible question. 'If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner? If only it was so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good from evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of their own heart?'
    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