Free Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page A

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