Free Stalin's Children by Owen Matthews Page B

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