‘I was frightened every single day’: the perils of guarding Stalin
In Russian, the
proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you
sleep’. For those who experienced the worst of the Soviet Union’s terrors, this
is not just a throwaway adage but a strategy for self-preservation. As Alex
Halberstadt’s father - the son of one of Stalin’s former bodyguards - attests:
‘There is no more to be gained from sifting through the past than through
cigarette ashes.’
Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir
and a Reckoning
By Alex Halberstadt. Reviewed by Matthew Janney
Halberstadt, a
Soviet-born American writer, doesn’t agree. Aged nine, soon after leaving
Moscow with his family and defecting to the West, he began having a recurring
nightmare in which he was chased by a ferocious bulldog, a dream that lingered
into adulthood. Contrary to the proverb, ignorance, it seems, is a shoddy
defence against night terrors. Throughout his life an inner dread has followed
him like a ‘medieval possession’, something he believes is an inherited
affliction, with roots in his family’s unacknowledged past.
In a bid to inspect,
diagnose and perhaps stymie this problem, Halberstadt returns east, to Ukraine,
to meet with his grandfather, Vassily, a former bodyguard for Stalin and other
senior figures in the KGB. Their uneasy encounters form the first part of Young
Heroes of the Soviet Union, an illuminating, dramatic and wistful family
memoir. That Vassily - now
senile and well into his nineties - is alive at all is quite remarkable. To be
close to Stalin was to risk a death sentence; many of Vassily’s colleagues
simply vanished from view. He is generally evasive, but at times offers
enthralling insights into Stalin’s inner circle, describing how he once
forcibly restrained Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s top military commander,
from entering a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
Halberstadt grew up
thinking his grandfather was the ‘moral equal of a Gestapo officer’; but this
soon softens into thinking of his culpability as ‘an immense, unknowable
continent filled with indecipherable ambiguities’. ‘I was frightened every
single day,’ Vassily whispers to his grandson, in a brief flicker of
vulnerability, further blurring the borders of responsibility….
The lives of
Halberstadt’s maternal grandparents also played out on a historic stage. As
part of the 5 per cent of Lithuanian Jews who survived the war, Semyon and
Raisa are ‘statistical marvels’. Halberstadt traces their story from Vilnius to
New York, observing how their lives moved in parallel with fluctuating levels
of anti-Semitism. Semyon was sacked in 1952 from his teaching position at
Vilnius University for being Jewish. Stalin’s anti-Semitic rhetoric would soon
culminate in the infamous Doctors’ Plot, a campaign that saw hundreds of Jewish
doctors arrested and tortured.
As Halberstadt recalls
swapping his childhood home in Moscow for a one-bed apartment in New York, the
book’s thread loosens amid biographical detail. But he has a knack for
memorable images: Leonid Brezhnev looked ‘fully rectangular from every angle’,
while the smell of a sleeper carriage was a mixture of ‘cured sausage and
sweat’. It’s as if his feelings about Russia were frozen in time when he
emigrated, leaving shards of perception that are peculiarly incisive. Halberstadt saves his
most majestic writing for his father, and their strained relationship. Of his
childhood, he writes: ‘I felt as if I were treading water on the periphery of
his awareness, unable to swim closer.’ His memoir is not so much a journey
backwards as a wading towards something that had previously felt out of reach.
While he theorises
that ‘trauma is perpetuated by repression,’ he also sees that not every-thing
need be explained. ‘We lived in terrible times,’ he is told by Vassily’s wife,
Sonya. ‘All that is left now is to be kind to each other.’ And this personal
history is, indeed, a kind book.
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