Stalin's Children: Three Generations of Love and War

3. Death of a Party Man

In the first days of January 1934 Bibikov left his heavily pregnant wife at home and travelled with several senior factory managers by special train to Moscow to attend the Seventeenth All-Union Party Congress as an ex officio observer. Because he never discussed politics with Martha, she had no idea that her husband had determined on an act of defiance which was to cost him his life.

The meeting was billed as the ‘Congress of Victors’, a celebration of the victory of collectivization, the triumphant fulfilment of the first Five Year Plan and the consolidation of the Revolution. But despite the official encomiums to the success of the Party, there was widespread exhaustion among the rank and file. Bibikov, like many, felt strongly that the famine which still continued over much of southern Russia had to be brought to an end. The Five Year Plan had been fulfilled, but the men and women of the grass roots who were more managers than ideologues saw with their own eyes that the insane pace of change couldn’t be sustained. Yet Stalin, the desk-bound firebrand, called for greater production, higher yields, and more vigour in pursuing collectivization despite its manifestly disastrous consequences.

There was no open dissent at the congress. But there was talk of easing Stalin out of the position of power he had forged from the hitherto insignificant post of General Secretary and replacing him with the more moderate Sergei Kirov. Kirov, the secretary of the Leningrad Party, was, at that point, still more than a match for Stalin. He was a Civil War hero, a former close ally of Lenin and the greatest orator the Party had seen since Trotsky.

Bibikov, along with many of his colleagues from the Ukraine, was encouraged by an apparent spirit of openness, a sense that there was to be a robust ideological debate among equals over the future of the great experiment they were building together, and they wholeheartedly backed Kirov’s plan to slacken the pace. It proved to be a fatal mistake. In Stalin’s already paranoid mind, Kirov’s attempt to soften the punishing pace of collectivization was an unpardonable insult and challenge to his ideological leadership of the Revolution. Stalin did not forget who voted and how, though his revenge was four years in the making. Of the 1,966 delegates to the Seventeenth Congress, 1,108 were to die in the Purges. The conference ended with the now customary standing ovations and exhortations to even greater triumphs in the future. Bibikov stood and applauded Stalin and the Politburo with the rest. But the outcome was politically inconclusive. Kirov had refused openly to challenge Stalin. Yet it was equally clear that Stalin was not yet undisputed master of the Party. The supposedly open debate over the Party’s future was not to be repeated until Mikhail Gorbachev’s time, when dissent was to rip the Party apart for ever.

Bibikov’s second daughter, Lyudmila, was born on 27 January 1934, just after her father’s return from the Congress.

Though he named his elder daughter after Lenin, he pointedly did not name his second, as some sycophants were already beginning to do, Stalina.

The year passed in furious work on the factory, with no sign of the political apocalypse which Stalin was quietly plotting. But on the evening of 2 December 1934, Lenina remembers that her father came home from work in tears. He threw himself on to the leather sofa in the sitting room and stayed there motionless for a long time, his head in his hands.

‘My propali,’ Bibikov said quietly to his wife. ‘We are lost.’

Lenina asked her mother what was wrong. Martha didn’t answer and sent her to bed.

The previous night Sergei Kirov had been shot dead by a lone assassin in his office at the Party headquarters at the Smolny Institute in Leningrad. ‘We are lost,’ Bibikov said as he wept for the death of a man he admired. But was he also weeping for himself? Weeping with anger for the mistake he had made in identifying himself too closely with the losing side? For all his cultivated proletarian bluffness, Bibikov must have been a political animal, a committee man, with a rising star’s sense of the way the wind was blowing. As Bibikov lay on the sofa weeping for Kirov, he must have turned over those now-dangerous January conversations in his mind, wondering whether he had said too much.

And yet the hammer did not fall at once. Stalin, too, wept in public at Kirov’s funeral, and acted as chief pallbearer, leading the nation in mourning. There was time enough to take revenge on the enemies in the heart of the Party which Stalin had identified at the congress.

On a local level, the Party machine continued to run smoothly. The KhTZ’s production levels climbed to greater heights and the famine mercifully abated – if only because the millions of dead no longer needed to be fed. Bibikov, along with three other members of the KhTZ’s management, was awarded the Order of Lenin, number 301, in a plush velvet box. It was a recognized prelude to greater things. In late 1935, the expected promotion came, to Provincial Party Secretary of the Chernigov region in the rolling farm country of the northern Ukraine. Bibikov was just thirty-two years old, well on his way to a high-flying future – perhaps membership of the Ukrainian or national Party Central Committee. Maybe higher still.

After the belching factory smokestacks and screeching rail junctions of Kharkov, Chernigov must have seemed like a step back into a slower, older Russia. The Chernigov Kremlin, with its medieval cathedrals, stands on the high bank of the sluggish River Desna. Wooded parkland comes right up to the centre of the city, and in summer the air is filled with pollen from poplar trees which line the streets. The squat, ornamented houses built by Chernigov’s wealthy merchants still stand, and the place has retained an air of pre-revolutionary bourgeois respectability. The town has many great churches which somehow escaped the Bolsheviks’ dynamite. Chernigov was too out-of-the-way, perhaps, to warrant a thorough purge of religious buildings, too far from the great industrial heartlands of the eastern Ukraine where the future of Socialism was being forged. It was a backwater, but Bibikov was sure that if he made a success of his new Party job he would not be tarrying long.

The Bibikovs lived the life of the privileged. Already the Spartan Party ethic of the early thirties was slackening. The élite quickly accrued perks which set them above their fellow citizens. Martha shopped at exclusive Party grocers’, and Bibikov was entitled to holidays in specially built sanatoriums on the Black Sea. Every month, Bibikov would give Martha a little book of coupons for imported food, textiles and shoes from the Insnab, or ‘Foreign Supply’ shop. The family moved into a large four-room apartment with handsome furniture, confiscated from a wealthy merchant family for the use of Chernigov’s new rulers. There, Varya scrubbed the Bibikovs’ pans with brick dust until they shone.

Boris installed shelves right up to the high ceiling of his study and filled them with books which he read in his big leather armchair. On his way back from work he’d stop in to the local bookshop and buy children’s books for the girls and ideological tomes for himself. When Martha shouted at Lenina she would tiptoe into Bibikov’s study and climb into his lap, sobbing. ‘Let’s not complain about her,’ he would say. ‘Let’s strengthen our Union instead.’ It was a joking reference to the current Party-speak.

During their first winter in Chernigov the Bibikov girls wowed the town with their wrought-iron sled, made for them by their old neighbour in Kharkov, which drew crowds of envious children to behold this wonder under the steep earth ramparts of the Kremlin, perfect for tobogganing. In summer Martha made the girls fashionable white cloche hats, copied from Moscow fashion plates, and sewed them dresses from imported printed cotton. In keeping with her new status as an élite wife she began calling herself ‘Mara’ because she felt that ‘Martha’ sounded too peasant-like – an odd twist of social snobbery in the land of proletarian dictatorship. Bibikov was as much a workaholic as ever, but began to spend more time chatting – but not drinking – in his kitchen with Party comrades. He bought season tickets to the newly built theatre for Martha and Lenina, though he himself couldn’t go because he worked until nine each night, by which time the play was already nearly over.

Lenina had never been so happy as during those days of her secret alliance with her beloved father. ‘I see it now so clearly,’ she told me, nearly a lifetime later. ‘I see it like a dream. It’s hard to believe it ever really happened.’

Bibikov even began to relax enough to philander – or at least, to philander more openly. Lenina remembers Martha screaming at him in the kitchen, berating him about his various mistresses. It was during this time, January 1936, when all Party members were required to renew their Party cards so that unworthy elements could be weeded out, that the portrait photo we have of him in his Party tunic was taken. Perhaps the hard-set face also shows a trace of smugness, of self-congratulation.

But behind the outward normality of Ukrainian small-town life, the country was drifting into madness. The NKVD, now under the leadership of the ruthless and sadistic Nikolai Yezhov, was preparing to unleash yet another civil war. This time it was not to be on the Whites or the peasants, but against the most insidious enemy of all, traitors within the Party itself.

Old Bolsheviks whose long standing and moral authority could challenge Stalin’s position went first. Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, both members of Lenin’s first Politburo, stood to attention at show trials in Moscow in August 1936 and confessed to being imperialist spies, while being hectored by the hysterical Prosecutor-General, Andrei Vyshinsky. ‘Wreckers’, or senior engineers blamed for sabotaging the industrialization drive, were also put on public trial. They confessed to being members of a counter-revolutionary organization determined to subvert the triumph of Socialism. Stalin’s rival Lev Trotsky, the head of the alleged counterrevolutionary movement, had already fled into exile on the island of Buyukada, near Istanbul. The vocabulary and tactics of the coming Great Purge were being rehearsed and refined.

Until 1937 the Ukraine was a relative sanctuary from the show trials that were decimating the Moscow-based élite of the army, intelligentsia and government. But it was the Ukraine, perceived by Stalin to be a den of Trotskyism and potential opposition, which was to feel the full brunt of his wrath when he finally unleashed the might of the security machine he had so carefully constructed.

At the February-March 1937 plenum of top Party members, Stalin’s opponents made a last, doomed stand, protesting against Stalin’s monopoly of power. Immediately after the meeting a fifth of the Ukrainian Party leadership were expelled. Bibikov, reading the curt announcement in Pravda, must have feared that worse was to come. By early summer close colleagues began to be summoned for questioning by the NKVD. Few returned.

People instinctively drew into themselves, huddling into self-protective silence like pedestrians hurrying home during a summer rainstorm. Lenina noticed a sudden change in atmosphere. Her father was looking tired and had lost much of his usual jollity. The friendly gossip of the Party wives on the stairwell had become nervous pleasantries. It must have been with relief that Bibikov prepared for his summer trip to a Party sanatorium in Gagry, on the Georgian Black Sea coast, in July 1937.

I opened the brown cardboard cover of my grandfather’s NKVD file, now disintegrating with age, on a grey December morning in a gloomy office in the former NKVD building in Kiev, now the headquarters of the Ukrainian Security Service. By now bloated to 260 pages, the file existed on that peculiarly Russian border between banal bureaucracy and painful poignancy. It was a compilation of the absurdly petty (confiscation of Komsomol card, confiscation of a Browning automatic and twenty-three rounds of ammunition, confiscation of Lenina’s Young Pioneer holiday trip voucher) and the starkly shocking: long confessions, written in microscopic, crabbed writing, covered in blotches and apparently written under torture, the formal accusation signed by Prosecutor-General Vyshinsky, the slip with its scribbled signature verifying that the sentence of death had been carried out. Papers, forms, notes, receipts all the paraphernalia of a nightmarish, self-devouring bureaucracy. A stack of paper that equalled one human life.

The first document, as fatal as any which followed, was a typed resolution by the Chernigov Regional Prosecutor sanctioning the arrest of ‘Boris L- Bibikov, Head of Department of Management of Party Organs of the Chernigov Region’ for suspected involvement in a ‘counter-revolutionary Trotskyite organization and organized anti-Soviet activity’. It recommends that Bibikov be held in custody without bail for the duration of the investigation. His middle name is left blank, as though the name was copied from a list by somebody who did not know Bibikov or anything about his case. The civilian prosecutor’s resolution was backed up the same day by an NKVD authorization of arrest, which, as the convoluted bureaucracy gathered momentum, became by 22 July a formal arrest warrant issued by the local prosecutor. Officer Koshichursin – or something like it, the name is written in barely legible, semi-literate handwriting – was charged with finding Bibikov ‘in the town of Chernigov’. He failed Bibikov was already on his way to Gagry. They finally caught up with him there on 27 July, and brought him back to Chernigov’s NKVD jail.

What he thought at that moment when he passed over to the other side of the looking glass, from the world of the living to that of the condemned, what he said, no one will now know. It would have been easiest for him if he’d said nothing, and resignedly submitted, considering himself already a dead man. But that wasn’t his character. He was a fighter, and he fought for his life, pitifully unaware that his death had already been ordained by the Party. As a Party man he should have known there was no way to resist its almighty will – though we know that at some point in the months that followed, he ceased to be the apparatchik and became just a man, refusing to live by lies for a few brief moments of misguided bravery.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn writes in The Gulag Archipelago of the loneliness of the accused at his arrest, the confusion and dislocation, the fear and indignation of the men and women who were rapidly filling the Soviet Union’s jails to bursting point that summer. ‘The whole apparatus threw its full weight on one lonely and uninhibited will,’ writes Solzhenitsyn. ‘Brother mine! Do not condemn those who turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.’

Yevgeniya Ginzburg’s harrowing account of her own arrest and eighteen-year imprisonment during the Purge, Into the Whirlwind, describes the infamous NKVD ‘conveyor’. Prisoners would be continually interrogated by teams of investigators, deprived of food and sleep, harangued, beaten and humiliated until they signed or wrote their confessions. The ones who broke down first were confronted with those more resilient, in order to break their solidarity. They were told that resistance was useless; once one made a confession the rest could be shot on that basis alone. Their wives and children were threatened. Perversely, committed Communists could be persuaded to sign for the sake of the Revolution – your Party demands it! Are you defying your Party? Stool pigeons urged fellow prisoners to confess – it’s the only way to save your life, your family’s lives! Solzhenitsyn recounts how convinced Communists would whisper to their fellows, ‘It’s our duty to support Soviet interrogation. It’s a combat situation. We ourselves are to blame. We were too softhearted; now look at the rot which has multiplied. There is a vicious secret war going on. Even here we are surrounded by enemies.’

Lied to, tortured, living in a world of pain and confusion, Bibikov the Party man for once refused to obey the Party’s orders and clung on to his innocence for as long as he could bear. But, like almost all of them, he broke in the end.

Nineteen days after his arrest he signed his first confession. It was a surprisingly long time to have held out. But nevertheless Bibikov confessed abjectly, in writing, to crimes against the Soviet Union. To the sabotage of the factory he helped to build. To the recruitment of Trotskyite agents. To propaganda against the state. He admitted that he had betrayed the Party to which he had devoted his life. His closest colleagues implicated him, and he, in turn, implicated them. None of the twenty-five supposed members of his circle refused to confess.

The first confession is dated 14 August 1937. It is the first time Bibikov speaks in the file – the first hint of a human voice among the dry officialese. The crimes to which he confesses are so bizarre, so startlingly improbable, that I felt physically nauseous at the lurch from banal legalisms into the grotesque language of nightmare.

‘Transcript of Interrogation. Accused Bibikov, Boris Lvovich, born 1903. Former Party member. Question: In the statement you have made today in your own hand you admit your participation in a counter-revolutionary terrorist organization. By whom, when and under what circumstances were you inducted into this organization?

‘Answer: I was recruited into the counter-revolutionary terrorist organization by the former second Party Secretary of Kharkov, ILYIN, in February 1934… We met often in the course of our Party work. During our meetings in 1934 I expressed my doubts about the correctness of Party policy towards agriculture, workers’ pay and so on. In February 1934, after a committee meeting, ILYIN invited me into his study and said he wanted to talk frankly. That is when he proposed that I become a member of the Trotskyite organization.’

The transcript was typed, and Bibikov signed at the bottom. The writing holds no clue as to what was going through his mind as he scribbled his signature.

But one simple confession was not enough. The bureaucracy demanded more detail, more names to fulfil the quota of enemies of the people to be found in every district and region in the country. Like scriptwriters concocting a soap opera of grotesque complexity, the investigators required their vast cast to corroborate each others’ stories, to add new layers to the plot. Bibikov’s first confession brought no respite. The interrogations continued. But at some point something within him must have rebelled at the perversity and the horror, and he tried to claw his way back into the world of the sane. Those moments of defiance ring through the thin, laconic pages of the file like a silent shout.

‘Question to Fedayev,’ reads the stark text of the transcript of his first ‘confrontation’ with a fellow ‘conspirator’, the former head of the Kharkov Regional Committee. ‘Tell us what you know about Bibikov.’

‘Fedayev’s reply: “…In the course of two conversations with Bibikov I confirmed that he was ready to take part in the organization of Trotskyite work. In our last conversation we agreed to set up a Trotskyite group at the KhTZ… “

‘Question to Bibikov: “Do you confirm the suspect Fedayev’s statement?”

‘Bibikov’s reply: “No. That is a lie. We never had such a conversation.’

‘This statement has been read to us and is accurate. (Signed) Fedayev. The accused Bibikov refused to sign.’

But in the end his defiance was useless, witnessed only by NKVD Lieutenants Slavin and Chalkov, who conducted the confrontation, and Fedayev himself, who was probably too terrified to think Bibikov’s stand was anything other than masochistic stupidity. Bibikov eventually broke completely.

‘At the Kharkov Tractor Factory we decided to sabotage an expensive, complicated machine which was crucial to the production of wheeled tractors…’ he wrote in blotted, tiny writing in his third and last detailed confession. ‘We persuaded engineer KOZLOV to leave a tool in the machine so that it would be broken for a long period. The machine alone cost 40,000 in gold and is one of only two in the whole country… At the KhTZ we plotted to throw an artillery round from the war into a blast furnace to put it out of action for two or three months… I also recruited my own deputy, Ivan KAVITSKY, into our organization… We attempted to undermine the work of the KhTZ by delaying the fulfilment of orders for the Hammer and Sickle Tractor station, and delayed the payment of wages to the workers.’

In the margin are inexplicable notes in his own writing, apparently written under dictation, saying, ‘Who, What, When?’, ‘More precise’, ‘Which organization?’

‘Our evil counter-revolutionary act was averted only by the vigilance of senior engineer GINZBURG,’ the last confession concludes. ‘This is how I betrayed my Party. Bibikov.’

The manuscript had been carefully torn across halfway down the page. Above the tear are signs of some kind of scribble, as though the writer had tried, in despair, to erase the death sentence he had just written for himself.

Then his voice disappears. There are excerpts from the transcripts of other accused in which Bibikov’s name is mentioned – sixteen interlinking confessions, all meticulously typed with angry, almost punched-through commas between the capitalized names, ‘ZELENSKY, BUTSENKO, SAPOV, BRANDT, GENKIN, BIBIKOV…’

He was brought to trial before a closed session of the Military Collegium in Kiev on 13 October 1937, the so-called troika courts of three judges who heard in camera the cases of those accused under Article 58 of the Soviet Criminal Code, which covered ‘any act designed to overthrow, undermine or weaken the authority of the workers’ and peasants’ Soviets’. The court’s conclusion is long and detailed, mostly repeating word for word the accounts of acts of sabotage included in the confessions. But for good measure, the final draft upped the charges and concluded that ‘Bibikov was a member of the k.r. [the term kontrarevolustionnaya is used so often that the typist begins to abbreviate it] Trotskyite-Zinovievite terrorist organization which carried out the wicked assassination of Comrade Kirov on 1 December 1934 and in following years planned and carried out terrorist acts against other Party and government leaders… We sentence the accused to the highest form of criminal punishment: to be shot and his property confiscated. Signed, A.M. ORLOV, S.N. ZHDANA, F.A. BATNER.’

Bibikov signed a form confirming that he had read the court’s ruling and sentence. They were the last recorded words he wrote. Signing off, with bureaucratic neatness, on the file which contained the state’s version of his life’s story. It was the final act of a life devoted to serving the Party.

The last form of the seventy-nine pages in the so-called ‘living’ file, the flimsiest of all, was a mimeographed quartersheet strip of paper roughly cut off at the bottom with scissors, which confirms that the sentence of the court has been 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 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.