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What was it like to be Stalin's bodyguard?

Alex Halberstadt's grandfather, Vassily Chernopisky, in 2004 - Alex Halberstadt
Alex Halberstadt's grandfather, Vassily Chernopisky, in 2004 - Alex Halberstadt

At a teachers' conference in 2014, Vladimir Putin humbly conceded that “Russian history did contain some problematic pages.” However, “We have fewer of them than other countries… We can’t allow anyone to impose a sense of guilt on us.”

Alex Halberstadt disagrees. In this remarkable family memoir, the journalist, a Russian émigré who left for America in 1980, just as Putin was enjoying his time monitoring foreign officials in Leningrad for the KGB, argues that the traumas of Russian experience in the 20th century have left scars so deep that any such attempt to smooth them over is bound to fail.

Halberstadt toys with the idea that the stresses of the past can leave a physical mark on later generations, as a 2013 study in epigenetics tantalisingly suggested. It is certainly the case that the narrative he presents, of his father’s family twisted by the parts they played in the apparatus of the Soviet state, and of his mother’s family, consumed by the Holocaust in Lithuania, contains trauma enough to sustain several generations.

As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointed out, one cannot expect a man who is warm to understand one who is freezing, and it is almost impossible to comprehend the experience of those who lived through this period. Only through personal narratives can one bridge this gap. And Halberstadt, in the form of his paternal grandfather Vassily, has a quite remarkable eyewitness.

Most likely Stalin’s last living bodyguard and an alarmingly close associate of that arch-monster Lavrentiy Beria, Vassily is not a comfortable figure for Halberstadt to confront. “Those were black years,” Vassily told him. “You always had to know how to play the situation…” When asked about his work, he was evasive, but his eventual response, “paperwork” and “interrogation” (twin pillars of the Communist state), seems telling enough.

Vassily and his wife Tamara in Ukraine, 1953 - Alex Halberstadt
Vassily and his wife Tamara in Ukraine, 1953 - Alex Halberstadt

Yet Vassily also gives us a glimpse of how this state could be allowed to exist. We may be familiar with, for instance, the grotesque image of Stalin at a Party banquet, chasing his wife from the table under a shower of orange peel and cigarette ends, the night before she was found with a gunshot wound to her temple, but it is only through the eyes of Vassily, a 21-year-old farmer’s son who found himself among the great men of the USSR, that we can comprehend such a scene being viewed with anything but revulsion. Even though the secret police were driving kulaks (wealthier peasant farmers) like Vassily’s father from their land and orphaning “scores of his former schoolmates”, Vassily admits that, in the Kremlin dining room, “I remember being happy…”

Halberstadt’s mother’s family were rather less active participants in the miseries that befell their homeland. Under its relatively enlightened Lithuanian rulers, the Jewish population of Vilnius grew so great that Napoleon, in 1812, described it as the “Jerusalem of the North” and it may have been the relative security of the Lithuanian Jews that prevented Halberstadt’s family from appreciating the danger they faced when, in June 1941, it became clear the city would fall to the Nazis. The family felt sure that the countrymen of Bach and Schiller were bound to behave “like civilised Europeans”, but by the summer of 1944, 95 per cent of Lithuania’s 250,000 Jews had been murdered.

Alex Halberstadt's mother Anna and his maternal grandparents Raisa and Semyon, Palanga, Lithuania, 1954 - Alex Halberstadt
Alex Halberstadt's mother Anna and his maternal grandparents Raisa and Semyon, Palanga, Lithuania, 1954 - Alex Halberstadt

Later in life, Halberstadt’s grandfather was tortured by his failure to persuade the rest of his family to flee with him. He escaped on the roof of a train bound for Russian frontier, and his instant conscription into the Red Army (the force of a nation to which he had no attachment and owed no loyalty) encapsulates the message of this memoir, that the 20th century in Russia and Eastern Europe was a place where “the buffer between history and biography became nearly imperceptible”, with each individual a pawn in the hands of history.

Take Halberstadt’s grandmother, who collapsed on a train she had leapt aboard when fleeing Lithuania in 1941 and woke up, shaven headed, in a typhus ward in Uzbekistan. Much earlier, Halberstadt's great-grandfather had been conscripted into the Tsar’s army and eventually found himself in a Berlin hospital, finally returning to his village in 1923, having walked much of the way (a remarkably similar narrative to that of a short story entitled "An Incident on Lake Geneva" by Stefan Zweig who was, himself, a writer equally fascinated by the idea of the loss of liberty to historical circumstance).

Even those fortunate enough not to be uprooted were crushed by the state. In Moscow during the early 1940s, amid widespread food and fuel shortages, factories operated through the night and mandatory five to eight year prison sentences were handed out for missing a single day’s work.

Faced with the scale of his family’s sufferings, Halberstadt’s tales of his own difficulties as a young immigrant in the 1980s jar, and traces remain of the “family detective” magazine piece from which the book was born (descriptions of long train journeys spent pondering “identity” and listening to Sonic Youth: “my mind felt like a snake that had swallowed a large rodent…”).

Alex Halberstadt's paternal grandmother Tamara in Moscow - Alex Halberstadt
Alex Halberstadt's paternal grandmother Tamara in Moscow - Alex Halberstadt

And while there are moments of hope and redemption – such as the triumphant expression of individuality in his father having pressed a serviceable copy of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock on to an X-ray of a lung (the best shellac substitute he could find) pinched from a Moscow hospital – overall the book is crushingly bleak. I was guiltily reminded of P G Wodehouse’s evocation of “the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy’s Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day’s work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city’s reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty”.

However, one resonant digression reminds us why these painful scars, however much we might prefer to ignore them, are worth picking at. In 1931, the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow was torn down to make way for an almost comically vast and unattractive Palace of the Soviets. The foundations of the new building (which was never completed) flooded almost immediately and the sides were shored up with the most readily available source of cut stone – tombstones ripped from the city’s cemeteries. If nobody had done any digging, it is unlikely anyone would be aware of this elegant testimony to the subordination of human life to the will of an overmighty state.

Young Heroes of the Soviet Union by Alex Halberstadt is published by Bodley Head at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, visit Telegraph Books