The grandson of Stalin’s last surviving bodyguard turns interrogator in this engrossing and tragic family history
“You came here as my grandson, not my interrogator,” Alex Halberstadt’s grandfather Vassily remarks to him when the writer visits him in the Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia in the early 2000s. A Soviet-Jewish emigrant who grew up in New York, Halberstadt presses his grandfather, a former major in the secret police who was Stalin’s last surviving bodyguard, to divulge his crimes. In their conversations, the 93-year-old offers hints of the horrors he both witnessed and inflicted, but no fulsome confession.
Sentences trail off, watery eyes stare into the middle distance; Vassily remains impenetrable. He “shrouded himself in the softening ravages of age, the creases and lines that erased from his face the look of mastery and even cruelty” discernible in photos of his younger self. Halberstadt seeks to decode Vassily’s “roles as perpetrator and victim”, but he is forced to concede a defeat of sorts: “I realised how naive I’d been. His culpability was an immense, unknowable continent filled with indecipherable ambiguities. Vassily had merely permitted me into the vestibule of his past.”