Дэвид Салой: The Innocent

Someone even said, ‘You alright?’

Was he alright?

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, thank you.’

‘What?’

He shook his head.

‘You should sit down.’

He nodded, and let them lead him to a bench in the shade.

Several people were looking down at him. One of them was holding his hat, which he must have dropped. ‘My hat,’ he said. It was handed to him. He put it on. ‘Thank you.’ He smiled. He was embarrassed to find himself in this situation. His shirt was wet. ‘I’m fine,’ he said, still smiling. ‘Thank you.’ They looked sceptical, but when he stood up – standing made his head spin – they stood aside to let him leave.

She died of lung cancer in 1971. He did not find out until the spring of the following year.

The Soviet Union was divided into Republics (e.g. Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Kazakhstan) which were further divided into regions. The Russian word for these regions is oblast . As with the USSR as a whole, each oblast had parallel state and party bureaucracies – the obkom was the highest party body in the oblast , the oblispolkom its state equivalent – and as in the USSR as a whole, the party always had the final word. As Stephen Kotkin puts it, ‘Both parts of the party-state were functional, but their functions were different: whereas the state’s role was defined in terms of competent technical and economic administration, the party’s was defined in terms of ideological and political guidance. Such a bifurcated political system, with the party analogous to a church, resembled a kind of theocracy.’ [1] Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (University of California Press, 1995) Thus, while day-to-day administration was handled by state institutions, the first secretary of the obkom was the most powerful individual in the oblast . Much of this power was exercised through the nomenklatura , a list of senior positions – in all walks of life, including the oblispolkom – which were filled only with obkom nominees.

Technically part of the state bureaucracy, the state security police was in fact more or less independent, part of a separate and parallel structure, with the Ministry of State Security in Moscow at its summit. It was formed in 1917 and was known as the Cheka, the ‘All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Sabotage’. Throughout the Soviet period, state security officers were popularly known as ‘Chekists’. The institution itself was known by an ever-shifting series of acronyms. Put simply, the Cheka became the GPU (State Political Directorate) in 1922, the OGPU (Unified State Political Directorate) in 1923, the NKVD (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs) in 1934, the MGB (Ministry of State Security) in 1946 and the KGB (State Security Committee) in 1954.

I AM PARTICULARLY indebted to the work of three historians. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s Everyday Stalinism ; Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation ; and Jochen Hellbeck’s Revolution on my Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin , especially the chapters on Stepan Podlubnyi and Zinaida Denisevskaya. Other books that were useful to me were: Russia: the People and the Power by Robert G. Kaiser; The Road to Terror: Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932–1939 by J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov; Stalin’s Secret Pogrom: The Postwar Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee by Joshua Rubenstein and Vladimir P. Naumov; Stalinism as a Way of Life by Lewis Siegelbaum and Andrei Sokolov; Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism by Donald Filtzer; The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System by James R. Harris; Cold Peace: Stalin and the Soviet Ruling Circle, 1945–1953 by Yoram Gorlizki and Oleg Khlevniuk; Khrushchev Remembers by Nikita Khrushchev; Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore; and finally, though it was in fact the starting point of the whole thing, The Man with a Shattered World by A. R. Luria.

I would also like to thank my agent, Anna Webber, and Dan Franklin and Alex Bowler at Jonathan Cape, for all their input and support.

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David Szalay was born in Canada in 1974. His first novel, London and the South-East (2008), won the Betty Trask Prize. He lives in London.

Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation (University of California Press, 1995)