Matthew Janney

‘I was frightened every single day’: the perils of guarding Stalin

Alex Halberstadt elicits some painful memories from his reluctant grandfather, once Stalin’s bodyguard

Anyone close to Stalin lived under sentence of death. Credit: Alamy 
issue 01 August 2020

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.

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