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

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.’

Halberstadt, a Soviet-born American writer, doesn’t agree. Aged nine, soon after leaving Moscow with his family and defecting to the West, he began having a recurring nightmare in which he was chased by a ferocious bulldog, a dream that lingered into adulthood. Contrary to the proverb, ignorance, it seems, is a shoddy defence against night terrors. Throughout his life an inner dread has followed him like a ‘medieval possession’, something he believes is an inherited affliction, with roots in his family’s unacknowledged past.

In a bid to inspect, diagnose and perhaps stymie this problem, Halberstadt returns east, to Ukraine, to meet with his grandfather, Vassily, a former bodyguard for Stalin and other senior figures in the KGB. Their uneasy encounters form the first part of Young Heroes of the Soviet Union, an illuminating, dramatic and wistful family memoir.

That Vassily — now senile and well into his nineties — is alive at all is quite remarkable. To be close to Stalin was to risk a death sentence; many of Vassily’s colleagues simply vanished from view. He is generally evasive, but at times offers enthralling insights into Stalin’s inner circle, describing how he once forcibly restrained Marshal Zhukov, the Soviet Union’s top military commander, from entering a meeting of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.