offer it as any sort of supporting evidence. The thought ofAdelman made him look at his watch. If he set off now he could be back at the symposium comfortably in time for lunch and there was a good chance they wouldn't even have missed him. He gathered up the books and took them back to the issuing desk, where the second volume of Volkogonov had just arrived.
'Well,' said the librarian, her thin lips crimped with irritation, 'do you want it or not?'
' Kelso hesitated, almost said no, then decided he might as well finish what he'd started. He handed over the other books and carried the Volkogonov back into the reading room.
It lay before him on his desk like a dull brown brick. Triyumfi Tragedzjva: politi cheskii portret L V Stalina, Novosti publishers~ Moscow 1989. He had read it when it first came out and hadn't felt the need to look at it since. He regarded it now without enthusiasm, then flicked the cover open with his finger. Volkogonov was a three-star Red Army general with powerful contacts inside the Kremlin, granted special access to the archives under Gorbachev and Yeltsin which he had used to produce a trio of tombstone lives - Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin - each one more revisionist than the last. Kelso picked it up and leafed through it to the index, looked up the relevant entries for Stalin's death - and a moment later there it was, the memory that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since Papu Rapava disappeared into the Moscow dawn: A. A. Yepishev, who was at one time deputy Minister of State Security, told me that Stalin kept a black oilskin exercise book in which he would make occasional notes, and that for some time Stalin kept letters from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and even Trotsky. All efforts to discover either the notebook or these letters
have failed, and Yepishev did not reveal his source. Yepishev did not reveal his source but he did, according to Volkogonov, have a theory. He believed that Stalin's private papers had been removed from his Kremlin safe by Lavrenty Beria, while the General Secretary lay paralysed by his stroke.
Beria made a dash for the Kremlin where it is reasonable to assume he cleaned out the safe, removing the Boss's personal papers and with them, one assumes, the black notebook ... Having destroyed Stalin's notebook, if indeed it was there, Beria would have cleared the path to his own ascendancy. Perhaps the truth will never be known, but Yepishev was convinced that Beria cleaned out the safe before the others could get to it. Now calm yourself, and don't get excited, because this proves nothing, you understand? Nothing whatever.
But it does make it a thousand times more likely Back outside the entrance to the reading room, Kelso yanked open the narrow wooden drawer and searched through it quickly until he found the index cards to Yepishev, A. A. (1908-85). The old man had written a score of books, of uniform dullness and hackery: History Teaches: The Lessons of the Twentieth Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War (1965), Ideological Warfare and Military Problems (1974), We A re True to the Ideas of the Part y (1981) . Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always, in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile. He ran down the flight of steps and along the wide and gloomy corridor that led to the Lenin's military section. This was a small and self-contained area, neon-lit, with a subterranean feel to it. A young man in a grey pullover was leaning a gainst the counter, reading a 1 970s MAD comic.
'What do you have on an army man named Yepishev?' asked Kelso. 'A. A. Yepishev?'
'Who wants to know?'
Kelso handed over his reader's card and the young man examined it with interest.
'Hey, are you the Kelso who wrote that book a few years back on the end of the Party?'
Kelso hesitated - this could go either way - but finally he admitted he
'Well,' said the librarian, her thin lips crimped with irritation, 'do you want it or not?'
' Kelso hesitated, almost said no, then decided he might as well finish what he'd started. He handed over the other books and carried the Volkogonov back into the reading room.
It lay before him on his desk like a dull brown brick. Triyumfi Tragedzjva: politi cheskii portret L V Stalina, Novosti publishers~ Moscow 1989. He had read it when it first came out and hadn't felt the need to look at it since. He regarded it now without enthusiasm, then flicked the cover open with his finger. Volkogonov was a three-star Red Army general with powerful contacts inside the Kremlin, granted special access to the archives under Gorbachev and Yeltsin which he had used to produce a trio of tombstone lives - Stalin, Trotsky, Lenin - each one more revisionist than the last. Kelso picked it up and leafed through it to the index, looked up the relevant entries for Stalin's death - and a moment later there it was, the memory that had been niggling at the back of his mind ever since Papu Rapava disappeared into the Moscow dawn: A. A. Yepishev, who was at one time deputy Minister of State Security, told me that Stalin kept a black oilskin exercise book in which he would make occasional notes, and that for some time Stalin kept letters from Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin and even Trotsky. All efforts to discover either the notebook or these letters
have failed, and Yepishev did not reveal his source. Yepishev did not reveal his source but he did, according to Volkogonov, have a theory. He believed that Stalin's private papers had been removed from his Kremlin safe by Lavrenty Beria, while the General Secretary lay paralysed by his stroke.
Beria made a dash for the Kremlin where it is reasonable to assume he cleaned out the safe, removing the Boss's personal papers and with them, one assumes, the black notebook ... Having destroyed Stalin's notebook, if indeed it was there, Beria would have cleared the path to his own ascendancy. Perhaps the truth will never be known, but Yepishev was convinced that Beria cleaned out the safe before the others could get to it. Now calm yourself, and don't get excited, because this proves nothing, you understand? Nothing whatever.
But it does make it a thousand times more likely Back outside the entrance to the reading room, Kelso yanked open the narrow wooden drawer and searched through it quickly until he found the index cards to Yepishev, A. A. (1908-85). The old man had written a score of books, of uniform dullness and hackery: History Teaches: The Lessons of the Twentieth Anniversary of Victory in the Great Patriotic War (1965), Ideological Warfare and Military Problems (1974), We A re True to the Ideas of the Part y (1981) . Kelso's hangover had gone, to be replaced by that familiar phase of post-alcoholic euphoria - always, in the past, his most productive time of day - a feeling that alone was enough to make getting drunk worthwhile. He ran down the flight of steps and along the wide and gloomy corridor that led to the Lenin's military section. This was a small and self-contained area, neon-lit, with a subterranean feel to it. A young man in a grey pullover was leaning a gainst the counter, reading a 1 970s MAD comic.
'What do you have on an army man named Yepishev?' asked Kelso. 'A. A. Yepishev?'
'Who wants to know?'
Kelso handed over his reader's card and the young man examined it with interest.
'Hey, are you the Kelso who wrote that book a few years back on the end of the Party?'
Kelso hesitated - this could go either way - but finally he admitted he
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