When the poet Osip Mandelstam was arrested by the Soviet secret police in the 1930s, he was taken to the notorious Lubyanka prison for interrogation. He drew a distinction between the guards “on the outside” — village youths doing terrible things out of a dim sense of duty — and the interrogators “on the inside,” who seemed like specialists in cruelty. “To do that job, you have to have a particular vocation,” Mandelstam said. “No ordinary man could stand it.”
It’s an observation that Alex Halberstadt forced himself to keep in mind when meeting with his paternal grandfather, Vassily, who worked in Lubyanka for several years before becoming one of Stalin’s bodyguards. Halberstadt considered his grandfather, who was a member of Stalin’s security detail for more than a decade, to be “the moral equal of a Gestapo officer.” Vassily survived countless rounds of purges and recriminations to live into his 90s — no small feat for anyone so entwined in the paranoid politics of the Soviet state.
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