Vol. 16 No. 15 · 4 August 1994
page 21 | 2697 words
Diary
Mary-Kay Wilmers
A distant relative of mine was a general in the KGB. ‘As long as I live,’ Stalin said of him, ‘not a hair of his head shall be touched.’ Stalin didn’t keep his word – which can’t have been wholly surprising even then. Unlike many of his colleagues, however, my relative wasn’t shot: he was beaten and tortured and kept in prison for 12 years. He died in 1981 with – I’ve been told – a portrait of Stalin by his bed.
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[*] Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster by Pavel Sudoplatov and Anatoli Sudoplatov, with Jerrold and Leona Schecter. Little Brown, 509 pp., £18.99, 19 April, 0 316 91217 4.
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Letters
Vol. 16 No. 17 · 8 September 1994
From Terry Kelly
I was so totally engrossed in Mary-Kay Wilmers’s account of her NKVD forebear (LRB, 4 August) that I almost missed the far-too-casual reference to the outrageous mugging of R.W. Johnson by a gang of ten-year-olds in Gorky Street, Moscow. At first sight this might appear to be a case of random violence against foreigners, but I doubt that this was so. R.W. Johnson is a distinguished intellectual with impeccable anti-Stalinist credentials. A relative of Leonid Eitingon should have realised instinctively what was going on here. This was not an instance of freemarket violence. The whole affair smacks of an old-style KGB operation. How could it have escaped Mary-Kay Wilmers that R.W. Johnson was attacked by hoodlums acting under the instructions of ANC veteran Joe Slovo? The ANC High Command wanted to punish Johnson for his courageous articles defending Chief Buthelezi and Inkatha. It would have been too obvious to attack him in South Africa. Hence the attack in Moscow.
Terry Kelly
Trinity College, Dublin
Mary-Kay Wilmers writes: Has Terry Kelly got a summer job at Bandung Productions (prop: Tariq Ali)? The provenance of his fax suggests so.
