The most dreadful characters in any revolution are its guardians. The prototype defender of the "gains" made by the overthrow of any ancient regime was the evil creature Fouquier-Tinville, whose zeal after the French revolution even caused him to guillotine the corpse of a man who had cheated him by committing suicide during his trial. Later, Tinville exultantly obliged one old man and his daughter to watch her children and her husband be guillotined, one by one, before her turn came, and finally, that of the old man.
Roland Freisler performed similar duties for the Nazis, dispatching perceived enemies with sadistic glee to the guillotine or the butcher's hook. Yet these are the sort of perverted creatures who misrepresent the insidious nature of true evil, simply because they are so visibly vile. Evil is normally much more covert and subversive. Sometimes it is represented by demented idealists such as the Pole Dzerzhinksy, founder of the Cheka, the forerunner of a lexicon of terror: OGPU, NKVD, KGB; and sometimes in the form of his cultural heir, Lavrenti Beria, who combined forensic genius, enormous energy, vast political skills and an amorality of psychopathic proportions with the ability to be a loving and attentive father.
This account of life at the heart of Stalin's Russia by Beria's son Sergo is in part about what it was to be the object of such fatherly affection; indeed, so close is his tale to the centre of power that it cannot see the trees for the wood. And whereas there clearly is a market for this kind of memoir in the old Soviet Union as it obsessively pores over the dark and terrible decades which followed the arrival of Lenin at the Finland station, it is hard to see what point there is to this volume in English.
It is almost as if the publishers are aware of this in the subversive and brilliantly destructive piece of editing which accompanies the reminiscences. For whereas the main text is a rambling farrago about family life in the heart of Stalin's Russia, full of tittle-tattle and hearsay of the kind which fills any royal court, with highly improbable verbatim recollections of entire conversations of 60 years ago, the brilliant notes by the editor, Francoise Thom, at the end of the volume almost completely dismantle the value of the reminiscences which precede them.
So why is this book being published in English? If the publishers feel it is so inaccurate that its main text needs extensive correctives to almost every page, why bother publishing it? And if its merit is that at least it gives us an insider's view on life in the Kremlin, albeit a wildly inaccurate one, why are the correctives not carried in more easily readable footnotes on every page, rather than being almost irretrievably buried in the back?
Otherwise, this volume consists of a wretchedly thin text which despite its meagreness manages to burden us with the author's frivolous memories of the size and furnishings of hotel rooms he once stayed in, and which either skates around or elides completely the enormities which his father was guilty of. This is dreadful stuff. Beria senior belonged to a vast criminal conspiracy against the subject peoples of the Soviet Union; and he did so, as we knew before these reminiscences, simply because he, Beria, was content to do the bidding of his master, Stalin. That he personally did not believe in the terror is perfectly evident from his overnight destruction of the instruments of the Gulag almost from the moment of Stalin's death.
Admittedly, the popular image we have of Beria as an unmitigated monster is in part the creation of those such as Kruschev who arranged the show-trial which led to his death. The post-Stalinist reformists, who were all accomplices to Stalin's deeds, then weeded the archive to remove thousands of files which incriminated them, completing their task by selectively publishing or leaking documents to incriminate Beria and to exonerate themselves.
That was not difficult to do. Power had turned a modest apparatchik into a monster whose machinery of state terror caused tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of deaths. In his latter years, he is said to have developed a taste for rape, and his official Zil limousine would scour Moscow to abduct unfortunate girls at random for him.
But little enough of such monstrosities appears in this book. Indeed, little enough of anything appears in it. If it has a distinction of any kind - aside, that is from the splendid if sadly concealed contributions from the editor - it is that is probably the worst book I have ever been called on to review. Such interest as it may posses is for scholars; but even this is vitiated by a perfectly deplorable index. Maybe this is the fault of the otherwise irreproachable editor, or more likely, of a publisher who was not prepared to put the necessary resources into it.
In conclusion, I feel obliged to urge the literary editor of this newspaper to spare me any more books such as this. Why embitter my declining years by being obliged to read, and review, such tosh.
Kevin Myers is an Irish Times journalist. His first novel, Banks of Green Willow, will be published by Scribner in the autumn