Last bastion of Stalinism bows out of politics

Andre Gromyko: Memories (Hutchinson 16.95)
SO, farewell Andrei. The final symbolic link with Stalinism, (apart, that is, from a few thousand tanks), has been sundered. One can guess at the sequence of events which led to the appearance of this book on western bookstalls, and the author's conversations with the diminutive, snooker-loving editor of a rival publication. A desire to clear out a few cobwebs, and earn a little bit of hard currency to plump the cushions of the wicker sofa during a long senescence.
Meanwhile, in the West, for ten minutes, everyone has Gromyko fever: it's lovable Andrei, the man who had no idea about Stalin's purges, the international apostle of preGorbachevian goodwill, the man who, when he said "Nyet", apparently meant "Nyet yet".
To be fair to Gorbachev, one can see from this book that Gromyko's re-education had a little way to go. On the NaziSoviet non-aggression pact, Gromyko writes: "the pact was the result of the policy of a number of western powers which did not wish to join the USSR in blocking Hitler's path". As to the protocol of the pact signed by Ribhentrop and Molotov which allegedly agreed the division of Poland by the Nazis and the Soviet Union, Gromyko has two arguments: (a) no such protocol exists; (b) it Mark Rogers is a forgery. The book is full of this kind of bleak humour.
So — what about Stalin? He was, we hear a man of "powerful intellect ... unshakeable determination" who, however, was "tragically contradictory" in that he — I'm sorry, the "state machine" he had created — sent millions (actually, Gromyko puts "multitudes" — a word with agreeably vague biblical overtones) of the Soviet Union's people to their death. Nevertheless, "partisans died with his name on their lips".
The Soviet Union has a problem with Stalin which is perhaps greater than the problem of the Germans with Hitler. After all, Stalin won, and perhaps (so the suspicion lurks) the purges, the massacres, the famine were all justified. Since Hitler lost, his methods are discredited — in Soviet Russia there will always and forever be Stalinists, ready to pick up the reins of power when the liberal leadership fumbles.
Many of Stalin's victims are still alive, and many of their widows and their orphans. It is not a ghostly event of scriptural remoteness which is under discussion when the foreign language digest Sputnik — as it did recently — devotes a special issue to Stalin and the war, it is one of sharp relevance to the states and individuals of Eastern Europe today. East Germany pulped the issue.
Oddly, the memoirs remind one of nothing so much as those of a governess in the household of the Romanovs who saw nothing but the Summer and the Winter Palaces, holidays, parties and visiting royalty. Unpleasant things may have happened during Gromyko's life, but he would have us understand that they were nothing to do with him, he was somewhere else.
Whilst perhaps, it is no more lying or contemptible than many another politician's memoirs, the fact that we know what Gromyko knows, and how closely he knows it, makes Memories fairly stick in the gorge. These are things, after all, that happened to his colleagues, his compatriots, his friends.
Stalin once called Gromyko "our encyclopedia" — we can he sure that he has not forgotten. Now he is taking it beyond the reach of the Sunday newspapers and the bourgeois historians. To the grave itself.
The reviewer is an independent television producer.