‘All Politburo members bear responsibility . . . But 1937 was necessary.’ Mikoyan agreed that ‘everyone who worked with Stalin . . . bears a share of responsibility’. It was bad enough to kill so many but their complete awareness that many were innocent even by their own arcane standards is the hardest to take: ‘We’re guilty of going too far,’ said Kaganovich. ‘We all made mistakes . . . But we won WW2.’ Those who knew these mass murderers later reflected that Malenkov or Khrushchev were ‘not wicked by nature’, not ‘what they eventually became’. They were men of their time.
