The wrong Ivanov

The database that keeps three point three million repressed people wants a surname, a given name and a patronymic, and it returns a man in under a second, which turned out to be the whole trouble. I typed Ivanov, Ilya Ivanovich into the open list in the last weeks before a novel with his name on it went to print. One record came back. Forty years old, condemned to death on the twenty fifth of May 1919 by a revolutionary war tribunal of the Western Front, counter revolutionary activity, rehabilitated in November 2005 by the Moscow prosecutor.

Not my man. Mine was born in 1870 and died in Alma-Ata in 1932, in exile, of a stroke, as far as the secondary literature agrees, and the argument of my whole third chapter is that nobody ever bothered to shoot him. The tribunal record belongs to somebody who shared three names with him and nothing else at all. I had it open in a tab for two days before I did the arithmetic on the ages, which is not a sentence I enjoy typing.

The other database holds two and a half million names out of hundreds of memorial books, and it does not say anywhere who runs it. Both are gifts. Neither is evidence: a place where you find a name is not the same thing as the book the name came from. So every hit goes back to its martyrology before it goes near a footnote. Wrong Ivanovs are cheap. Mine took two days.