Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  “I was dumb,” Tretetsky said. “I believed in it all. I would have given my life for the Motherland on a moment’s notice.”

  He petitioned the military for a commission to Afghanistan and served there from 1987 to 1989. Tretetsky came home to Moscow only to get a bitter taste of the real history of the country he knew so little about. He was assigned to the Military Prosecutor’s Office, which was conducting massive investigations into the rehabilitations of people who had been repressed over the past seventy years. Slowly, he began to learn about some of the ugliest incidents in Soviet history: the purges, the massacre of the Polish officers, the army’s bloody attack on peaceful demonstrators in 1961 at Novocherkassk.

  Put in charge of the excavations, first in Starobelsk and now in Mednoye, Tretetsky attacked his work with passion and precision. In Mednoye, he knew perfectly well where to dig and what to look for. He had already interrogated a local man, a retired officer of the secret police, who had helped carry out the orders from Moscow in 1940. Vladimir Tokaryev was blind and eighty-nine years old by the time history caught up with him, but his memory was clear. Sitting with Tretetsky and a videocamera, he described how in April 1940 his unit of the secret police shot Polish officers in the woods outside Kalinin—two hundred and fifty a night, for a month.

  The executioners, Tokaryev said, “brought with them a whole suitcase full of German revolvers, the Walther 2 type. Our Soviet TT weapons were thought not to be reliable enough. They were liable to overheat with heavy use.… I was there the first night they did the shooting. Blokhin was the main killer, with about thirty others, mainly NKVD drivers and guards. My driver, Sukharev, for instance, was one of them. I remember Blokhin saying: ‘Come on, let’s go.’ And then he put on his special uniform for the job: brown leather hat, brown leather apron, long brown leather gloves reaching above the elbows. They were his terrible trademark. I was face to face with a true executioner.

  “They took the Poles along the corridor one by one, turned left, and took them into the Red Corner, the rest room for the prison staff. Each man was asked his surname, first name, and place of birth—just enough to identify him. Then he was taken to the room next door, which was soundproofed, and shot in the back of the head. Nothing was read to them, no decision of any court or special commission.

  “There were three hundred shot that first night. I remember Sukharev, my driver, boasting about what a hard night’s work it had been. But it was too many, because it was light by the time they had finished and they had a rule that everything must be done in the darkness. So they reduced the number to two hundred and fifty a night. How many nights did it last? Work it out for yourself: six thousand men at two hundred and fifty a night. Allowing for holidays, that makes about a month, the whole of April 1940.

  “I took no part in the killings. I never went into the execution room. But I was obliged to help them by putting my men at their disposal. I remember a few individual Poles. For instance, a young man. I asked him his age. He smiled like a young boy. I asked him how long he had been in the frontier police. He counted on his fingers. Six months. What had he done there? He had been a telephone operator.

  “Blokhin made sure that everyone in the execution team got a supply of vodka after each night’s work. Every evening he brought it into the prison in boxes. They drank nothing before the shooting or during the shooting, but afterward they all had a few glasses before going home to bed.

  “I asked Blokhin and the other two: ‘Won’t it take a lot of men to dig six thousand graves?’ They laughed at me. Blokhin said that he had brought a bulldozer from Moscow and two NKVD men to work it. So the dead Poles were taken out through the far door of the execution room, loaded onto covered trucks, and taken to the burial place. [The site] was chosen by Blokhin himself. It was near where the NKVD officers had their country homes, near my own dacha, near the village of Mednoye, about twenty miles from Kalinin. The ditches they dug were between eight and ten meters long, each one being enough to hold two hundred and fifty bodies. When it was all over, the three men from Moscow organized a big banquet to celebrate. They kept pestering me, insisting that I should attend. But I refused.”

  On and on the blind man droned, pointing his finger at “the others,” denying the importance of his own role, no less a cruel, bland beast than Eichmann in Jerusalem. But Tokaryev was hardly the issue now. Nor were the executioners themselves. Blokhin and three of the others had long ago gone mad and committed suicide. The point was that nearly everywhere they went, historians, prosecutors, archivists, and journalists discovered that the legacy of Soviet power was at least as tragic as everything they had heard from “forbidden voices”: Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales. Now no book, no voice, was forbidden. To regain the past, to see plain the nightmares of seventy years, was a nearly unbearable shock. As the return of history accelerated, television routinely showed documentary films about the slaughter of the Romanovs, the forced collectivization of the countryside, the purge trials. The monthly literary journals, the weeklies, and even the daily newspapers were crammed with the latest historical damage reports: how many shot and imprisoned; how many churches, mosques, and synagogues destroyed; how much plunder and waste. Under this avalanche of remembering, people protested weariness, even boredom, after a while. But, really, it was the pain of remembering, the shock of recognition, that persecuted them. “Imagine being an adult and nearly all the truth you know about the world around you and outside your own country has to be absorbed in a matter of a year or two or three,” the philosopher Grigori Pomerants told me. “The entire country is still in a state of mass disorientation.”

  The men of the Communist Party, the leaders of the KGB and the military and the millions of provincial functionaries who had grown up on a falsified history, could not bear the truth. Not because they didn’t believe it. They knew the facts of the past better than anyone else. But the truth challenged their existence, their comfort and privileges. Their right to a decent office, a cut of meat, the month of vacation in the Crimea—it all depended on a colossal social deception, on the forced ignorance of 280 million people. Yegor Ligachev, a conservative figure in the Politburo until his forced retirement in 1990, told me ruefully that when history was taken out of the hands of the Communist Party, when scholars, journalists, and witnesses began publishing and broadcasting their own version of the past, “it created a gloomy atmosphere in the country. It affected the emotions of the people, their mood, their work efficiency. From morning to night, everything negative from the past is being dumped on them. Patriotic topics have been squeezed out, shunted aside. People are longing for something positive, something shining, and yet our own cultural figures have published more lies and anti-Soviet things than our Western enemies ever did in the last seventy years combined.”

  When history was no longer an instrument of the Party, the Party was doomed to failure. For history proved precisely that: the Party was rotten at its core. The ministers, generals, and apparatchiks who organized the August coup of 1991 met secretly at KGB safe houses outside Moscow many times to discuss the ruin of their state. They talked of the need for order, the need, somehow, to reverse the decline of the Party. They were so deluded about their own country that they even believed they could put a halt to the return of history. They would shut it down with a decree and a couple of tank divisions. The excavations at Mednoye and the other sites of the Polish massacre were no exception. The putschists would try to undermine the work as well as they could. Long before the coup, Valery Boldin, Gorbachev’s chief of staff and one of the key plotters in the August coup, tried to control the damage by secretly transferring many key documents on the case from Division Six of the Central Committee archives to the “presidential archive,” which he controlled. But that small step did very little. Boldin and the rest of the plotters were now prepared to eliminate everything that aggrieved them. They would end the return of history. They would turn back time. Once more, fear would
be the essence of the state.

  On the day of the putsch, Tretetsky’s men, both the Soviets and the Poles, tried to keep their minds on their work. They dug up old graves and washed the bones and skull fragments in battered bowls. But as the news of the coup reached them, piece by piece, it became harder to concentrate. The soldiers under Tretetsky even heard that the troops deployed on the streets of Moscow were from their own division: the Kantemirovskaya Division. They turned on a television in one of the tents near the work site and saw familiar faces, friends sitting on armored personnel carriers near the Kremlin, outside the Russian parliament, and on the main streets of the capital.

  “The weather was wretched,” Tretetsky remembered. “It rained nearly all the time, and so to dry the fragments of uniforms, we had to put them in tents, fire up a furnace, and keep the tent open to circulate the air.” The team worked until late in the afternoon, when Tretetsky told them all, “The work for today is over.” He told them nothing more.

  All day long, Tretetsky had been getting calls from the headquarters of the KGB command in Kalinin. The KGB general there, Viktor Lakontsev, warned Tretetsky that the excavation “was no longer necessary,” that work should stop and that he must come immediately to headquarters. Tretetsky refused, saying work would go on as planned. He said he would come to KGB headquarters only at the end of the working day. Despite his brave front, Tretetsky was frightened. “I knew there was trouble,” he said.

  That evening Tretetsky was driven under KGB guard to Lakontsev’s office in Kalinin.

  The work must stop, Lakontsev insisted. “If it does not,” he said, “we cannot guarantee your safety or the safety of the Polish workers.”

  Tretetsky had to laugh. Throughout his work in Starobelsk and Mednoye there had always been KGB men at the sites—“observers,” they called themselves. “Our United Nations observers,” the workers called them.

  Tretetsky would not back down. “Over my dead body,” he thought to himself. To Lakontsev, he put the refusal more subtly. He told the KGB general that if it was a question of the Poles, he would take responsibility for their safety. The Poles could live together in the tents with the Soviet army troops instead of in the city.

  “The investigation cannot stop,” Tretetsky said. “What would I tell the Poles? I need to talk to my own chief. This is not an easy question.” All the same, Tretetsky thought, “Lakontsev is a big boss, and who am I?”

  When he returned to his camp, Tretetsky called Moscow and was told that there had been no stop-work order. He was relieved. Exhausted, he went to sleep in his tent. But not long after, the commander of the army troops woke him saying that an order had come from Moscow: the soldiers had to return to the Kantemirovskaya base in the town of Naro-Fominsk outside Moscow.

  “Listen, Viktor,” Tretetsky told the commander, “this is an oral order, isn’t it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And to bring your men here, you had a written order.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “So why should you obey?”

  The troops stayed where they were. The KGB had tried to trick Tretetsky and they had failed. There never had been an order from the Military Prosecutor’s Office in Moscow.

  At nine the next morning, Tretetsky went before the men and said, “The work goes on. Let’s begin now. Everyone is to work intensively, with enthusiasm. And that’s it!”

  The KGB sabotaged the tractor the men had been using for the excavation. But by now Tretetsky had connections with people in the area, and a collective farm lent him one of its tractors. The Polish workers were especially grateful and pounded Tretetsky on the back. For two more days, the Soviets and the Poles worked at the graves and listened to the radio reports coming from Moscow. Slowly, the news improved. When the men heard that the coup was on the verge of collapse, they seemed to work even harder. Finally, on the morning of August 21, after the plot had failed and troops had returned in relief and triumph from Moscow to their bases, Tretetsky went before his men. He would not live the lie any longer. He refused to return to the past, except to study its bones.

  “The criminal investigation ordered by the president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, goes on!” he cried out. Then the colonel gave the order and his men began to dig.

  CHAPTER 2

  A STALINIST CHILDHOOD

  Not long after my wife, Esther, and I moved to Moscow in January 1988, I was having tea and cake with Flora and Misha Litvinov at their apartment on the Frunzenskaya Embankment, where many families of Communist Party officials, active and retired, lived. The Litvinovs were a dazzling couple in their seventies, dazzling in their kindnesses and the unassuming way they seemed to know everyone and everything going on in Moscow. Misha was the quieter of the two. His reserve, I supposed, was the result of a lifetime sandwiched between a father, Maksim, who served in Stalin’s inner court as foreign minister and a son, Pavel, who helped strike one of the first blows against the regime as a dissident. Surrounded by history and its actors, Misha made an art of listening. He listened patiently, with nearly imperceptible amusement. There was not much that would surprise a man whose father slept with a Browning automatic under his pillow in case of attack and a son who flipped the bird to the men of the Politburo. In a room of friends or strangers, however, it was Flora who took the lead, provided the family positions, made the polite inquiry.

  She asked what I’d be writing about in Moscow.

  “I’m looking for Kaganovich,” I said.

  Flora’s face tightened. She and Misha had known more than one American reporter in the past, and they had undoubtedly heard more reasonable journalistic ambitions: a mastery of arms control, human rights, Kremlin politics. Strange boy, she must have thought, but she was too kind to say so.

  At the time, Lazar Moiseyevich Kaganovich was in his mid-nineties and the last living member of Stalin’s inner circle. As the people’s commissar, he was once as close to Stalin as Goering was to Hitler. He helped direct the collectivization program of the 1920s and early 1930s, a brutal campaign that annihilated the peasantry and left the villages of Ukraine strewn with an endless field of human husks. As the leader of the Moscow Party organization, Kaganovich built the city subway system and, briefly, had it named for himself. He was responsible as well for the destruction of dozens of churches and synagogues. He dynamited Christ the Savior, a magnificent cathedral in one of the oldest quarters of Moscow. It was said at the time that Stalin could see the cathedral belltower from his window and wanted it eliminated.

  Did Kaganovich still believe? I wanted to know. Did he feel any guilt, any shame? And what did he think of Gorbachev, the current general secretary? But that wasn’t it, really. Mostly I wanted just to sit in the same room with Kaganovich, to see what an evil man looked like, to know what he did, what books he kept around.

  Misha listened, but with a certain ethereal inattention. As I talked, he was twisting and folding a napkin into … something. He had lately become a master of origami, the Japanese art of paper folding. He had filled an entire room with his paper menagerie: octagons, tetrahedrons, storks, bugs.

  “You know,” he said, mashing out a crease with the butt of his palm, “Kaganovich lives downstairs.”

  Downstairs? I already knew that he lived on the Embankment, probably in one of the better buildings still stocked with the descendants of Old Bolsheviks and the Stalinist guard. But here, downstairs? In old photographs, Kaganovich was a huge man with a Prussian mustache and onyx eyes. In retirement, he had been the champion of dominoes in the Frunzenskaya Embankment neighborhood. He would play all comers in the courtyards. Once, when Brezhnev was still in power, Kaganovich made a call to the local Party committee and demanded that his courtyard be equipped with spotlights so he could play dominoes on summer nights. He still had the right to use the plush Kremlin hospitals—the “fourth administration”—and he was very much alive. Here, downstairs.

  “It’s apartment 384,”
Misha said. “We used to see him once in a while in the elevator or in the courtyard. The thing is, we never see him anymore. He never goes out, they say. He never answers the door. Maybe he has a nurse. I’m not sure he can walk. He is completely blind.”

  With that, Misha took a pair of scissors and made the slightest incision in his napkin. Slowly, he unfolded the paper. A turkey ruffled its feathers in his palm.

  Afternoons in Moscow, when I had a spare hour or two, I would visit Misha and Flora’s building—50 Frunzenskaya Embankment, entrance 9—looking for Kaganovich. Over many months, I rang the bell at apartment 384 hundreds of times, sometimes for a half hour or more. I slipped notes under the door and into his mailbox. I rang and knocked and listened, my ear pressed against the door. Sometimes I could hear a kind of mumbling inside, other times a shuffling sound, slippers padding along the floor.

  Kaganovich’s daughter, Maya, an old woman herself, came evenings to check on her father and prepare his dinner. She would not talk to me, and whenever I called her at home she passed the phone to someone else. “Look, he is too old to see anyone,” one relative told me. “We don’t want people coming here and bothering him with unpleasant questions about the past. It might upset him.”

  I’d hang around in the courtyard mostly talking to people about Kaganovich. “He doesn’t let anyone near him,” one of the neighbors, a young engineer, told me as we sat on one of the benches in the courtyard. “I think he’s afraid of the world now. One of these days, he’ll just die, and he’ll be lucky if they mention his name in Pravda. The bastard once had the power to kill every one of us.”