Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  Another day in the courtyard, one of Kaganovich’s oldest neighbors, a woman with a Byelorussian accent and eyes as blue as cornflowers, was taking her daily walk. Children were jumping rope and playing hopscotch, and the old men and women watched them. “Not long ago,” she said, “you’d see Kaganovich out here all day, playing dominoes or sitting off by himself with his daughter. Everyone knew who he was, what he’d done under Stalin. There are a lot of people in these buildings along the embankment who were big shots in the Party, but nobody like Kaganovich, no one still alive. Me, I always stayed away from him. Where I come from they have a saying: ‘The farther away you keep from the czar, the longer you stay alive.’ ”

  I had Kaganovich’s phone number—242-6751—but he never answered. A Russian journalist who had spent years trying to talk to Kaganovich later explained to me there was a code: dial the number, let it ring twice, hang up, and dial again. I tried, and an old man came on the line.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Lazar Moiseyevich?”

  “Yes?”

  “Lazar Moiseyevich, my name is Remnick. I am a reporter for an American newspaper, The Washington Post, and I would like to come visit you, if possible.”

  “It is not necessary.”

  “I’ve heard your health is not very good, but I—”

  “It is not necessary. I feel awful. I can’t see anything. I feel awful.”

  “Perhaps, on a day you are feeling a bit better, we could—”

  “I always feel awful. No interviews. I don’t do interviews. Why should I do interviews?”

  His voice, weak at first, was beginning to pick up a little, as if just the use of it was a kind of exercise.

  “Lazar Moiseyevich—”

  “I said no interviews. That’s it!”

  “Well—”

  The line went dead. In the months ahead, he must have changed the code. The old one no longer worked, and playing with new codes of the same sort didn’t work either. Doorstepping was again the only hope. Reporting is often foolish work, but there was something especially shaming about knocking endlessly on a tyrant’s door. It raised insane questions of etiquette, such as what the rules of harassment are where a mass murderer is concerned. One afternoon I went up the elevator to see Flora, and with a motherly smile she listened to my complaints about the closed door downstairs.

  “Well, what if he does open it, what would you learn?” Flora said. “Do you think he’d break down and apologize?”

  “Well, not exactly.”

  “He’s an old man,” she said. “What does it matter?”

  Then Flora told me a story.

  On a winter’s night in the time of Stalin—1951 or 1952—Flora opened the door to her son’s room and bent low to kiss him good night. Pavel rolled toward her, the bedclothes rustling. In the dark, there was a shine to his face. He’d been crying, and his breathing had a wheezy jump to it. Pavel was a big child, self-assured and smart, but now it seemed that he was lost, scared even to speak.

  “What’s wrong?” Flora said. “What is it?”

  Pavel was quiet a long time and turned away, turned into himself somehow.

  “Please, tell me. What’s wrong?”

  “They said I can’t tell you,” the boy said. “I gave my word.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a secret.”

  “A secret?”

  “Yes,” he said. “A secret.”

  “You can tell me,” Flora said. “It’s right that you keep your word, but you can always tell your parents everything.”

  Pavel’s grandfather Maksim Litvinov was Stalin’s foreign minister in the first years of the regime. He’d died just a few months before, but the family still lived, by the standards of the time, in privileged circumstances. Their legacy included an apartment in the House on the Embankment, a magnificent outpost for the Communist Party elite overlooking the Moscow River with huge rooms and special cafeterias and theaters. For the families of the elite there were foreign books, competent doctors, marmalade for the toast, tomatoes in wintertime. The Litvinovs even had their own cleaning woman—a lieutenant in the KGB. In the summer they spent much of their time at a dacha in the town of Khimki outside Moscow. Surrounded by birches and pines, the house had originally been built for Stalin’s family. Many of Pavel’s schoolmates were the sons and daughters of the Communist Party hierarchy, or what was left of it after the first wave of purges. At school, they all joined the Timur Society, a band of zealous young patriots, the Bolshevik Cub Scouts.

  “Tell me. Please,” Flora said once more to her son. “What is it? What could be so secret?”

  Pavel was frightened. He had sworn his silence to the Timur Society, and he knew enough to be afraid. But, still, he could not deny his mother.

  There was a new hunt on for “enemies of the people,” he said. One of his best friends had told him so. Flora recognized the boy’s name. He was the son of an officer in the KGB.

  “He said there can be enemies of the people anywhere,” Pavel went on. “Anywhere. Even in our own homes!”

  Flora felt a rage gather inside her. She knew the adults who supervised these groups were doing nothing less than training children to work as informers, as traitors against their own families. She was terrified—for her son most of all—but not completely surprised. These were children, after all, who were taught to revere Pavlik Morozov, the twelve-year-old Young Pioneer who was made a national hero and icon for all Soviet children when he served his collective by ratting on his own father for trying to hide grain from the police. These were children raised in schools designed according to the “socialist family” theories of Anton Makarenko, an ideology officer of the KGB. Makarenko insisted that children learn the supremacy of the collective over the individual, the political unit over the family. The schools, he said, must employ an iron discipline modeled on that of the Red Army and Siberian labor camps.

  Now the story was pouring out of Pavel. He said that two strange men had told him that soon he would have a “special task.” Flora knew pretty well what that meant. They wanted the boy to report on the family.

  Stalin and his circle had always been wary of Maksim Litvinov and his odd family. Although Maksim had served the regime impeccably as foreign minister and as ambassador to the United States, he was nothing at all like the most loyal of Stalin’s gray henchmen. He was a man of the world. He spoke foreign languages. He had foreign friends. Maksim had also married a foreigner, an eccentric Englishwoman named Ivy who wrote fiction, had heterosexual and lesbian affairs, and preached C. K. Ogden’s gospel of Basic English, an 850-word system for learning the rudiments of the language. When her husband gave her George Bernard Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism to read, she gave him volumes of Austen, Lawrence, and Trollope.

  Especially after his forced removal from the Central Committee in 1941, Maksim Litvinov was possessed of a certain sympathy for the political interests of foreigners. In 1944, he told reporters that Stalin had imperial designs on Eastern Europe and wondered aloud why the West did not intervene. In an article for Foreign Affairs in 1977, the historian Vojtech Mastny described Litvinov as the “Cassandra in the Foreign Commissariat,” a diplomat unafraid to complain about the “rigidity of the whole Soviet system.” Stalin, of course, was listening. Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs that the secret police drew up an elaborate plan to “ambush” Litvinov while he was on the road to the dacha in Khimki. Litvinov, however, was a lucky man. For years he slept with his revolver close at hand, but in the end he escaped arrest. Miraculously, he died of old age. “They didn’t get him,” Ivy remarked to her daughter just after Maksim’s death. The family and historians could only guess why. Stalin undoubtedly valued Litvinov’s contacts in the West, and he may have thought the foul publicity abroad was not worth the execution.

  But even after Litvinov died on December 31, 1951, his family still lived in fear of Stalin’s whim, of a knock on the door. Pavel’s parents, Misha and Flora,
and his aunt Tanya were more subtle characters than Ivy, more attuned to the risks of their time and country. But they, too, behaved in a way that could have landed them in jail or in front of a firing squad. Misha was a celebrated young engineer at the Aviation Engines Institute and a self-made Hero of Soviet Recreation: a mountain climber, a jogger, a dabbler in game theory. Surely this was suspiciously eccentric behavior. Pavel’s aunt Tanya was thrown out of an art institute for an “excessive interest” in “decadent Western art.” At home, at least, they all spoke their minds. Once Pavel brought a book home from the library about the derring-do of Pavlik Morozov. He was entranced by the boy’s great service to the Bolshevik state, his heroic betrayal of his father. Flora spun off into a rage. She tore out the pages and said that Pavel should never, never betray his parents. No child should, no matter what such foolish books said.

  “Even if the parents are bad?” Pavel said.

  “Yes. Even if they are bad.”

  Now Flora had to decide what to do about her boy and his “special task.” She would not allow Pavel to become another Pavlik Morozov. In the morning, Flora put on her finest dress and went to the apartment of Pavel’s friend, the son of the KGB man. She would try to bluff the officer, scare him into thinking that someone “on high” supported the Litvinov family. She tried to dress the part of a powerful Bolshevik matron and wore an elegant scarf and a pompous hat.

  “You have no right to carry on negotiations with my son!” she told him. “You will stop at once!” She left immediately, still shaking with anger and a giddy sense of her own daring. Only a little later would she begin thinking about what she had risked.

  In the next few weeks, Misha and Flora talked long about what they should do about their children. They decided they could no longer hold back as much as they had. It was not enough to tear up a book once in a while and then retreat again into a baffling silence. If they were to prevent Pavel and Nina from becoming the sort of young Stalinists that the schools were so eager to create, then they had to speak the truth whenever possible. They had to describe what had happened to so many of the parents and grandparents of Pavel’s friends at school, how they had been thrown into the vans known as Black Marias and shipped off to camps in Kolyma, Vorkuta, and Kazakhstan, where they had vanished. They had to begin to impress upon their children that Stalin, the Mountain Eagle, was a lowly beast. Pavel must learn somehow to think outside of a system that engulfed him all day long.

  Flora and Misha could not afford to be too direct too often. Such were the times and the dangers. Nor could they compete very well with the immensity of the Stalin cult in all its forms: the parades celebrating Stalin as a god on earth, the newspapers describing his heroic deeds, the radio addresses, the history books written by the Kremlin ideologists, the rallies and paramilitary drills of the Young Pioneers. Pavel had learned to love Stalin the way other children in other places learn to love God. Stalin was a kindly deity, omniscient, a gentle father. He rarely appeared in public. Instead his image was painted on banners, zeppelins, billboards, and icons. His words filled the schoolbooks, the newspapers, the airwaves. “It’s not easy to compete with that,” Flora thought. “Perhaps it is impossible.”

  On the day Stalin died, in March 1953, Pavel was thirteen years old and inconsolable. He cried for days. In the schoolyard, he got into fights with the children who failed to mourn Stalin as deeply as he did. At home, he was furious when he discovered his parents and their friends laughing and joking about Comrade Stalin. He saw them in the kitchen, not mourning but celebrating. Pavel reddened, stormed out of the kitchen, and went off to bed, angry and confused.

  It was not easy for any of the Litvinovs in those years after Stalin’s death. Misha and Flora were young parents, and they were often at a loss in dealing with Pavel. He struggled in school. He married at seventeen and quickly divorced. He drank a bit, played in marathon card games, and gambled on the horses at the Hippodrome. “The horses were an obsession with him,” Flora said. “We were scared that Pavel would end his life a broken-down gambler.”

  But Pavel was growing up, and he was in no way immune to the “thaw,” the wave of anti-Stalinist sentiment, history, and ideology encouraged by Khrushchev in the middle and late 1950s. Hundreds of thousands of prisoners returned home from the labor camps, and all of them had stories to tell. The Litvinovs knew many intellectuals who had been in the camps: writers, artists, scientists, even Party officials. It was a time of revelation for Pavel. He sat at the kitchen table and heard for the first time the real history of the years under Stalin. One of his parents’ closest friends, a physicist named Mikhail Levin, came home from prison in 1955 and described the conditions there, the senseless deaths of countless innocents. “It was the experience of waking up after years and years of sleep,” Pavel would say a long time after. “All the fantasies of childhood and Stalin were suddenly painful and ridiculous.”

  In the early 1960s, Pavel got a job teaching physics at the Lomonosov Institute and eventually became friendly with a group of intellectuals who monitored the first celebrated dissident trial—the trial of the “anti-Soviet” writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel. Among the older writers and scientists, Pavel was a kind of pet: a charming young man of intelligence and curious pedigree. He immersed himself in this new world, reading the underground manuscripts known as samizdat, taking part in the endless kitchen-table discussions that were the center of all intellectual life. Pavel read Solzhenitsyn, the camp stories of Varlam Shalamov, Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror. He helped draft letters in support of political prisoners and released them, at great peril to himself, to Western journalists. He also married into one of the best-known intellectual families of Moscow. He married Maya, the daughter of the literary scholars Lev Kopelev and Raisa Orlova. Kopelev, who had been one of Solzhenitsyn’s cellmates and the model for one of the characters in his novel The First Circle, was also a model for Pavel Litvinov. Kopelev had grown up a committed Communist, a true believer, and then “got an education.” Kopelev’s life, for Pavel, was living proof of a man’s ability to see and think clearly, to act honestly, even in the conditions of a nightmare.

  On August 21, 1968, Pavel and six of his friends reacted with horror to the shortwave reports coming out of Czechoslovakia. For months they had been listening for every detail of the Prague Spring, cheering on Alexander Dubček’s attempt to create a “socialism with a human face.” They waited to see how Khrushchev’s conqueror and successor, Leonid Brezhnev, would deal with the rebellion of a satellite state. Would he show the same ruthlessness Khrushchev showed Hungary in 1956, or would there be a new sense of tolerance? Now the answer was clear. The voice on the underground Czechoslovak station was brittle and choked: “Russian brothers, go away, we have not asked you to come,” the voice said. Pavel’s close friend among the early dissidents, Larisa Bogoraz, was crushed. Her husband, Anatoly Marchenko, was in jail for his political activities, and now she saw that the regime itself was prepared to stamp out large-scale dissidence with soldiers and tanks.

  “We need a bold act, a movement,” she thought. “We need it now.”

  Pavel, Bogoraz, and five others met to talk it through. They planned a brief noontime demonstration for August 25 against the invasion of Czechoslovakia. They knew well the consequences for such an “anti-Soviet” activity: a prison term, internal exile, or a long stay in a psychiatric hospital. They prepared themselves for nothing less than that. Pavel began to gather his possessions and give his books away to friends. His fate was inescapable.

  On the night before the demonstration, Pavel went to the Kopelevs’ apartment for a party where the famous bard Aleksandr Galich was singing. The mood was funereal, and the vodka did nothing to lighten it. The Prague invasion was surely the end of the “thaw” and all hopes of a “socialism with a human face”; Brezhnev had begun a movement of blatantly neo-Stalinist politics. For all its hesitations and half-measures, the Khrushchev era would soon seem like a paradise lost. The invasion,
the novelist Vasily Aksyonov said, “was a nervous breakdown for the whole generation.” At the party, they spoke of their anger, how they were ashamed before the Czechs, the Hungarians, and the Poles—before the entire world—to be a Soviet citizen. They were not citizens at all, they felt; they were subjects.

  Then Galich began to sing a song of the Decembrists, the rebels during the reign of Nicholas I:

  Can you come to the square?

  Dare you come to the square

  When that hour strikes?

  Pavel felt Galich’s eyes on him as he sang. The double meaning of the lyrics, their reference to the dissent of another century and the clarion call to a new generation—it was lost on no one, least of all on Pavel. When Galich put down his guitar, Pavel was tempted to announce the plans for the demonstration, but he decided against it. He was afraid that the older people in the room would feel compelled to come. For them, years in internal exile or prison could mean death.

  The next day, at a few minutes before noon, Pavel, Larisa Bogoraz, and their friends gathered at Lobnoye Mesto, the spot on Red Square where the czar’s executioners once chopped off the heads of heretics against the state and the church. At the sound of the noon bell on Spassky Tower, they unfurled a series of banners. In Czech: “Long Live a Free and Independent Czechoslovakia.” In Russian: “Free Dubček” and “Hands off Czechoslovakia” and “Shame on the Invaders.” The poet Natalya Gorbanevskaya brought her three-month-old son to the square. When the others showed their signs, she reached into the baby carriage and pulled out from under her sleeping son the flag of Czechoslovakia.

  The demonstration would not have lasted long under any circumstances. KGB men had followed Litvinov and the others to the Kremlin. But a special contingent of KGB officers was also stationed on Red Square that day. They were there waiting for the end of a meeting inside the Kremlin between Brezhnev and the leaders of the Prague Spring, who had been brought to Moscow in handcuffs on the night of the invasion. When the officers saw the banners, the guards pounced on the demonstrators, shouting, “These are all dirty Jews!” and “Beat the anti-Soviets!” Pavel’s face was badly bruised, and the art critic Viktor Fainberg lost a few teeth. The officers packed the protesters into unmarked cars and headed for the police station.