Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  After a few moments, the square was quiet once more. The summer tourists went back to watching the changing of the guard at the Lenin Mausoleum. They gaped at the candy-striped whirl of St. Basil’s Cathedral. The old women peddled vanilla ice-cream bars and the old men sold snapshots to the visiting comrades from Sofia, Budapest, and Hanoi. Suddenly, guards blew their whistles and ordered people to clear the lane coming out of the Spassky Gate from the Kremlin. A line of official black cars drove through at terrific speed. Then the guards blew another signal. The coast was clear. No one knew it then, but one of the men in the caravan was probably Alexander Dubček, the leader of the Prague Spring and now a prisoner of Moscow.

  “It would have been wonderful if Dubcek and the others had seen the demonstration of support for what they had been doing. They didn’t,” Andrei Sakharov told me later. “But most important was that somewhere in this country there were some people who were willing to uphold its dignity.”

  The trial of the Red Square protesters, of course, was a sham, a totalitarian theater piece. On October 11, 1968, Pavel was given the chance for a last statement before the sentencing:

  “I will not take your time by going into legal details; the attorneys have done this. Our innocence of the charges is self-evident, and I do not consider myself guilty. At the same time, that the verdict against me will be ‘guilty’ is just as evident to me. I knew this beforehand when I made up my mind to go to Red Square. Nothing has shaken these convictions, because I was positive that the employees of the KGB would stage a provocation against me. I know that what happened to me is the result of provocation.

  “I knew that from the person that followed me. I read my verdict in his eyes when he followed me to the metro. The man who beat me up in Red Square was one I had seen many times before. Nevertheless, I went out into Red Square. I shall not speak of my motives. There was never any question for me whether I should go to Red Square or not. As a Soviet citizen, I deemed it necessary to voice my disagreement with the action of my government, which filled me with indignation.…

  “ ‘You fool,’ said the policeman, ‘if you had kept your mouth shut, you could have lived peacefully.’ He had no doubt that I was doomed to lose my liberty. Well, perhaps he is right, and I am a fool.…

  “Who is to judge what is in the interest of socialism and what is not? Perhaps the prosecutor, who spoke with admiration, almost with tenderness, of those who beat us up and insulted us.… This is what I find menacing. Evidently, it is such people who are supposed to know what is socialism and what is counterrevolution. This is what I find terrible, and that is why I went to Red Square. This is what I have fought against and what I shall continue to fight against for the rest of my life.”

  No one escaped punishment. Pavel Litvinov was sentenced to five years in internal exile. He was sent to live in a remote village in Siberia—not far from where the rebel Decembrists had been imprisoned more than a century before.

  After he returned home to Moscow, Pavel saw that he faced an unavoidable choice: jail or exile abroad. If he continued his human rights work—and he could not do otherwise—he would be sentenced this time to a prison camp, a far more severe fate than he had known in Siberia. An application for emigration, a KGB officer suggested to him, would likely meet with a “positive response.” Pavel said his farewells to his friends and family at a bleak party in 1973.

  “I thought that when I left the country it was forever and that I would never see my parents again,” Pavel said. “This was a typical experience for many people. You left, and for you the people you were leaving behind were as good as dead. They were alive, but you lost them the way you lose people when they die.”

  Pavel and Maya Litvinov began a new life in the United States. Pavel found a job teaching at the Hackley School, a small private school in Tarrytown, New York. They traveled, they met new friends. But for years they lived in a painful limbo. Pavel Litvinov had gone through a transformation, from obedience to independence, that had cost him his family, his home. Most of those he had left behind did not have the means or the chance to win their independence. The Soviet Union was no longer what it was under Stalin. But even with the prison camps in ruins, the system survived. The fear remained, and no one was free.

  In nearly four years of living and traveling in what was once the Soviet Union, I often found myself wandering accidentally into old prison camps. During the first strikes in the Siberian coalfields in 1989, some miners in the Siberian city of Kemerovo told me to look over a fence and into a field—that low set of buildings to the left of the cows. Barracks. In a working prison outside the city of Perm in the Urals, I had tea and cookies with the commandant. He had buried a few dissidents in his time and now he was thinking about his pension. At one time the entire country was part of the camp system—the gulag archipelago, as Solzhenitsyn called it—and you did not have to travel far from home to see it. One evening I was drinking tea and visiting an old man in an apartment house on Leninsky Prospekt just down the street from where I lived in Moscow.

  “I’ve always felt honored to live here,” the man said.

  The apartment was just one room, and the heat was off and the plumbing was rotting.

  Why? What honor can there be in living here? I asked him.

  “Solzhenitsyn helped build this dump,” he said, his gold incisors flashing. “He was on the prisoners’ crew when they put this place up.”

  At every one of these meetings, it was not hard for me to feel at once connected to the place, and lucky to have escaped it. Both my grandfathers, Alex and Ben, were born around the same time and in the same sort of place. They lived in muddy villages around the turn of the century: Alex outside Vilna (now Vilnius), Ben outside Kiev. Neither village, so far as I have been able to determine, still exists. Neither of my grandfathers knew much, or wanted to know much, of his boyhood in the Russian empire. They were bewildered in old age by the craze for “roots.” There was no nostalgia in them. They were lucky to have escaped. Upon hearing the rumors of pogroms they fled Russia on foot, on horseback, on wagon, and finally on a ship. They came to Castle Garden and Ellis Island. Alex sold “notions” in New York: girdle snaps, nylons, hairpins at a corner store on Prince Street and Broadway. Ben worked as a salesman in clothing stores in Paterson, New Jersey. When I began learning Russian in high school, my grandfathers smiled with curiosity and let it go at that. If they knew seven or eight words of Russian, it was a lot. For them, Russia was a burning house they had fled in the middle of the night. Just before I left for Russia, I flew to Miami Beach. Ben had managed to trade in his house in Paterson for a small room with a view of the Atlantic Ocean and an ambulance in the basement garage. He was one hundred years old. When I told him I was planning to live in Moscow for three or four years, he said, “You must be crazy. We almost got killed going out and you, meshuggah, you want to go back in.”

  My wife’s family was even more suspicious of our going to Moscow. And with good reason. They were less successful at escape. Esther’s grandfather Simon was a renowned rabbi, born in Byelorussia. After taking a pulpit in Poland, he married Nechama, the descendant of seven generations of rabbis. Robinson was her maiden name: son of rabbis. Eventually he moved back to Byelorussia, where he was both a rabbi and a teacher of philosophy in the local gymnasium. In 1939, an officer of the NKVD secret police came through the town of Diesna looking for Simon. The townspeople and congregants refused to give him up. But when Simon found out about the agent, he sought him out and invited him to his home. When the agent arrived at the door, he said something strange. “If you don’t mind,” he said to the terrified family, “I’d like to pray with you first.”

  When they were finished praying, it became clear that the NKVD man was a kind of double agent, or at least an agent with a hint of mercy. He told Simon that the police were after him. “You must leave,” he said. “Leave now with just the clothes on your back.”

  Simon fled to independent Lithuania, and his wife and childre
n soon followed. But in June 1940, just days after the Soviet occupation of Lithuania, he was arrested and jailed for six months in Vilna. Then he was deported to a labor camp in the town of Sukhobezvodnoye—meaning “Dry, Without Water”—in the Urals. He was never heard from again.

  As relatives of an “enemy of the people,” Nechama and her children, Murray, Rita, and the baby, Esther’s mother, Miriam, were all deported to Siberia. Nechama was put to work on a collective farm. When she refused to let her son go into the army—she claimed Polish citizenship—the two of them were arrested and jailed. Rita, at fourteen, was left to fend for herself, and Miriam was put into a children’s camp in western Siberia. After the war, Miriam and her sister, brother, and mother fled Russia.

  For the longest time, Esther’s grandmother refused to speak of the past. By the time Esther began to insist that she needed to know what had happened, Nechama could no longer think clearly. Her mind moved in and out of time, from one language to another. Three months after we were married, Esther and I moved to Moscow. “I hope you come home once in a while,” Miriam said, “because I don’t think I could visit you there.”

  CHAPTER 3

  TO BE PRESERVED, FOREVER

  In the years after Stalin’s death, the state was an old tyrant slouched in the corner with cataracts and gallstones, his muscles gone slack. He wore plastic shoes and a shiny suit that stank of sweat. He hogged all the food and fouled his pants. Mornings, his tongue was coated with the ash-taste of age. He mumbled and didn’t care. His thoughts drifted like storm clouds and came clear only a few times a year to recite the old legends of Great October and the Great Patriotic War. Sometimes, in the gathering dark of his office, he would set out on the green baize table all the gifts that foreigners had given him: the gold cigarette dispenser, the silver Eiffel Tower, the colored pens, the crystal paperweights. The state was nearly senile, but still dangerous enough. He still kept the key to the border gate in his pocket and ruled every function of public life. Now and then he had fits and the world trembled.

  But how the state kept alive, how it got from day to day, was a mystery. History was a fairy tale and the mechanisms of daily life a vast Rube Goldberg machine that somehow, if just barely, kept moving. If not for the plundering of Soviet oil fields and the worldwide energy crisis, the economy might have collapsed even before it did; and by the early 1980s, KGB reports declared that the cushion of oil profits was all but gone. The abyss awaits us, the most trenchant of the secret police reports declared. The economy was doomed. Nothing, and no one, worked in any recognized sense of the word. I saw the serfs of a collective farm outside Vologda in northern Russia herded onto buses to buy their food in the city. Their own harvest had rotted in the rain. In the steel town of Magnitogorsk, I saw miners spending their breaks at a local clinic sucking on “oxygen cocktails,” a liquid concoction infused with oxygen and vitamins. On Sakhalin Island north of Japan, I saw a few hundred thousand salmon, fish that could have sold on the Ginza or Broadway for a fortune, writhe and rot in the shoreline nets while the trawlers sat rusting in port. Sakhalin is closer on the map to Hollywood Boulevard than Red Square, but the fishermen couldn’t “make a move until they get the telegram from Moscow,” a local politician told me. The order from the ministry came a week after the salmon had gone white and belly up.

  But somehow the state never completely collapsed. There was bread, at least, and parades marked the triumph of the state’s persistence. Even the May Day parade of 1988 was not much different from those before them. I stood in the reporters’ section just to the right of the Lenin Mausoleum and watched the leaders come out looking faintly embarrassed, but pleased as well that it was all hanging together: Lenin’s edgy portrait still hung on the side wall of GUM, the state department store; strongmen heaved dumbbells and gymnasts skipped through hoops in a show of “physical culture”; the workers of the Moscow automobile plants carried the banners they received in the morning and drank down the vodka they got at parade’s end. Only the music changed: Pete Seeger songs boomed out of the Kremlin loudspeakers as the workers of the ZIL automobile factory marched by the reviewing stand. As Sergei Ivanov, a Soviet scholar of the Byzantine period, wrote, the rites of Communism had their roots in Constantinople, when the leader’s rare appearances “before the people were accompanied by thoroughly rehearsed outbursts of delight, specially selected crowds who chanted the officially approved songs.”

  It was Oz, the world’s longest-running and most colossal mistake, and the only way to endure it all was the perfection of irony. There was no other way to live. Even the sweetest-seeming grandmother, her hair in a babushka and her bulk packed into a housecoat, even she was possessed of a sense of irony that would chill the spine of any absurdiste at the Café Flore. One morning I was sitting in a courtyard in Moscow talking with an ancient of the city, a sweet wreck of a man. He needed help desperately, and it was still a time when a foreigner seemed the last recourse for everything from KGB harassment to this man’s problem: his wife was dying of leukemia. How could he get to the Mayo Clinic? He’d heard the doctors there were “beautiful.” They could save his wife. As he talked, I happened to glance up over his shoulder and saw a woman on the tenth floor hurl a cat out her kitchen window.

  “Animal!” she screamed. “No room for you here! Be gone!”

  The cat hit the pavement, and it sounded like the soft pop of an exploding water balloon. Now the two of us, the old man and I, were watching: the woman at the window, her face twisted into an angry knot, the cat struggling to get up on its broken legs.

  “Ach,” the old man said, turning away, “our Russian life!”

  His smile was like the smile on a skull. He went on talking.

  In an era of rot, the laureate was a genius of irony and part-time drunk named Venedikt (“Benny”) Yerofeyev. In the seventies, Yerofeyev’s friends circulated his masterpiece, a modern Dead Souls called Moskva-Petushki, the name of a train route between the capital and a town where many people lived after they returned from the camps. Yerofeyev’s book, published in English as Moscow Circles, is a novel of wandering that goes nowhere except down, deep into the soul of man under socialism. His greatest relief is in the mastery of the binge. He is an artful mixologist. When there is no real vodka at hand, he conjures, with nail varnish and lavender water, the “Tears of the Komsomol Girl”: “After one glass your memory is as strong as ever, but your mind just goes blank. After the second glass the brightness of your mind amazes you, but your memory goes blank.” His best recipe, the “Finis coronat opus,” is Cat Gut: 100 grams of Zhigulev beer, 30 grams of “Sadko the Rich Merchant” brand shampoo, 70 grams of anti-dandruff shampoo, and 20 grams of insect repellent. And now, “your Cat Gut is ready. Drink it from early evening in large gulps. After two glasses of this, men become so inspired you can spit at them from five feet for half an hour and they won’t take the blindest bit of notice.”

  Yerofeyev made his living at any job he could keep. He didn’t keep them long, generally, but he did rise to the post of foreman. He commanded a small brigade of men who were laying cable, or pretending to, in the town of Sheremetyevo outside Moscow. “This is what we would do. One day we would play poker, the next day we would drink vermouth, on the third day we’d play poker, and on the fourth day it was back to vermouth.… For a while everything was perfect. We’d send off our socialist pledges once a month and we’d get our pay twice a month. We’d write, for example: ‘On the occasion of the coming centenary we pledge ourselves to end production traumatization.’ Or: ‘In honor of the glorious anniversary we will struggle to ensure that every sixth worker takes a correspondence course in a higher educational institution.’ Traumatization! Institutions!… Oh, what freedom and equality! What fraternity and freeloading! Oh, the joy of nonaccountability! Oh, blessed hours in the life of my people—the hours which stretch from opening to closing time! Free of shame and idle care we lived a life that was purely spiritual.”

  The state, of course, did not
allow this sort of thing. Moskva-Petushki was published only in 1988, and then only by a temperance journal. But the state never got the joke with Yerofeyev; otherwise he would have been jailed or exiled. Let him laugh. What it could not tolerate was a challenge uncomplicated by irony. When Brezhnev shoved Khrushchev out of power, the state still had the means to squash what little freedom it had allowed. The censors went through the libraries with razor blades and slashed from the bound copies of Novy Mir Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Then they slashed Solzhenitsyn from Russia, hustling him from a prison cell to a jet and finally to his exile. It could not tolerate Solzhenitsyn’s sneer, Brodsky’s impudence, or Sakharov’s superiority. The regime would rather kill its brightest children than give way. A magnificent life-support system, with millions of agents, informers, police, wardens, lawyers, and judges all working at its bedside, kept the old tyrant breathing. Their watchfulness was admirable.

  “Every life has a file, if you will,” Brodsky told me in his basement apartment, his New York exile. “The moment you get a little bit well known, they open a file on you. The file begins to get filled up with this and that, and if you write your file grows in size all the faster. It’s sort of a Neanderthal form of computerization. Gradually, your file occupies too much space on the shelf and, quite simply, a man walks into the office and says, ‘This is a big file. Let’s get him.’ ”