Lenin's Tomb

by David Remnick

  They got him. At his trial in Leningrad, Brodsky encountered the soul of the regime, its peculiar language.

  JUDGE: What is your profession?

  BRODSKY: Translator and poet.

  JUDGE: Who recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?

  BRODSKY: No one. Who enrolled me in the ranks of human beings?

  JUDGE: Did you study for it?

  BRODSKY: What?

  JUDGE: To be a poet. Didn’t you try to take courses in school where one prepares for life, where one learns?

  BRODSKY: I didn’t believe it was a matter of education.

  JUDGE: How is that?

  BRODSKY: I thought that it came from God.

  Just before he left the country in 1972, Brodsky adopted an old Russian tradition and wrote a letter to the czar.

  “Dear Leonid Ilyich: A language is a much more ancient and inevitable thing than a state. I belong to the Russian language. As for the state, from my point of view, the measure of a writer’s patriotism is not oaths from a high platform, but how he writes in the language of the people among whom he lives.… Although I am losing my Soviet citizenship, I do not cease to be a Russian poet. I believe that I will return. Poets always return in the flesh or on paper.”

  Brodsky’s letter, Sakharov’s manifestos, all the broadsides and master-works of the dissidents carried with them the air of futility. The idea of change, of the resiliency of the word against the state, seemed a kind of dream, a conceit to live out the day and get to the next one. Just before his exile, Solzhenitsyn wrote his “Letter to the Soviet Leaders.” “Your dearest wish,” he informed them, “is for our state structure and our ideological system never to change, to remain as they are for centuries. But history is not like that. Every system either finds a way to develop or else it collapses.” And with that, Solzhenitsyn was gone.

  Lydia Chukovskaya, who wrote a novel about the purges while she waited in vain for her husband to return from a prison camp, got up at a meeting of the Writers’ Union at the height of the anti-dissident campaign and said:

  “I can prophesy that in the capital city of our homeland there will inevitably be an Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Square and an Academician Andrei Sakharov Avenue.”

  Inevitably! Who believed it? Even the bravest of the brave—and Chukovskaya was among them—had their doubts. When I met her she was in her nineties and living with her daughter Yelena on Gorky Street. Yelena greeted me at the door and asked me to wait a moment until Lydia Korneievna was ready to receive me. There was nothing royal about this, nothing vain, but rather a woman gathering herself. Yelena led me into the room and Lydia Korneievna was seated at a small table. There was a teapot and two cups with chipped saucers and a plate of cookies. Her hand was already on the handle of the pot.

  Lydia Korneievna had not been well. Her wide, light eyes were glazed with rheum. The skin of her face was fine, a kind of papery white, as if it would burn if you touched it. Like all Moscow intellectuals of a certain kind and class, she had photographs of well-known poets and writers stuck behind the glass of her bookshelves. In many apartments this is both a vanity and a connection, a way of announcing one’s sense of quality and aspiration. Lydia Korneievna had no vanity and no one deserved the portraits of Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov more than she did. She had risked all to defend them. She had lost the right to publish. Probably all that kept her safe in her bed was her age and the fact that she was the daughter of Kornei Chukovsky, a children’s writer as revered in Russia as Dr. Seuss is in America.

  For a while, she talked about her friends, her walks with Anna Akhmatova in Leningrad, her love for Sakharov. Her sentences were formal and clear, and her voice, though weakened with age, had a liquid sound. Then the lights went out in the entire apartment block. It was night and there was no moon and the room was black. Lydia Korneievna could hardly tell. To her it was like the slight change of light in a room when the fire settles into itself. And not noticing, she kept talking. After a while she did sense some difference, a change in the air, a certain coolness and quiet. Her mood changed. For a moment she paused, as if she were finally going to mention the darkness. Then she said, “You know, when we talk about all these people, I know now that they are all gone. It is horrible to say, but you must imagine a state that used every means to kill the best among us. All dead or all gone.”

  After a while, Lydia Korneievna said, “The lights. They’re out. How strange!”

  Yelena came in with candles and we continued talking until Lydia Korneievna announced, “I suppose I’m tired.”

  On the way out, I told Yelena a little of what her mother had said. She nodded. She had heard this many times before.

  “But you must remember,” she said, “even Lydia Korneievna has hope. She adores that young boy. Dmitri Yurasov. She adores him. You should meet him if you can.”

  While the world spent 1987 and 1988 waiting for Gorbachev’s newest initiatives, his shifts in ideology, the boldest ideas for the creation of a civil society were debated on Saturday mornings in Moscow. At first small groups of young intellectuals—the “informals”—met at home and even typed out their declarations on onionskin paper. But after a while, the older voices gathered. Sakharov had returned from exile, and Moscow Tribune, a loose amalgamation of scholars and writers who all had lived through the promise of the thaw, was one of his regular platforms.

  The first time I saw Dmitri Yurasov was at a Saturday-morning session of Moscow Tribune at Dom Kino, the headquarters of the Filmmakers’ Union near the Peking Hotel. The scene was nearly always the same. Moscow Tribune’s sessions would begin at ten or eleven with speeches by the best-known of the group: Yuri Afanasyev, a bearish-looking historian of the French Annales school, who had been put in charge of the Historical Archives Institute; Yuri Karyakin, a journalist and Dostoevsky scholar who nearly drank himself to death during the Brezhnev years; Nikolai Shmelyov, an economist and short-story writer who had once been a member of the Khrushchev family by marriage; Leonid Batkin, a scholar of the Italian Renaissance whose slight heresies and refusal to join the Party prevented him from teaching in Moscow; Galina Starovoitova, a demographer, an expert on Armenia; Len Karpinsky, the son of revolutionaries, a journalist who had once been blessed by the Kremlin as “our great hope” and later betrayed it by becoming what he called a “half-dissident.” And always, there was Sakharov, off to the side, sleeping through the speeches at times, clearly weakened by his years of forced exile in Gorky but ready to perform when it came his turn.

  Yurasov was sitting in the back rows. He was twenty-four years old and the youngest person in the hall. He was a tough-looking kid in ratty jeans and a bleached jacket. His hair was cropped close; he looked like an army recruit on leave. When one of the speakers said something not to his liking, he sneered, as if rehearsing to be James Dean. Dmitri, or Dima as everyone called him, was known as the young kid who collected information on people who had been imprisoned or executed under Soviet power. He kept the names on index cards, and he had about 200,000 of them—that is, 200,000 out of tens of millions.

  Moscow Tribune meetings never really ended. Instead, after a few hours, they sort of trailed off like smoke. The first-string speakers had left for home and even Afanasyev, who was the radical left’s master of ceremonies, was getting ready to leave.

  I offered Yurasov a ride home.

  “Wait here, just a second,” he said when we got to his apartment.

  I heard him inside, frantically throwing papers into order. This was a futile effort. He led me to his room, a tiny place with journals and magazines in five-foot stacks on the floor. On the wall there were a few posters of rock stars and a calendar with a photograph of a sexy girl from Brazil who looked as though she had just had three drinks and a bad meal.

  “Before we start,” Dima said, “you should read this.”

  He handed me a short stack of letters.

  “Respected Dmitri Gennadiyevich!

  “My father Afonin,
Timofei Stepanovich, lived in the town of Tolmachevo in the Novosibirsk region. As I remember it, he was a member of the local military party committee and was chairman of the farm council. In 1930 he was arrested by the NKVD together with other residents of the village and taken to Novosibirsk. In the court documents of the military intelligence he was judged guilty of Article 58-8-10 and 73-1 of the Russian criminal code and sentenced to be shot. On February 13, 1930, the sentence was carried out.…”

  There were many such letters in his files: people now in their forties, fifties, and sixties telling the stories of their parents who had disappeared, the sketchy details of their arrests, the open questions.

  Finally, Dima handed me a short note, a testimonial from a woman who had written to him asking if he knew anything at all about her dead father:

  “In his catalog, Dima found my father’s name. He named the place of his imprisonment and, evidently, his death. Dima showed me that one of the investigators into my father’s rehabilitation had said my father was a librarian. Was this some arbitrary thing he did in his camps or his real profession, I don’t know. But something changed inside me. From the anonymous gray mass of pea jackets, my father had emerged as a particular man, a special man. Not all were called librarians! A father! I have a father!”

  “Now maybe you can see what I do,” Dima said, taking back the letters.

  Dmitri Yurasov was born in 1964, the year that hard-line forces and Stalinist revivalists in the Kremlin toppled Khrushchev for the heresy of “voluntarism.” Next to the Litvinovs, the Yurasovs were an unremarkable family. They lived in a cramped apartment on Leninski Prospekt and worked as midlevel engineers. They read no samizdat and did not care to. Dima’s mother, Ludmila, grew up singing paeans to Stalin (“I’m a little girl, I dance and sing,/I’ve never seen Stalin but I love him so”). She joined the Communist Party, not so much out of an overwhelming sense of conviction but rather as a mark of distinction, a way to advance at work.

  Like every other Soviet schoolboy, like Pavel Litvinov, Dima grew up outside of history and deep within the mythologies of his time. He was trained from the earliest age to become a “Soviet man.” This was a matter of policy, one that had altered very little since Stalin’s death. “The Communist Party of the Soviet Union proceeds, and has always proceeded, from the premise that the formation of the New Man is the most important component of the entire task of Communist construction,” said Mikhail Suslov, one of the leaders of the plot to overthrow Khrushchev and Brezhnev’s ideologist. In their first year of medical school, students were informed that there were two species of human beings: Homo sapiens and Homo sovieticus. As a schoolboy, Dima sat through his lessons in the latter. He learned to read using primers that substituted “Grandpa Ilyich” Lenin for Dick and Jane. His history lessons were a litany of garlanded triumphs beginning with the revolution and ending with record harvests in the Black Earth Zone. Summers, Dima went to Young Pioneers camp, outposts that taught the virtues of military discipline and the supremacy of the group over the individual.

  But Dima Yurasov also had a young mind that was somehow, innocently, subversive. Even in the fifth and sixth grade, he read constantly in the sixteen-volume Soviet Historical Encyclopedia, books written by Party historians and ideologists and approved by a hierarchy of censors. There were approved articles on the Revolution, the Civil War, the Great Patriotic War—each one an instruction in the pseudo-theology that the study of history had become decades before. On rare occasions, evidence of the thaw under Khrushchev washed up on the page. The censors, it turned out, could not catch everything. One day when he was eleven years old, Dima was reading about a scholar who had been, the encyclopedia said, “illegally repressed and rehabilitated after his death.” Dima had never seen such a phrase. It was as strange to him as a sentence of Burmese.

  Dima asked his mother for an explanation. She brushed it off. This was nearly two decades after Khrushchev’s secret speech denouncing the crimes of the Stalin era, and yet the atmosphere of neo-Stalinism was so pervasive that ordinary people, even in the relatively sophisticated city of Moscow, were not prepared to talk to their children about the nightmares of the past. They themselves knew so little about it. Khrushchev’s speech, after all, had never been published in the Soviet Union, and much of the literature that came out during the thaw period had been pulled from library shelves.

  And so Dima set out to learn history on his own. He went slowly through the volumes of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia and wrote down the names of all those generals and politicians and artists who had died in 1937, 1938, 1939, 1940, the years of the Great Terror. The cause of death was almost never listed. For each name, Dima set up an index card and filled out the most rudimentary information. It was a game, a mystery. “A little like stamp collecting,” he said. “Like the way kids imagine they’ve gone to Yemen or the Sudan when they’ve found the stamp. It was a sense of connection to something I had only the vaguest ideas about. And what was strangest, I couldn’t really talk to anyone about it.”

  During the day, Dima was a good enough student and excelled in history as it was taught. He could recite with ease the mythology of the country he lived in. He was obedient and enjoyed the teachers’ praise that his good memory won for him. In the evenings and weekends, Dima filled out his cards with the names of the disappeared. He had little idea what to make of this strange phenomenon, but his catalog of the disappeared continued to grow.

  “Then there was this breakthrough,” he said. “While I was in the eighth grade, I read in the papers the minutes of the Twenty-second Party Congress,” where Khrushchev gave more body and detail to his denunciation of the Stalinist terror. “When that happened, the game changed. It wasn’t a game. At first it was just these strange names that seemed to disappear at a certain point in history. Then it became a matter of their fates. It was becoming more obvious to me what had happened to these people.”

  In high school, Dima signed up for the history Olympiad, an academic contest sponsored by the Young Communist League. “A lot of the questions were on the order of ‘Who was the first boy to join the YCL?’ and ‘How many medals and honors did he win?’ Stuff like that. But there were questions that went a little deeper. I decided to win.” He went to study at the Central State Archive of the October Revolution. Dima met one of the directors there and asked about a few issues related to the contest. He had also brought along his stack of index cards, a stack that was growing by the hundreds as he made his way through the encyclopedias. He was hoping for more information.

  “What do you want to know?” asked the director.

  “I want to know whether these people were ‘repressed’ or killed,” Dima said.

  The woman lowered her eyes. Her voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “We’ll answer questions about the Komsomol,” she said, “but we needn’t talk of these people you are talking about. It is unnecessary.”

  The woman was in her mid-forties and not at all cruel in what she said or how she said it. Instead, it seemed to Dima that she knew only that these were forbidden things and must not be spoken of. She was terrified.

  When Dima was seventeen, he decided to apply for both work and study at the Historical Archives Institute. His mother was baffled and wondered why he didn’t try for a more prestigious place. Dima said very little. He kept his passion well hidden, not so much because he enjoyed the secret but rather because he was no longer a boy; he knew how dangerous his interest could be for those around him.

  To win a post at the institute, Dima had to take an entrance exam. Around that time he had read in samizdat Solzhenitsyn’s essay “Live Not by the Lie.” The essay recognized the difficulty, even the impossibility, of outright rebellion in a totalitarian state; instead, it implored the reader at least to refuse cooperation in the lies of the state. Better not to be a journalist than to write the lies of Pravda. Better not to teach history at all than to read The Short Course to young minds. Preserve yourself even if you cannot save the world.r />
  But at his entrance exam, Dima found himself writing an essay that extolled the sham autobiography of Leonid Brezhnev, The Little Land, which was filled with heroic exploits that had never actually taken place. Brezhnev never even wrote the book, and yet he rewarded himself with the year’s top literary prize, a spectacle not unlike Ronald Reagan awarding himself the Pulitzer Prize for his own ghost-written book. “What can I say? I was one more Soviet person who faced a choice and humiliated himself,” Dima said. “And you know what? I got a top grade. How wonderful.”

  Dima’s job at the institute was mainly clerical: organizing boxes of documents, counting pages, sorting files. But it was paradise. Alone in a closed room, he had enough time to comb through secret documents and copy out as much information as time allowed on his file cards. Once, when all his fellow workers in the department went out to cash their weekly paychecks, he stayed behind and scanned the files of the NKVD for 1935. He shuddered remembering the stark sight of those papers: one execution after another.

  “Sometimes they would send me to the basement to find a file and I’d take five minutes to find it and twenty to copy it out. I tried to copy at least one hundred files every day. It all proved to me very soon that the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was a multivolume lie. The documents testified that people were tortured, that their tongues were burned with cigarettes, people were forced to stand sixty hours in a row just facing a wall. Prisoners were beaten so badly that they had to be carried to the firing squad. There were descriptions of the theater director Meyerhold, how he was forced to drink his own urine, how his interrogators broke his left arm and forced him to sign his ‘confession’ with his right. I remember being in shock when I read about how 208 people were shot down in the Dmitrov Camp for an alleged attempt on the life of Yezhov, who was on an inspection trip to the camp. There were women, old people. The information was like a nightmare, like being caught in a huge avalanche and it goes on and never stops. But I didn’t make the connections. I couldn’t hook it all up with ideology, policy. It was all on the level of the raw accumulation of data about this person and that and not much more.”